How to Laugh in New China: Socialist Utopia in Maoist Cinema
Rujie Wang, College of Wooster
As China changes into a modern nation state, its moral values, aesthetic tastes, and cultural sensibilities change too. One of these changes is the place of comic laughter in modern Chinese literature and cinema. Laughter answers to certain requirements of life and the laughable are therefore learned cultural affectations and their expressions subject to moral or political censorship. Last year’s terrorist attack on French cartoon magazine Charlie Hebdo is a painful reminder of the various uses of comic laughter as a rhetorical device from culture to culture.
In the historical context of nation building around the turn of last century, the role of comic laughter as a rhetorical device was quite limited in the cultural production of China. This is because, as Japanese scholar Naoki Sakai has noted, “modernity for the Orient is primarily its subjugation to the West’s political, military, and economic control. The modern Orient was born only when it was invaded, defeated, and exploited by the West. This is to say that only when the Orient became an object for the West did it enter modern times.” It is hard to feel joy, exhilaration or humor in a situation of national crisis or living inside an imaginary iron-house of backward cultural traditions.
It is in this historical context that we must determine the social signification of comedies that normally do not deal with social conflicts or upheavals of great magnitude, and understand why cultural complacency, to many progressive and Leftist writers, was viewed as a sign of emotional apathy or lack of humanity. Zhou Zuoren viewed classical comedies as “inhuman” as contrasted with Western literature:
The difference lies merely in the different attitudes conveyed by the work, one is dignified and one is profligate; one has aspirations for human life and therefore feels grief and anger in the face of inhuman life, whereas the other is complacent about human life, and the author even seems to derive a feeling of satisfaction from it, and in many cases to deal with his material in an attitude of amusement and provocation. In one simple sentence: the difference between human and non-human literature lies in the attitude that informs the writing; whether it affirms human life or inhuman life.
The humanism is thus predicated on the rejection of the view of man as a product of his environment and at mercy of natural forces, as opposed to be the agent of social change. Such intellectual sentiments and biases against improper humor in classic literature are quite easy to understand if we realize the “anthropocentric” tendency of Chinese literature since the May Fourth (人的文学), different from classical literature as Andrew Plaks understands it:
The ubiquitous potential presence of a balanced, totalized, dimension of meaning may partially explain why a fully realized sense of the tragic does not materialize in Chinese narrative. …. But in each case the implicit understanding of the logical interrelation between these fictional characters’ particular situation and the overall structure of existential intelligibility serves to blunt the pity and fear the reader experiences as he witnesses their individual destinies. In other words, Chinese narrative is replete with individuals in tragic situations, but the secure inviolability of the underlying affirmation of existence in its totality precludes the possibility of the individual’s tragic fate taking on the proportions of a cosmic tragedy. Instead, the bitterness of the particular case of mortality ultimately settles back into ceaseless alternation of patterns of joy and sorrow, exhilaration and despair, which go to make up an essentially affirmative view of the universe of experience.
It is this affirmative view of the universe or life, even oppressive and cruel at times, that was seen as the core of the “non-human” literature (非人文学) to be rejected.
If the revolutionary literature calls for political actions to overthrow an oppressive social system by blood and tears, then the post-liberation and Maoist cinema draws everyone to Chinese socialism by humor and laughter. In the Maoist era, literary and cinematic productions had to switch gears and move China from war and revolution to a new era of peaceful socialist construction. Thus the need arose for a socialist utopia in which all sectors of the young republic work in unison to create social justice and wealth. Without any vestiges of class struggle, this utopia is delivered and elaborated in many works of Maoist cinema: Our Youngsters (我们村里的年轻人1959), It’s My Day Off (今天我休息1959), Big Li, Little Li and Old Li (大李小李和老李1962), and Better and Better (锦上添花, 1962).
It is a taunting task to construct a collective Chinese dream. To understand the hybridity of high and low mimetic modes of representation in Maoist cinema, it is important to know the basic functions of the laughable as French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) analyzed them in his Laughter: An Essay on the Comic. “It is difficult to laugh alone; it is easier to laugh collectively. One who is excluded from a group of people does not laugh with them; there is often a complicity in laughter. Thus, the comic is not a mere pleasure of the intellect, it is a human and social activity; it has a social meaning.” The social meaning of these comic films is to bring forth a cultural norm (promised land) in which to laugh at and make fun of one’s own petty self-interests and vices from the stand point of the public good, or from the perspective of a collective whole. To properly understand the meaning of these narrative Utopian films, it is important to reject or discount any claim of realism. Here is what Roland Barthes, the French linguist and thinker, tells us in his Image-Music-Text:
Claims concerning the realism’ of narrative are therefore to be discounted. …The function of narrative is not to ‘represent’, it is to constitute a spectacle still very enigmatic for us but in any case not of a mimetic order. The ‘reality’ of a sequence lies not in the ‘natural’ succession of the actions composing it but in the logic there exposed, risked and satisfied. Putting it another way, one could say that the origin of a sequence is not the observation of reality, but the need to vary and transcend the first form given man, namely repetition: a sequence is essentially a whole within which nothing is repeated. Logic has here an emancipatory value – and with it the entire narrative. It may be that men ceaselessly re-inject into narrative what they have known, what they have experienced; but if they do, at least it is in a form which has vanquished repetition and instituted the model of a process of becoming. Narrative does not show, does not imitate; the passion which may excite us in reading a novel is not that of a ‘vision’ (in actual fact, we do not ‘see’ anything). Rather it is that of meaning, that of a higher order of relation which also has its emotions, its hopes, its dangers, its triumphs. ‘What takes place’ in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language, the unceasing celebration of its coming.
In other words, what finally emerges from these comic films is not something (situation) that we see or observe with our naked eyes. Rather, it is a vision of socialism whose logic ‘emancipates’ us from many repetitions of comic events and delivers a political optimism proven by miracles of gargantuan size, in which water flows to areas devastated by drought, electricity illuminates benighted rural villages, and good heath descends on exhausted and stressed out factory workers.
In the case of Our Youngsters, the logic of Chinese socialism reveals itself through the entangled and tormented love interests of 高占武, 曹茂林, 孔淑珍, 李克明, and 刘晓崔 none of whom has any idea of what Great Leap Forward movement is about or how it would impact their love life. The meaning of the narrative film, as Barthes argues, is not in the form of a vision, not even the last mise en scene where all the youngsters assemble to celebrate their success in bringing water and electricity to the village. None of these comic characters is in a position or capable of describing what China is supposed to look like as a socialist country. The ‘reality’ of their intertwined lives lies not in the ‘natural’ succession of what they have done but “in the logic there exposed, risked and satisfied.’” What excites the viewer and makes him laugh is “a higher order of relation that also has its emotions, hopes, dangers and triumphs”. In the story, all kinds of energies converge: lust, greed, self-interests, impulsiveness, stubbornness, well blended with the ingredients of high-minded heroism: altruism, self-sacrifice, abundance of enthusiasm and aspiration for greatness.
The same synergy of youth, creativity, technology, innovation and new economy can be found in It’s My Day Off in which socialist utopia automatically rewards everyone more than what they contribute. In this comic situation the protagonist Ma Tianming manages to impress his future wife and father-in-law without doing anything more than enjoy his day off as a beat cop. In a series of chance events that is dictated by serendipity he wins the love of his intended and the approval of his in-laws whom he has helped only as strangers. The Good Samaritan is a window into the promised land of socialist utopia where no good deed goes unrewarded. Seen from the surface, it seems that he helps others at his own expense but in the end when the comic situation finally reveals itself and when virtue triumphs over vice (self-interests), Ma becomes a far better and happier person because of his altruism. The comic situations confirm the cleverness and noble-mindedness of the common people despite their collective inability to see their own virtues and the whole picture. Ma is one of the wonderful exemplars of socialism as a positive force, in which the distinctions between the public and private, between the urban and rural, between industry and agriculture, between work and pleasure, are all suspended.
The laughable also involves ugliness. By “ugliness” Bergson meant the materiality of the human body if and when we focus on a specific feature of the person and to associate the person with this feature. Bergson says, “When materiality succeeds in fixing the movement of the soul, in hindering its grace, it obtains a comic effect. To define comic in comparison to its contrary, we should oppose it to grace instead of beauty. It is stiffness rather than ugliness”. What do Chinese filmmakers want to express when they deploy this function of comic laughter and exaggerate physical and natural features of people? 大李小李和老李uses the body to show, instead of our physical tendencies to rigidify itself and produce a comic effect, the efforts of the soul to dynamise materiality, the soul or the mind give flexibility, agility and animation to the rigid body and to materiality. In other words, in this film, the dialectic of the body and soul helps the three main protagonists to overcome their “stiffness” and achieve the kind of grace that socialism extends to every working-stiff in China, men and women alike. As the film ends, Big Li is no longer the “weather station” because his backaches as signs to predict coming rain have stopped. His wife overcomes her fear of bicycle-riding (stiffness) and wins the bicycle race. Old Li who is marked by his physical senility and infirmity now does physical exercise daily ever since the accidence in which he has to exercise to keep himself warm inside the meat factory’s freezer that someone locks up by mistake. The hilarious situation, instead of taking away or dampening the grace of the human soul, ends up affirming human efficacy and the spirit of the Great Leap Forward. The ending seems to contradict the normal view of the comic that “… attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are subject to laughter precisely in the way that body makes us think of a simple machine.” The film thus constitutes an exception to the rule of comic convention where we are made to be fully aware that the body is a weigh, a burden for the soul.
To laugh and appreciate the comic effects in these Maoist films is to understand the tension and dialectic between spirituality and materiality. “In the first place,” says Bergson, “we may distinguish two keys at the extreme ends of the scale, the solemn and the familiar. Transpose the solemn into the familiar and the result is parody. The effect of parody, thus defined, extends to instances in which the idea expressed in familiar terms is one that, if only in deference to custom, ought to be pitched in another key.” If we are to adopt this formula for comedy or parody, then we need to acknowledge that this is not exactly what happens in these comic films of utopia. In Better and Better (锦上添花1962) and other films, socialist ideals do not lose their solemnity when transposed onto the plain of the familiar; nor are they parodied. On the contrary, the film is a propaganda piece to introduce the new realities of socialist construction, proselytizing the socialist cause in a funny way to humanize it. Like in this and other films, the comic characters are in no position to comprehend the magnitude of what they are doing, working in a tiny railway station as station manager (“老解决”), station announcer (“秦广播”), ticket officer (“老怀表”), the shunter (“小发明”), the head of women production brigade (“胖嫂”), and novice (“段志高”). Their contribution to Chinese socialism does not appear to be anything more than or different from their pursuits of happiness and professionalism. But the result of their pursuits and self-fulfillments is nothing less than a miracle that dignifies their collective identity as masters of new China.
Normally, comic situations work to bring down lofty ideals as life presents itself as evolution in time and complexity in space. But in Better and Better, the comic convention is reversed; the familiars in life are full of promises and reveal a complex process to support the moral optimism of commoners, confirming their wit, intelligence and power of those socially inferior and of the lower orders. In these utopian accounts of social change, we see the political myth and lofty ideals of nationalism elevated rather than ridiculed or critically scrutinized.