Hidden in the Heat of the Sun: Mimesis, Sacrilege and Aporia Reading Jiang Wen S Filmic

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HIDDEN IN THE HEAT OF THE SUN: MIMESIS, SACRILEGE AND APORIA—READING JIANG WEN’S FILMIC RECREATON OF THE CHINESE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Qian Gao

University of Redlands

Abstract:

Since the late 1980s, the Chinese people have begun to commemorate the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic past in China’s recent history, with warmth, affection and even zeal. Joining in this new trend in China's popular culture and literature, Jiang Wen's 1994 production In the Heat of the Sun fashioned similarly sunny, warm and sweet memories of the Cultural Revolutionary era, provoking from viewers a deeply nostalgic sigh.

This paper will situate this filmic text in the larger "rewriting the Cultural Revolution" phenomenon. Besides arguing against the popular diagnosis of global nostalgia, and uncovering the hidden messages of resistance to the Maoist culture and ideology in the film, it will also discuss the Chinese mentality in dealing with trauma, the new modes of consumption and commercialization of history and memory, the influence of modernity and the global epidemic of nostalgia, and the meanings and problems of all these complications in the remembering and creating of a problematic past.

In China, filmic narratives about the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) memories had always been preoccupied with the presentation of trauma. However this scenery changed in 1994when Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun[1](hereafter Heat) came out and depicted the Cultural Revolution in rather mellow, sunny, and warm pictures. The film won the Venice International Film Festival’s Best Actor prize as well as the Golden Horse Film Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. Not only did it gain international popularity, the film also broke China’s box-office record instantly and won from its Chinese audience a deeply nostalgic sigh.

Why would the Chinese audience so readily embrace Heat? From the famous nine-and-a-half-hour long documentary Shoah, to Schindler’s List, to the recent film The Pianist, the Jews and others who were persecuted by the German Nazis are still making a great effort not to forget their trauma. Even with the more comical film Life is Beautiful, chilling horror and great sadness far override the sweetness in the father and son relationship. How could the Chinese people have so quickly moved beyond the painful memories of the Cultural Revolution, a ten-year traumatic history, and been able to turn around and laugh at it or even savor it with a rather nostalgic sentiment? Are the Chinese more immune to pain and trauma or are they drawn to historical amnesia?

To answer these questions, this studyclosely examines Heat as a new nostalgic memory of the Cultural Revolution, against the backdrop of a political climate that has never favored free expressions of the Cultural Revolution. Through my study, I argue that even though it looks morally suspect when we first encounter the current nostalgic recreations of the Cultural Revolution memory, given the ongoing repression by the Chinese government of the actual events of the Cultural Revolution and their legacies, Chinese intellectuals are actually taking advantage of the global sentiment of nostalgia to open a discourse about this forbidden topic.

Before discussing Jiang Wen’s Heat, I shall provide a brief review of all previous films that make the Cultural Revolution central to their presentations.These films are mostly the works of the fifth generation directors.[2] Significant works from this group include Chen Kaige’s Baiwang bieji (Farewell My Concubine) (1993), Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan fengzheng (The Blue Kite) (1992), Zhang Yimou’s Huozhe (To Live) (1994). Xie Jin, who belongs to the Third Generation, in the 80s, also produced several acclaimed films about the Cultural Revolution. His CR-themed films are Tianyun shan chuanqi (The Tale of Tianyun Mountain) (1980), Muma ren (The Horse Herder) (1982), and Furong zhen (Hibiscus Town) (1986). It is a notable phenomenon that the Fourth Generation directors who actually lived through the whole CR period somehow did not have significant works reflecting the Cultural Revolution.

The difference between Xie Jin’s films and those of the Fifth Generation directors in terms of writing the CR past lies in a quintessential difference in the perception of history. Critic Wang Ban sees that Xie Jin’s films about the Cultural Revolution have a typical pattern. First, the victim falls to sufferings, then he retreats to home/family or a female character’s love as shelter, after the Party realizes its errors and rectifies the wrongs, the victim is thus saved and allowed to resume a happy life.[3] Xie Jin’s faith in the progression of history and the Party’s leadership is clearly manifested in these presentations. However, in contrast, while also exposing the CR as an atrocity, in their films the Fifth Generation directors refuse to depict reasons to have faith in history’s progress or the Party’s leadership. Their filmic narratives often express doubt and loss amid trauma, while painstakingly seeking causes behind the CR calamity. They refuse to fabricate happy or redemptive endings; instead, they leave questions unanswered. Despite the different critiques toward the Cultural Revolution, it is correct to state that CR-themed films before 1994 were all based upon the perception of the CR experiences as trauma.

However, since the late 1980s and early 1990s, in both literature and films, memories of the Cultural Revolution began to take on a new look. In literature, Wang Xiaobo’s two stories “Golden Times” and “Love in a Revolutionary Time,”[4] Mang Ke’s Wild Things[5] have turned their memory of the CR past into carnivals that are filled with romances and wild sex. In films, after Jiang Wen’s Heat, Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress created another rosy picture of the Cultural Revolutionary period. Seemingly, in remembering the CR past, romance and longing have replaced exposure and critique; enjoyment and fun have been substituted for pain and trauma. I devote therest of this paper to examine the nostalgicand somewhat eroticized memory of the CR history in Heat by situating it in the larger trend of romanticizing the CR memory in not only filmic, but also literary, cultural and economic world.

In Chinese and American academic circles, this new romance with the CR past has perplexed many scholars. Among those who studied this issue, Wendy Larson, Dai Jinhua, Yomi Braester, Xu Zidong, and Yang Guobin have contributed the most. Following is a brief review of their analyses.

Wendy Larson contends that sexuality in literature and films from the 1980s is basically a trendy move under the influence of modernity based on the western model, since she believes that sexuality and the issues surround it are historically non-Chinese. In her article “Never This Wild,”Larson provides a lengthy outline of the twentieth-century Western debate on human sexuality; she then gives a full analysisof the sexual representation in Anchee Min’s novel, The Red Azalea. She believes that Min’s work is primarily an attempt to join “the many cultural artifacts that promote the sexualization of representation as something modern—as indeed it is—and therefore desirable.” She also finds that although “some post-Mao writers and filmmakers have tried to recoup direct sexual expression as something appropriately Chinese,” there are traces of a “complicated, many-faceted link between sexual expression and the West in many of the same works.”[6] However, I argue that Anchee Min’s residence in the U.S. makes the meaning of her eroticized CR memory writing different from those written in China. Therefore to speak to this Chinese phenomenon, careful reading of local Chinese texts is necessary.

Yomi Braester is concerned about the relationship between history and memory in his study of Jiang Wen’s In the Heat of the Sun (hereafter Heat). He argues that, instead of offering testimony for history, the role of Chinese literature as defined by Mao, Heat“refute[s] the correlation between history and memory.”[7] Through “weaving together memory and fantasy,”[8]Heat is not history-making but rather myth-making. Braester goes so far as to claim that, “(Heat) provides a concise history of PRC cinema and demonstrates the power of films to reconfigure the past.”[9]

Xu Zidong anchors his study of the fifty novels about the CRin a narratological approach. Borrowing J. Hillis Miller’s concept of structural components in a story and Russian structualist Vladimir Propp’s morphology, Xu typifies four basic components,four narrative models, twenty-nine formulaic plots in these CR narratives. Xu’s narratological study has produced a surprising finding: three out of four of the basic narrative models actually conform to the official attitude and rhetoric about the CR.[10] Based on this, Xu challenges the view which sees the “memory boom” about the Cultural Revolution a promising sign for the birth of a collective memory of the CR in China. But Xu spends only a limited space on the discussion of “absurd narratives,” the only model that he credits for having some power of resistance to the official rhetoric on the CR past. My study will engage with CR memories that are not only critical to the CR past but also to the repression on the CR memories.

Aside from literary analysis, Dai Jinhua sensitively captures the many grand and minute cultural phenomena happening in China; she offers us explanations from the perspectives of social ethos and people’s mindset for the rise of nostalgic sentiment in the field of popular culture. Her explanations for the current wave of nostalgia for the Maoist era and Maoist culture include several intertwined factors. Among these factors are a general disappointment over the undelivered promises of modernization; anger and frustration following the many news reports and exposures of official corruption at all levels; the sense of insecurity and instability in society; and the desire to look back at certain aspects of the Maoist era when society felt safer, things were simpler, minds were purer.[11]

While Dai devotes more attention to finding and presenting the nostalgic sentiments and memory boom in popular culture, and sharing her insights more from the people’s perspective of cultural trends and social ethos, critic Yang Guobin gives more consideration to the “outer” factors, the political, social and economical environment that permitted and preconditioned the proliferation of memory works. Yang offers three hypotheses for the memory boom in contemporary China:

A repressive hypothesis postulates that the mnemonic control in the earlier periods bred its own resistance. A market hypothesis holds that the rise of a culture industry provided a market for memory products, and cultural entrepreneurs seized the opportunity. A social hypothesis posits that while opening up spaces for alternative memories, the booming market paradoxically created social discontents, especially among the zhiqing members of the Cultural Revolution generation. Whether in China or as diaspora, they articulated a nostalgic imaginary of an alternative Chinese modernity in which the reconstruction of morality took central place.[12]

In his “Market Hypothesis,” Yang asserts three “positive functions” of the capitalist economy and commidification in the way that it has revitalized the memory activities in China since the 1980s. These three positive functions are: 1) a market-based culture industry that is driven by “a thirst both for knowledge and for its material forms—magazines, books, newspapers, and so forth.”“It is part and parcel of China’s capitalist economic development.”[13] 2) growing economic affluence and the rise of a consumer society in China which provide another necessary condition for the proliferation of memory works in China.3) the crucial role played by cultural entrepreneurs in manipulating an environment of market competition while at the same time negotiating political control.

Situating my study of Heat against the nostalgic tapestry depicted by these scholars, I shall add to their insights my findings about nostalgia and romance with the CR memory in Heat, so to help portray a more complete picture of the whole “rewriting the Cultural Revolution”[14] phenomenon.

Through close reading, this study will demonstrate that behind the veil of a nostalgic misty air are very strong messages of resistance to the Maoist ideology during the Cultural Revolution, a resistance that was never allowed free articulation. It is the power of resistance newly discovered in nostalgic retrospection that makes the longing for a past in its revised form even more irresistible. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym’s lays out theoretical configuration of nostalgia as either “restorative” or “reflective.”[15]Drawn from the case of Heat, I propose the concept of “resistant nostalgia,” to add to Boym’s theory. I also defend nostalgia against the conviction of its selectiveness as one-hearted or unethical.[16] I argue that the selectiveness of nostalgia is in tandem with articulating a criticism of the present and a proposal for the future.

As I introduced earlier, Yomi Braester sees in Heata nostalgia with critical edges.Critic Song Weijie uses the theory of “youth sub-culture” to explain away the film as a coming-of-age story. Inspired by these previous studies, I want to emphasize what has not yet been paid enough attention to and hidden in Heat: mimesis, sacrilege and aporia.

Turningthe Cultural Revolution, a grimly serious and stern topic into a big joke, the ten-year social turmoil into a hilarious farce and game, Jiang Wen’s Heat exhibits warm sunshine, tender young love, timid sexual initiation and wild youth in a heavily nostalgic sentiment. What makes Heat especially important is its remembering of the Cultural Revolution from the teenagers’ perspective. This view had never been portrayed before. After all, in terms of grouping, there have been hosts of literary texts about the predicament of the “fathers’” generation, such as Ba Jin’s Suixiang lu (Random Thoughts), Ji Xianlin’s Niupeng zayi (Memoirs of the Cow Shed),Zhang Xianliang’s Nanren de yiban shi nüren (Half of Man is Woman), among many others. “Sent-down Youth” literature embodies the memories of “big brothers and sisters.” Wang Xiaobo’s CR memory, although also concerning the stories of the “Sent-down Youth,” makes a special case in this group due to its lighthearted, wry presentation that is drastically different from the main body of “Sent-down Youth” literature. Fifth generation film director Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Lan fengzheng (The Blue Kite) offers us an account of the CR memory from the eyes of a young boy, from his birth to around ten years of age. Heat therefore offers the last piece of a puzzle to “complete” (in a literal sense) the Cultural Revolution picture in the literary world, by offering the CR memories of the teenagers who were old enough to have broader social contacts but not yet qualified to participate in any of the political movements, who were simply let loose from schools and their parents’ controls.

As Braester and Song have acknowledged, the uniqueness of Heat’s presentation of the Cultural Revolution lies in its total concealment of trauma and pain, elements which were at the heart of almost all previous CR memories. Another distinctive feature of Heat, as Braester sees, is its bold relinquishing of the responsibility to provide testimony for history.[17] Braester writes,

Memory serves, not to recapture the events, but rather to obfuscate them and to silence the past that must be taken up by the storyteller. The narrator looks for objective history, but he must submit to fiction as the only way to retrieve the past. The resulting narrative is revised while being told. It is altered to the point where the viewers, like all readers of fiction, must suspend their disbelief when the alternative plotline resumes.[18]

Overthrowing the traditional mission reserved for literature, Heat wreaks havoc in the history-making system. In Braester’s terms, Heat is “myth-making”[19] instead of history-making.

Also acknowledging Heat as “an astonishing alternative representation of the Cultural Revolution,”[20] Song, in deploying a number of Western theories, diagnoses Heat as a representation of the practices and symptoms of youth subculture mainly through its manifestations of transgression, submission and fantasy.

Braester argues that Heat’s value lies in that, by depicting “an adolescence graced by dreamlike beauty,” it “refrains from such pathos” as “bearing witness for history.”[21] He agrees with Chen Xiaomei that “survivor accounts published in English have curried favor with American nationalism and converged into a corpus of ‘China bashing memoirs.’”[22] Braester further reasons that in China, “memoirs that identify personal experience with the collective upheaval might also end up perpetuating the Maoist discourse that subsumes individual will under the state, the same rhetoric that they set out to repudiate.”[23]

Braester’s reasoning is meaningful and powerful.In his view, the film’s director, Jiang Wen,well deserves this credit by offering an alternative memory of the Cultural Revolution, which helps to alleviate the burden hinged with the past. Jiang Wen thus provides a means to rescue people from a sense of hopeless repression.Nevertheless, in his article Braester seems more committed to his discussion of Heat’s “myth-making” endeavor than to its resilient power of resistance. His discussion concludes Heat as “presenting simple quotidian events” and making “hooligan history.” I shall offer my discoveries in reading this filmic text to demonstrate Heat’s repudiating and resisting power. I argue that these “simple quotidian events” are far from what they appear on the surface. Hidden in those “simple quotidian events” are messages that are not at all simple or quotidian. As I shall discuss in the following, Heat is brimming with overt messages of resistance, full of mimicry and sacrilege.