The Enchantment of Commodified Desire in Post-Revolutionary China: “Rain Clouds over Wushan” (1996) as Post-Socialist Film

Introduction

China’s neoliberal reforms in the 1990s resulted in a rapid increase in layoffs and a tremendous expansion of so-called “disadvantaged groups” (Ruoshi qunti弱势群体) in a short period of time. The living situation of the “understrata” (Diceng底层) also gradually became a hot topic in Chinese art. In 2004, the concept of “Understrata Literature”（diceng wenxue底层文学）emerged to define a host of works reminiscent of the leftist literature popular in China from the 1920s to the 1940s. In the case of film, the story is different. Starting in the late ‘80s, Sixth Generation auteurs first focused on the anomie and angst of intellectual figures, signaling a break not only from officially sanctioned, mainstream production, but also from the Fifth Generation directors who mostly worked in the state-sponsored studio systems and cast their cameras on the national past in order to orchestrate legendary stories. Carrying on the spirit and technique of the neorealist Italian cinema of the late 1940s and the French New Wave of the late 1950s, these directors are considered more “avant-garde” than their predecessors. Understandably, then, some of them also turned their gazes on the economically weak and unprotected. Since these directors proclaim that “my camera does not lie,” this move is easy to understand: they aim to show life “as it is,” with the assistance of a documentary impulse, in contrast to the epic-oriented narration of Fifth Generation auteurs that often allegorizes the legendary fables of ancient China.[1] For the purposes of realism, the lamentable living situation of the socially marginalized is a convenient subject. The first film to treat this subject was Rain Clouds over Wushan (Wushan Yunyu巫山云雨, also known as In Expectation), written by famed avant-garde writer Zhu Wen (朱文 b. 1967)[2] and directed by key avant-gardist Zhang Ming (章明b. 1967).[3] Since its release in 1996, the film has steadily gained in reputation as part of the Chinese avant-guard cinematic movement.[4]
 
The movie has a tripartite narrative structure, a form frequently used in international art films but that had not been used by other Chinese Sixth Generation auteurs. Two plotlines follow two characters whose experiences seemingly do not intersect or overlap with each other until the third section, which also helps to explain earlier weird and uncanny phenomena. Meanwhile, each section focuses on one group of people, all in their mid-thirties. The critic Nick Kaldis notes that within this general framework,
 

the most notable features of the film’s structure are … numerous scenes with recurring events and motifs, which conjure up inexplicable connections between characters and events, endowing the film with a mysterious, ambiguously symbolic quality that resists chronological narrative explanation and easy paraphrase. (61)

This results in a strong effect of defamiliarization,[5] reminiscent of Brecht’s “Verfremdung” or estrangement.[6] In defining its “suggestive, imagistic style” as “paratactic cinematics,” Kaldis argues that the movie presents
 

an exploration into the relationship between the destruction of the local ecosystem and the psychosexual conflicts of residents being displaced by that destruction, and almost all of the film’s events arise out of this overarching structural relationship between national development and individual sexuality. (58)

In his view, “in its uncompromising attempt to explore repressed and disavowed sexual conflicts in contemporary Chinese society, and in linking disruptions in human desire and sexuality to the destruction of the environment and communities,” the film is “doubly radical” (58).
 
Sexual issues are indeed foregrounded in and central to the story. Yin Hong notes that the film “uses a nearly emotionless factual documentation and the ‘disastrous’ metaphor of the Three Gorges relocation as a backdrop … to narrate the ‘sexual’ core of the existential states of a few average men and women” (91). But why is a sexual complex approached and exploited here as the “core” of the living conditions of these Chinese people? Is it simply something that we are familiar with, namely, a cinematic expression of the pansexualism of Freudian theory? In publicity material for the film, the director explains that “In the time of peace and prosperity in which we live, many people’s emotional desires cannot be satisfied. Our film is concerned with this fundamental aspect of existence” (Beijing 1). But instead of showing “peace and prosperity,” the movie exemplifies the rampant human casualties of the destruction of housing and the impending catastrophes of physical displacement—and under this shadow, the psychological turmoil caused by the lamentable living conditions of the subaltern.
 
On the surface, the psyches of the individual characters are a result of “a traumatic experience of environmental destruction on a massive, historically unprecedented and highly disorienting scale” that renders them “alienated from [their] own environment, experience, and desire, resulting in a confusion of real and imagined relations to other people” (Kaldis 59). Yet the theme of alienation aside, my reading of the cinematic text and its allegorical texture finds that the “traumatic experience” is brought about less by the unprecedented environmental destruction than by the post-revolutionary, de-collectivized society in which the atomized working class is marginalized to be the subaltern. The highlighted omnipotence and omnipresence of physical desires, meanwhile, are merely due to the enchantment of the logic of commodity exchange at a certain historical moment, an enchantment yet to be realized consciously by the characters, by the director, and by society in general. Seen this light, the film is not exactly, as Kaldis writes,
 

an allegory of any nation experiencing rapid, large-scale development, in which the government-propagated ideology of the unquestionable good of economic “progress” and “modernization” is shown to be the cause of irreversible ecological damage and the obliteration of historically-rich local communities, bringing alienation, rupture, and confusion to the inner and outer worlds of the very citizens whose lives it is ostensibly improving. (72)

Rather, in its symptomatic (re)presentation, projection, and displacement of the illusionary expectations of bourgeois elites (to become the desires of average citizens, particularly subaltern figures), the film becomes a social-historical fable dealing with the post-socialist conditions of China in the early stage of market economy, when the nation bid farewell to the planned, abstinent economic system of the revolutionary period. In accordance with this subject matter, the film applies heavy doses of symbolism, naturalism and hyper-realism. And in this way, it is a postmodern film with a modernist and realist facade, demonstrating that postmodern culture in China is essentially predicated upon the post-socialist, political-economic regime, and premised on its sensory machine.

Portraying the Working Class in the Era of Depoliticization

At the beginning of each of the three sections, captions briefly introduce the characters and the origin of the drama. The first two sections follow the two protagonists, who represent the working class in the contemporary era of depoliticization, and who seemingly care for nothing political but their own physical desires and individual concerns.
 
The first part follows a prologue in which the title appears after strange music reminiscent of the uncanny rhythm of a Hitchcock movie; then a close-up portrays the protagonist pulling a rope, followed by a long shot of him returning to his nearby workroom in a lighthouse perched over a river, in which he appears merely as a small figure. The caption reads: “Mai Qiang, thirty-years old, a local river signalman. In the afternoon, Ma Bing brings Lili in.” The camera then turns to Mai Qiang, again in the room, painting something.
 
A solitary man, Mai is the only staff in this signal station in the town of Wushan, a dull little burg located along the Yangtze River; and implicitly, he is the only resident of the isolated island. The establishing shots show that his job is to receive calls about relevant navigation conditions and then relay the messages to other related parties and change the signal flag. Still a bachelor, his life is listless and short of interests. His only pastime seems to be ink drawings, yet he uses the works he creates merely as toilet paper: his distraction is simultaneously a kind of self-annihilation. We do not know how long has he been entrenched in this living situation, which seems to be the norm for him. Considering that in the socialist period, workers were assigned to a “work unit” in which they were expected to engage in lively (and sometimes very tense) political life, Mai’s solitary life in the dilapidated house is possible only after the collectivist socialist culture had gradually come to an end after the reform period began.
 
Dull and colorless life looks burdensome; it needs some sort of stimulation. One day, Mai’s buddy Ma Bing and his “girlfriend” Lili drop by for a visit. Apparently, Ma brings Lili just to entertain Mai, since he insinuates this to Mai and arranges for the two to spend the night together. Yet Mai shows no interest in Lili. Let us look carefully at this section filled merely with bland and tasteless episodes that nevertheless have much more allegorical import than realistic significance. A de-socialized worker living in an isolated station is just like a prisoner in a wasteland. It seems that Mai has neither parents nor any other relatives, and he rarely contacts his colleagues and friends on his own initiative. Only occasionally, one or two friends pay him a visit – at least this is what we see in this cinematic time-space. In effect, this is the imaginary situation of an atomized individual who lives not in the real world, but in the philosophical world of deliberation. This is not to deny that many members of the working class in post-revolutionary, de-collectivized China have been extremely atomized and marginalized into being the subaltern; but what the movie highlights is that in this hypothetical state, none but the “natural” desires for food and sex exist, making this a hyper-alienated condition. Mai’s work is uninteresting, and his distraction after work – or rather, his major occupation during his working hours – is boring. He draws, yet he has no passion for it. His friend Ma Bing comforts him by saying that his “masterpieces” should not be used as toilet paper but could be brought to Beijing for sale: he offers Mai Qiang a meaning for this dispirited life.
 
Yet a human being of the real world would not be used to this hypothetical vacuum state, so as soon as Mai Qiang returns to the living room, he turns on the TV. It broadcasts a piece of news about the Chinese premier at a commencement ceremony, announcing the building of the Three Gorges Dam. Later on, we see that Mai turns on the TV punctually, deliberately watching the CCTV news. Does he care about national affairs, or is he just concerned about the imminent emigration that will impinge on his life and on the life of the tens of thousands of local residents? We cannot tell from the visual scenes. The TV screen usually flickers, indicating the dysfunction of signals, but also implicitly referring to the station’s run-down condition. On the other hand, the flickering also seems to serve as a pretext for the inability to present Mai’s living conditions in a realistic way. In this light, I suggest that the representation of Mai’s environmental alienation here is incomprehensive and partial: these existential conditions are presented much more as the consequence of an “event” psychologically felt, than as authentic reality per se.
 
How great is the force of the “event”? And how does it bring about such psychological turmoil for the masses that it even verges on trauma? Fredric Jameson’s lesson is worth mentioning here:
 

What I have called its meaning … [lies] in the problem of the indeterminacy itself and that of assessing the nature of an external force that does something to you, but which, by virtue of the fact that its power transcends your own and cannot be matched, by definition also transcends your capacity to understand it or to conceptualize — better still, to represent — it. (Geopolitical 88)

This event is both the background of the characters and their inexorable life per se. It becomes the subtext for understanding the characters’ psychologies and behaviors, and why they are represented as such. This subtext is not shown directly not because it is unimportant, but because the populace have become used to it and are barely able to think about it outside of its circumscription. Consequently, although the film is unfamiliar enough technically, it is not the Brechtian effects of de-familiarization that encourage us to reflect upon reality. We must locate the reality of the “event” in the clues or traces of the diegetic space; and the film ostensibly encourages us to search for this truth with its uncanny score and reversed and interspersed storyline. Although this event is seemingly the ongoing destruction of the town and the impending doom of the locals, or development-as-destruction, in fact it is much larger in scope and much more complicated in nature.
 

Soon after they arrive, in the dining room Ma Bing explains his and Mai Qiang’s relationship to Lili. It turns out that Mai was his master, and they had been “brothers of the working class.” Towards the end of the movie, he asks Mai to leave his job, go into business, or at least find a new job. Here, Ma’s urging partially reveals the truth of the epoch: the two “main melodies” or alternatives after the historical event of the birth of the market economy are to “plunge into the commercial sea” or to look for a job that can satisfy one’s personal interests. Both sharply contrast with what Mai Qiang is doing now as “a cog in the party’s (or the nation’s) machine” (a popular slogan in the Maoist period calling for selfless devotion to the socialist enterprise), namely, a job that satisfies the national interest. Although Mai Qiang repudiates this supplication by arguing that he has no interest in the two sorts of work Ma Bing proposes, we do not know whether this is due to his lack of ability or to his sense of responsibility to the socialist ethic. But because of his rejection of the reasonable proposal, he appears less than human in an era of individualism.
 
Consequently, he must be enlightened. Ma Bing, who now becomes a Tom and Jerry character treating life as a game, is the candidate. To dispel Mai’s feeling of loneliness, Ma brings Lili to look upon his erstwhile master. We are not sure whether this is out of “class feeling” or “personal concern,” for we are not told anything about their past experience. For instance, we are not informed what Mai Qiang the master had taught Ma Bing and what kind of friendship they had developed before, which seems to be a past that needs not be recalled. From his emotionless face, we do not know how Mai Qiang feels even about this visit, as if it is a dispensable move that disturbs his religious-styled cultivation. What the audience witnesses are their behaviors on a superficial level: Ma Bing demands that Mai Qiang move out of his house to make room for him and Lili, and then arranges for Lili to sleep with Mai Qiang. Whether this proposal emerges only on the spur of the moment or was planned earlier, it is no surprise that the apparently ascetic Mai has no interest in Lili. Instead of making love, the two go out to the seaside without Ma Bing’s noticing. Witnessing Lili’s excitement over a passing steamboat, Mai still looks cold and numb. In this regard, the protagonist Mai Qiang indeed looks less than human. Yet the next day, when Lili asks for payment from Ma Bing for her work, Mai, facing Lili’s earnest eye contact, responds evasively to Ma’s interrogation about whether he has slept with her.[7]
 
The second section caption tells us about the second protagonist: “Chen Qing, a hotel receptionist, is preparing her second marriage.” Chen is a single mother with a young child living a lamentable life, for her salary from her job is meager. When she appears, she is undertaking her daily business: holding a signboard, she eagerly solicits the patronage of tourists coming to see the famous gorges before they are submerged. She proclaims that the hotel is state-run so its charge is reasonable and low, and it has everything necessary. The last point is not true: when the visitors follow her to the hotel, they find that it is indeed a cheap roadhouse, yet it has few facilities. This does not mean Chen is a swindler without a conscience; it merely indicates the metamorphosis of workers of SOEs (state-owned enterprises) as well as the run-down conditions of such enterprises following the gigantic event of an emerging market economy. The SOEs at the time still had their reputation compared to private-owned businesses; yet with the new market economy, they did not get enough support from the state, and so were mostly entrenched in a difficult financial situation, which forced staff like Chen Qing to find clients by any means.
 
Situated in this depoliticized state, the leaders of the SOEs or the work units, who used to be (or were supposed to be) not only political leaders but also moral paragons in the Maoist era, also lost their aura – moral integrity, personal appeal, and even political authority. Lao Mo, the manager of the hotel, imposes a sexual relation on Chen Qing by taking advantage of her financial difficulty. Though he keeps this secret carefully, nevertheless his ambiguous attitude is detected by a staff member, who then scolds him for accosting Chen Qing and asks him leave for his own office. The erstwhile socialist work unit has completely lost its political nature in this post-revolutionary era; its members work there merely to earn a living.
 
Around this time, a female colleague introduces a partner for Chen Qing. Though the man is quite ill, the marriage is seen as a viable choice for Chen as a widow raising a child. Yet Chen curiously delays the marriage interview (later on we will know that she is waiting for Mai Qiang). Nevertheless, she has decided to sever her ties with Lao Mo. Yet after she fulfills the latter’s desire on the condition that this is the last time, Lao Mo changes his mind the next day and insists on maintaining their relations, which causes her great anger. Still, she needs to take care of her job after the emotional explosion. Living in a garret, she has to trek a meandering road to reach her house every day, which symbolizes her difficult life experience.
 
Throughout this section, there are strange scenes: Chen Qing often stares at the river in a daze, and she often asks her son whether he hears someone calling her name. What does she wait for in this state of delirium? On her way from the ferry to the hotel, she has to pass a signboard indicating the date of the beginning of construction of the Three Gorges Dam (which is also the deadline for migration for local residents like her). Next to this board, an advertisement posted on the wall reads: “The film In Expectation is to be screened soon.” Apparently, she is expecting or desiring something. What is it? A romantic engagement?
 
Thus comes the third section. The caption tells us that the third protagonist appearing now is the police officer Wu Gang, who has just planned the date of his wedding. In this last chapter, the major characters are all implicated and the riddle finally sorted out; yet this scenario comes in a rather surprising way, one that essentially exemplifies a phenomenology of fatalism, or a sense of doom, as well as its dialectical other: a desire that is expected to be fulfilled.
 
While Wu is busy preparing for his wedding, Lao Mo arrives to report a rape. When Wu expresses surprise that the one doing the reporting is not the victim herself, Lao Mo resorts to the Maoist discourse of “serving the people”; yet his high-sounding words merely conceal his selfish motivation. He believes that someone raped Chen Qing because he saw her crying after a man rushed out of her room. But in response to Wu’s interrogation, Chen Qing denies the accusation. When one day Lao Mo chances upon the man, he reports it to Wu Gang, and the suspect Mai Qiang is detained. Mai acknowledges that he sleeps with Chen, yet he has met her through Ma Bing, and he gives his entire monthly earnings to Chen, even though the normal fee for her sex work is only one-eighth that amount. His explanation is ambiguous and not to the point: he just focuses on the monthly wage. When Ma Bing is brought in to corroborate the story, he is astonished by Mai’s confession, for he had merely played a joke on Mai by insinuating that the woman on the street was a hooker. He did not believe that Mai could have sex with her on account of Mai’s naivety. These different perspectives are somewhat like a Rashomonian myth in that each person tells the story differently and we are left to decide what the actual truth is.
 
Yet what is more intriguing is the characters’ sense of fatality. Mai Qiang says that he probably has met Chen Qing sometime somewhere, and Lao Mo also has a similar feeling about Mai Qiang. Did they ever meet? What kind of destiny do they sense? In the second section, Chen Qing keeps asking her son whether someone is calling her, and in the first chapter, Mai Qiang tells Ma Bing after he is awakened by the latter that he was dreaming of someone. These strange episodes converge to illuminate each other when we get to the end of the movie, and we know that the couple is indeed expecting to see each other. When Mai Qiang learns that because of his affair with Chen Qing, Chen’s proposed marriage is wrecked and she has to continue her ignoble life, he can no longer restrain himself and swims across the river to look upon her. Facing the man long expected, Chen cannot help herself and cries out to relieve her bittersweet feelings.

On the Phenomenology of Fatalism and Desire as Expectation

At first sight, the movie seems to present itself as critical realism, exposing the hardships of the working class and eulogizing their authentic love; these subjects emerged in modern China during the 1930s and 1940s, when progressive, left-wing cinema that exemplified the difficult lives and innate goodness of the underclass became the mainstream. To some extent, this film indeed shows the lamentable lives of an underprivileged group of workers who implicitly had been members of a dignified, collective-oriented class yet now degenerated into atomized employees selling their labor and even bodies in a dull and purposeless manner. For instance, because Chen Qing, once (and still) member of the SOE, desperately needs to survive in a market economy for herself as well as for her son, she not only has to exchange sex for the leader’s favor, but also engages in prostitution in secret. Although she has decided to quit the “job” and get remarried, once her affair with Mai Qiang is exposed, she suffers public humiliation. In this way, their indignity is displayed, while their sense of dignity is also stressed (for instance, in one scene Chen Qing loses her temper with a client who insinuates that she prostitute herself and pokes fun at her). Meanwhile, since this film exposes the hypocritical bureaucrat (Lao Mo) and shows the power of the police (Wu Gang), elements reminiscent of similar plots in the tradition of critical realism, we are more prone to include it in that category. Here these elements appear for the first time on the screen of contemporary China—since the reform era—which led to the film’s popular acclaim.
 
Yet to understand the film, we have to look into its idiosyncratic mode of representation. The representation of the thematic subject here is inseparable from the form. First, we can barely detect any salient critique of the pro-capitalist transformation from the superficial plotline, since the relevant information is only subtly conveyed. This is because all the related events and episodes are presented as normal. The film is interested in “familiarization” rather than in the reverse.[8] In addition, the overarching plotline, i.e., the love between the downtrodden couple, is rendered to be a Rashomonian, unexplainable “accident.” Meanwhile, numerous strange episodes still wait for explication. In one such incident, when Chen is working at the counter, a man wearing a traditional Taoist robe and chignon comes into the diegetic space. He stops before the gate of the hotel, and the shot-reverse-shot shows the two making eye contact, after which Chen Qing shyly lowers her head. This shot sequence probably shows Chen Qing’s hallucination in her state of delirium, because she is forced to sell her body, which makes her feel guilty, so she falls into a trance when she sees a Taoist pass the hotel. Her initial relation with Mai Qiang is possibly also due to this illicit transaction. In this light, the intimate emotions brought about by the prostitution are what the film aims to show: Mai Qiang is attracted by this plump woman and feels that they are linked by certain ties of fate (with its Buddhist connotation). Out of sympathy for her desolate situation, he leaves his one-month wage, which gives Chen a good impression of him; she waits for him day and night after that.
 
Although this explanation of the affections between them is reasonable, it is a scandal for “civilized” society, and we can understand the ambivalence of the depiction. The movie show genuine feeling between the couple, but we are not sure whether it is love or desire. When Chen’s little son is looking at his mother’s corpulent body through the shower curtain, it is apparent that even this child has a knowledge of his mother’s secret and disgrace: when Chen and Lao Mo stay in the same room, he angrily throws stones at the door. When Chen Qing expresses her feelings of love and hate towards Mai Qiang when they finally reunite, he silently slips past them in a sensible manner. Desire as the omnipresent yet silent force not only shows itself in the ties between Lao Mo and Chen Qing, but also particularly in the “rape case.” In the existential situation of the film—in the newly depoliticized society—no one is exempt from this condition: neither the unit leader nor the staff, neither adults nor children.
 
To understand why desire plays such a significant role here, let us return to the “Great Event” that serves both as the background and the subtext of the film, like a shadow enveloping these characters. This event does not merely include the Three Gorges Dam project, nor does it simply imply that Wushan County, where they reside, is destined to be flooded when the project is complete. The derelict buildings along the river show signs of an impending end; the fortunes of the underclass are also doomed, including those of Mai Qiang, Chen Qing, and even Lao Mo (the SOE in which they work will soon become history because of its miserable financial situation), like so many working people in China at the time when the neoliberal agenda of wholesale privatization was arriving on the scene.
 
It is in this doomed (but also uncannily exciting) setting that the film traces three disparate but intersecting lives. Under a seemingly fin-de-siècle atmosphere, men’s desire looms large. All three central characters are bothered by egocentric considerations; the emphasis is clearly on their sexual desires and frustrations as well as on their misplaced hopes. This picture needs to be correlated with the broader social context if we are to fully understand its realist connotation as well as its allegorical import. Apart from Wu Gang, all the protagonists are workers. The working class they represent has lost its political consciousness of safeguarding its collective interests under the depoliticized conditions since the late 1980s, and has been subject to atomization. It reluctantly accepts the coercive arrangement offered by the authoritative regime and suffers the dire consequence of its neoliberal policies. The workers do not even know how the homogenous time elapses, whereas qualitative changes have taken place in reality. In the movie, this is represented with the imperceptible flow and sudden re-emergence of time in a way that is reminiscent of the art film. Recurring jump cuts show the ebb and flow of time, which is sometimes the result of hallucination. One scene goes like this: when Mai Qiang, Ma Bing, and Lili sit listlessly around the table idling away time, the first shot shows there is nothing on the table, yet in the next shot three eggs are on it, while Lili and Mai Bin have changed their seats. In another scene, the first shot presents Chen Qing looking out from her counter in a daze, while four men behind her are playing cards in the lobby; the next shot reveals that when presence of mind suddenly comes back to her, the four men have been in a deep sleep on the sofa, lying in all directions. The lapse of time is presented mythically, signifying the unreliability of time as a physically entity, or the psychological nature of time for humanity (in particular for the characters). In a phenomenological sense, these episodes expose the chronotropic effect of this transformative era.
 
This effect is usually taken to be the “unseen but inexorable spectacular and destructive developmental process”; according to Kaldis, it is “against this backdrop” that “the director singles out and explores the analogously less tangible psychosexual conflicts engendered by such living conditions” (67). In particular, he argues, the movie shows
 

the troubled psyches of individuals who are being traumatized by this obliteration of their social and natural habitats. Under such conditions, they experience detachment, disorientation, anomie, and dysphoria, and are alienated from their surroundings, from other people, and from their own experiences. For the protagonists Mai Qiang and Chen Qing, this takes the form of a confusion of real and imagined sexual relations with other people. (66)

Indeed, it is under this surface of a quiet yet stifling living situation that (sexual) desires surge forward violently. The film purposely demonstrates that for the underclass living in this hopeless environment, physical desire or natural instinct is the primary concern.
 
This logic of desire is pushed to its utmost, verging on the uncomfortable, as illustrated by three deliberately orchestrated episodes, all of which are related to killing fish. The first two focus on Mai and Chen and show them in graphic detail absentmindedly doing the bloody job. The scenes indicate that in this doomed setting, the characters care (indifferently) for nothing but the existential anxiety of survival and sex. In a third episode, police officer Wu Gang is occupied with the same job. Unlike the other two characters, however, he does not do it on screen. We only see him observing fish in a cask that has been presented by his work unit.
 
As a civil servant, Wu Gang still enjoys the privilege of receiving articles of daily use and various other welfare items now and then distributed by the work unit, a practice popular in the socialist period that continues in official institutions to this day. As a police officer, Wu Gang’s authority is partially granted by his profession, yet also comes from his manner of serving the people. Seemingly arrogant at times, and preoccupied by the preparations for his upcoming marriage, he nevertheless largely fulfills his duty by doing his best to investigate the “rape case.” In the post-socialist era, the hold of the socialist work ethic is loosened (as we see in Lao Mo’s behavior), yet the residual spirit of the notion of serving the people is still visible at times. In another scene, when Mai Qiang is released, Wu Gang helps him with a haircut, which shows his sympathy and his sense of friendship for the underprivileged.
 
But all of these actions pertaining to the idea of socialist ethics and morality are exemplified in an unconscious way, whereas the other dimension of the post-socialist era is shown more explicitly. This exposure includes Wu Gang’s implicit acceptance of a bribe—Ma Bing acquires for him a cheaper washing machine when Ma Bing is detained for interrogation—as well as the various violations (if not betrayals) of (socialist) class sympathy: Ma Bing and Mai Qiang have held onto this sympathy (depicted as brotherhood, and conveyed unconsciously through their cordial exchanges and tender concern for each other, especially Ma Bing’s loving care for Mai Qiang in the early stage of his visit). Now, in this atomized society, they have to betray each other for personal interests, as demonstrated in their confrontation before the police officer (though most of the time they remain embarrassingly silent when being interrogated). Thus we know that under the threat of the force of the Great Event, people cannot keep their class sympathies.
 
Facing imminent transformation beyond their control, with a feeling of helpless resignation these subaltern figures try to eke out an existence.  Their self-consolation points to the other side of the consequence of change on the psyches of the subaltern, and of the Chinese people in general at the time: feeling doomed, they also harbor an indistinct expectation that becomes a subconscious, for the state’s propaganda claims that their life would be much better after the emigration and after the transformative era concludes – that is, after the market economy had been fully established and market principles are wholeheartedly followed by the people.[9] Therefore, the movie that is supposed to be screened in the local county is named In Expectation and demands the intended audience’s expectation. When Mai Qiang and Lili come to the riverside that night, upon seeing a steamboat moving forward, Lili opens her arms excitedly and cries out, “Where are you going? Where are you going?” and then impetuously strips down to her underwear and takes a dip in the river. Though she does not know whither the boat goes, she expects or hallucinates that it could take her to explore the unknown world; and she dares to have a try.
 
To be sure, the characters also have some clear expectations: Chen Qing longs for her remarriage, Lao Mo for Chen Qing, and Wu Gang for his wedding. Before the film ends and Mai and Chen meet together, two shots show them silently staring at the moving river. Are they waiting for each other, or musing on their future? Whatever the expectation, it is closely related to their physical desire. When Lili changes the channels of the TV in Mai Qiang’s apartment, the TV shows distorted pictures and noises. Ma Bing then teases Lili by asking, “Are you looking for the TV programs from the States?” The States have symbolized a free and rich life in China ever since the 1980s (when the state’s reform agenda fully embraced modernization as its objective).
 
To show this theme of “fulfillment of desire to be expected,” the movie dialectically stresses the repression of it. Mai Qiang is a quiet old bachelor, appearing almost ascetic, yet he harbors a strong and ulterior desire for Chen Qing; Lao Mo represses his urge in public since he is a unit leader, yet he requests numerous liaisons with Chen after office hours; Chen Qing often falls into a delirious state on account of her longing for Mai Qiang; Wu Gang cannot wait any longer for his upcoming marriage. All of these desires are subtly delineated to show that they constitute the characters’ existential condition per se. When Mai Qiang the fully depoliticized worker swims across the river to meet Chen Qing, which symbolizes his breaking away from conventional custom or socially constrained morality (not to mention any concept of socialist ethics), the legitimacy of “natural desire” is reinstated.
 
In contrast to characters who seem to suppress their desire, only the vulgar Ma Bing and Lili are represented as paragons of sexual liberation on account of their implicit embrace of a commodified nature. Yet we cannot afford to neglect the fact that Ma Bing is a lumpenproletariat figure; he first appears in the film leaving an outdoor restroom, and has fewer moral misgivings, whereas Lili has to fight for her “service fee” by fair means or foul. Even the passion between Mai Qiang and Chen Qing is apparently paid for. The desire that the film extols and legitimizes has a specific feature: it is inscribed with the imprint of a market economy, and is thus commodified. Chen Qing and Lili sell their bodies, and Lao Mo and Mai Qiang pay to manipulate women, though these actions might be glossed over with the rhetoric of a liberated lifestyle or of intimate affections among the underprivileged. In fact, the urge to make money or the desire to follow the principle of market economy appears in the beginning when the film introduces Mai Qiang and Ma Bing: Ma Bing refuses to use the landscapes offered by Mai Qiang as toilet paper, but intends to sell them back in Beijing.[10]
 
The commodity logic of the market can be seen in the destiny of women, who it is suggested are scarified and despised in a capitalist-oriented economy. In this movie that implicitly expresses a yearning for the coming market society, we find examples of women’s fortunes in a market society, fortunes that are shown to be symptomatic of misogyny. The two heroines Chen Qing and Lili are both materialistic. They are “inexplicably associated with one another, in twin scenes showing each of them holding a piece of currency up to the light. Lili is apparently bored or hinting that she can be bought, while Chen Qing is checking for counterfeit money received from hotel customers” (Kaldis 68). Kaldis aptly observes that for the prostitute Lili in particular,
 

viewers are not given much insight into Lili’s personality, desire, and motives, and must surmise the precise (sexual) relationship between Lili and the men with whom she associates. … Lili appears to be on autopilot — she performs the role of a sexpot with aplomb, but it is as if there is little more to her identity, nothing behind her performance, just the shell of an artificial character. She expresses few emotions aside from a childlike impulsiveness, frequent boredom, and contrived sensuality, all performed for the gaze of Mai Qiang and Ma Bing. (68)

In the patriarchal society of the post-socialist era, women suffer the most. The exchange principle of the market takes youthful women as sex commodities, and treats them badly: Ma Bing “pushes Lili about, slaps her head while talking to Mai Qiang, drags her into the bedroom for sex, and even tries to force Mai to have sex with her” (Kaldis 68). The women do not own their own subjectivity. Even the less materialistic Chen Qing (we have to note that she sells her body to Lao Mo and Mai Qiang for a mere sustenance fee) “seems to have no capacity for pleasure, sexual or otherwise, and appears to be oblivious to her own apathy” (68).[11] The men, including Mai Qiang himself, do not take women seriously. When being interrogated, Mai Qiang mentions casually that he went to the hotel just for a “private affair” with a woman, and calmly admits: “I slept with her and then left all my money on the table.”
 
So the “Great Event” of the spreading market economy (appearing through the camera obscura as the impending doom of destruction) not only works in the background, casting a shadow over the fate of the characters, but also serves as the subtext that dialectically undergirds the men’s concealed desires, which are furthermore displaced to be women’s desires (such as Lili’s and Chen Qing’s). In this way, this movie ingeniously transforms its male-chauvinist, misogynic inner core to the appearance of taking care of the destiny of the oppressed women.

Realism, Naturalism, or (Post)Modernism?

Let us return to the movie’s idiosyncratic form or peculiar way of delivering its message. Jameson explores the idiosyncratic concept of the “play of figuration” in his discussion of postmodern art (Postmodernism 411). As “an essentially allegorical concept,” such play assumes that some “new and enormous global realities are inaccessible to any individual subject or consciousness”; to put it another way, “those fundamental realities are somehow ultimately unrepresentable or … are something like an absent cause, one that can never emerge into the presence of perception” (Postmodernism 411). Still, Jameson reminds us that “this absent cause can find figures through which to express itself in distorted and symbolic ways” (Postmodernism 411). We can see such figures in the movie.
 
The director Zhang Ming says that it is his belief that a good movie combines the real and reverie (Li Dongran 139). There are several shots that follow this directive: in a scene when Mai Qiang is talking to Ma Bing about “the woman on the other side of the bank,” the next shot shows him already swimming across the river, which is his psychological movement soon to be realized, for the following shot returns to the original scene of discussion. It is a surrealist technique. The film also uses symbolism to deliver indirect messages. For instance, in a long shot, a bald-headed man with a wig goes to get a haircut. Yet no matter what the barber does to his hair, he is not satisfied; finally he angrily takes off his wig and leaves. Just like Lao Mo, he tries to cover up his appearance, yet his features are inexorably revealed. In another scene, when Lili sits with Mai and Ma around the table, she sees a tuft of grass growing tenaciously in the darkness, which may refer to the three characters’ tenacious perseverance in life. Still on another occasion, when Mai Qiang goes to the restroom while Lili waits for him in bed, we see a broken chair there, which reflects Ma’s nervousness.
 
Besides the ubiquitous symbolism, other mysterious phenomena appear here and there. When Lao Mo reports the alleged rape to Wu Gang, he emphasizes that he probably has met the rapist before, which implies that he and Mai Qiang indeed have met at some point in the past. Yet the narrative does not give us any information about this possible encounter; it also leaves out any narration that would explain the passion between Mai and Chen. Without this narration, for the audience there is only a mysterious telepathy between them. There are also other scenes not directly related to the narrative; for instance, a policeman is drinking cola in the police station when Wu Gang interrogates Ma Bing (a sign for his desire or thirstiness?).
 
These unusually arranged shot sequences indicate that the movie does not aim for a conventional realism. To understand these phenomena, we need to know that a sort of uncanny feeling was shared by not a few people, including film directors, around the time this movie was made. Jia Zhangke, probably the most well-known member of the Sixth Generation, once said:
 
I have the impression that a surrealist atmosphere prevails in China today, because the entire society faces an enormous pressure to speed up. As a result, many strange and unimaginable events have occurred in reality. As they say, “reality is more exceptional than fiction.” The surrealistic elements sound unbelievable to most of us, but they are part of reality…. Under this enormous pressure, people are in a state of unknown agitation and unknown excitement. This state results in an irrational attitude. Sadly, because many people do not believe they have any future, they splurge on excessive enjoyment, as if life might end tomorrow. (Qtd. in Lu Tonglin 126)
 
Film critics also have long known that to “capture a phenomenological sense of reality, a filmmaker must tirelessly struggle against cinematic illusion by means of formal innovations” (Lu Tonglin 127). It is the social subtext that explains the film’s tactics.
 
One problem that concerns this film, in my view, is that it takes an outsider’s point of view to observe and gaze on the lives of the underprivileged subaltern, and this gaze is furthermore premised upon its own understanding of what humanity is and should be; therefore many times what the characters think or feel is not known or explicated.[12] This reminds me of Jameson’s elaboration of his discomfort with a certain sort of “humanism”:
 

It seems to me the “respect for the freedom of the other” is very much one of these humanist slogans that I would prefer to avoid. And I would also rather [have] … a political act than an ethical act, because for me the latter is also a humanistic category, and after all one may be respecting the freedom of the people talking in the film, but one also wishes very much to use that politically against some other people’s freedom. (Jameson and Chanan 137)

In our case, while “the freedom to act” of Mai Qiang, Ma bin, Chen Qing, and Lili is ostensibly allowed to be presented, their right to speak out for themselves, within the fictional space, is to a great extent usurped and represented by an omnipresent, omnipotent, and voyeuristic camera’s eye.
 
While the film imitates the minimalism of western art films to reflect the social, it always does it in an inorganic way. There is never a pan shot of the environment, so we cannot figure out the contours of Wushan County, and we do not even know much about the physical features of the lighthouse and the hotel. When Lao Mo is chasing Wu Gang, the streets he runs through are shot at a narrow angle, making the audience unable to figure out their relations with the surrounding buildings. This camerawork not only gives the audience a merely vague feeling for the physicality of differing locations, but also causes any cognizance of the society in question to be clouded by the phantasmagoric illusion caused by intense desire, a result also of self-enclosure.[13] Discussing Lacan’s theory, Jameson has aptly noted that “the whole thrust of Lacanianism in the early seminars is directed against the Imaginary, and the illusions of the Imaginary, which are unity, and the ego.” In this regard, “fiction film is the realm of the Imaginary, it is the construction of the Imaginary, the ego of the viewer, and so on; all the mesmerisations and the illusions of the Imaginary are present in fiction film” (Jameson and Chanan 140). In this movie, “the ego of the viewer” is suggested by the camera’s eye, which offers various episodic scenes of “all the mesmerisations and the illusions of the Imaginary.” However, in the film we never see “the Symbolic order,” which would have “played the role of destroying the illusions of the Imaginary” and of “lift[ing] the person who’s locked into the illusions of the Imaginary, break[ing] the subject out of that into some other order which is not a personal order” (Jameson and Chanan 140). This “big Other somewhere” is completely out of the picture. With its theme of alienation, loneliness, and frustration in a rapidly industrializing society, the film seems tied to the modernist era, yet fragmented and imbued with the symptoms of historical amnesia, it suggests the postmodernist episteme as elucidated by Jameson.[14]
 
But postmodern culture is a product of post-industrialized capitalist society, and, as widely acknowledged, registers this condition stylistically. Whether we take distance and self-consciousness as an implicit political critique arising from a certain historical awareness (Hutcheon 1-2; 101-106) or merely as “blank parody” without any political bite (Jameson, Postmodernism 17), we rarely see these features in the movie. Instead, the film merely conveys a perplexed feeling without either irony or parody.
 
All these inappropriate labels point to the unusual characteristics of this “art film.” The particularity of the form comes from the uniqueness of the content, which shows a moment of historical conjuncture in the Chinese world – the very start of a market-oriented society under the sway of its ethical economy of commodity enchantment with its ulterior lure in the name of desire. It is this post-socialist, de-politicized Chinese society that overdetermines the unique genre of this movie as aesthetically idiosyncratic (and as hybridized as its postmodern counterpart). Ultimately, behind the facade of a “postmodern” film with the cloak of modernism, and harboring the essence of a realistic movie established by the techniques of symbolism, naturalism and surrealism, there exists an idiosyncratic “post-socialist” movie.
 
In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Jameson points out that some contemporary films capture nascent or new aspects of (and formations in) the stages of capitalism by representing an “epistemological problem” and constituting an “ultimate challenge to cognitive mapping” (88). In particular, he identifies conspiracy films in this regard. In this movie we witness the nascent stage of the pro-capitalist market economy in post-revolutionary China, which is indicated not only by the movie’s eerie score, but also by the bizarre atmosphere circumscribed by a strong and omnipresent desire, a result of the desiring machine offered by the exchange principle of the commodity economy, which reduces men and women to fetishized objects of consumption. Like a conspiracy film, this movie devotes approximately half of the diegetic space to the investigation of the alleged rape. The director says that the film “intensively depicts aimless desires at a time that they suddenly emerged unexpectedly. The long-term taboos are gradually fading away. People feel that they can do something, but they do not know what they should do. This is the truest reality of China at that time” (qtd. in Li Dongran 139). To show the desire for expected emancipation, from a fatalistic point of view and an illusionary perspective, the film delivers its subaltern love story. Yet this romance is more of a narrative projected by middle-class urbanites’ own desires and fantasies. Those in expectation are rarely underprivileged men and women (this does not mean that they are exempt from visionary hope, but, as Marx informed us, “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” [236]). It is the social elite, such as the director and the screenwriter Zhu Wen (a famed avant-garde writer distinguished for his fictional writings depicting the sexual desires and sexual practices of urbanites), who can afford to expect the future. Under their gazes, the vulgarity of the underclasses is observed with a seemingly sympathetic view and represented as spectacle. From their perspective, all the interpersonal relations among the characters are inflicted with this diehard principle of commodity exchange or market transaction which nevertheless disguises or metamorphoses itself as desire. Even the genuine affections between Mai and Chen are insinuated to be brought about by Mai’s “service fee” much higher than normal price.[15] Yet in reality, the embarrassing poverty and listlessness of that class goes far beyond the elite’s concept of the real.
 
Under the shadow of the “Great Event” as the ontological setting, everything has changed. By highlighting desire as the omnipresent driving force for the laboring class, the movie unconsciously falls into the pitfall of pansexualism, which, however, is essentially the sensory machine offered by the capitalist commodity economy. Or, what the producers of the movie do not realize is that the essential nature of the desire is the exchange value of the commodity. Since this desire becomes a consumable commodity, it seems everyone can dream of it – even passionate feelings and intimate physical exchanges can be earned or at least expected through a sort of commodity exchange. This fantasy left many people at the time to yearn for the coming of the new era. Only after the latter fully blossomed in the late 1990s did people realize its true nature; whereas in the movie, none of the characters is “able to make sense of his/her environment or communicate with others in a satisfactory manner” (Kaldis 62).

Coda

The enchantment of commodified desire grew with ferocious speed with the blossoming of the market system in China in the late 1990s; we witness a variation on the theme of desire to be consumed and consummated thereafter. In the director’s second film, Miyu Shiqi xiaoshi 秘语十七小时 (“Weekend Plot”), produced five years after Rain Clouds, we find a group of young men and women unabashedly chasing their desires, for which they suspect each other because of a piece of paper inscribed with the short line “Love you unto death.” The omnipotent force of desire has seriously eroded feeling of brotherhood and caused the once intimate community to disintegrate. Here the seduction of commodified desire assumes a more significant role, to the extent of becoming intensively alluring, as shown in numerous scenes that depict the female body as sexually seductive. But the devastating effects of the market are more alarmingly presented in the director’s third feature, Jie Guo 结果 (which literally means “the result” but is translated into English awkwardly as “Before Born”). In this film, produced in 2006, ten years after In Expectation, we find that the destiny of Chinese women has fallen into a much more miserable state with the maturation of market society. Although the title of the movie also suggests expectation (and results or consequences), and it too explores such themes as lost time, futurity, and futility, the content is vastly different. It is still enveloped in a surreal atmosphere of mystery, which invites comparisons to Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 classic L’Avventura. It portrays the pursuits of a private detective, who is hired to gather evidence of an affair for his employer. When in search of his target Li, he discovers that two young women are also looking for the man. The two women have both been made pregnant by this wealthy businessman who never shows up; yet not unexpectedly, our detective falls hopelessly in love with one of them. Playing with the motif of desire, the epochal truth-content of the film is that in contemporary Chinese society, beautiful women have become playthings for patriarchal power when omnipresent yet invisible Capital becomes the (name of the) Father—who, with his mysterious power, seduces these women to let themselves willingly become his playthings or his prey. In this way, the director’s exploration of the post-socialist sensory machine in the pro-capitalist neoliberal era develops further. Expectedly, however, he never consciously reveals the devastating effects of the great Power, namely Capital in the embodiment of commodified desire and incarnated in the imperceptible entrepreneur.
 
Yet how to represent faithfully or authentically the existential situation of the underprivileged strata is a controversial problematic, and we see different methods for handling the issue. Ten years after Rain Clouds over Wushan was made, another film treating almost exactly the same subject came out. Still Life (Sanxia haoren三峡好人), made by Sixth Generation auteur Jia Zhangke (1970- ), is also set in the town of Wushan, and similarly follows an outside man who comes to visit the town; it again focuses on the lives of lonely people living there during the destruction of local buildings and the construction of the Three Gorges Dam; finally, it likewise tells a tale of urban alienation. Yet the perspective and narrative strategy it adopts are quite different, exemplifying a differing way of characterizing the subaltern. This difference has less to do with the time of production than with the directors’ ideas about class and the genre of the art film. Still Life appears more “realistic”: with its salient critique of social illness and extolment of the innate goodness of the subaltern class, the movie comes close to the tradition of revolutionary realism and even socialist realism in modern China, demonstrating a resuscitation of the spirit of critical realism in the new stage of neoliberal reform. However, its belief in a non-political, ahistorical, and universal human nature to a certain extent still constrains its exploration of social contradiction.[16]