Sample Film Commentaries (scroll to see three samples)
Note that your's will be multimedia commentaries, with film stills and clips, as well as relevant clips or images from other sources if you choose, embedded in the document.
1) Mardi Gras: Made in China
Mardi Gras: Made in China is a film that reveals hidden interdependencies. Tracing the travels of plastic beads from factory floors in Fujian, China to the streets of New Orleans, the documentary creates an intriguing story because these spaces appear in many ways as contrasts to the other. One is a city in the First World nation-state of the United States; the second is located in the People's Republic of China. One is a space of consumption and release, the other of production and discipline. Showing how the flow of global capital links these two places that seem radically different, the documentary makes visible what is often left unacknowledged as part of the world economy. It challenges the "dynamic of valorization that has sharply increased the distance between the devalorized and valorized" (Sassen 87). It is at once a record of this incredible distance between two realities and an attempt to reduce that gap through a reminder of our everyday complicity in these structures of exploitation. Mardi Gras beads seem like a particularly interesting commodity to trace because of the context in which they are used, but the filmmakers could obviously have chosen to trace the movement of any mundane commodity and exposed similarly appalling cases of exploitation. I was reminded of Anna Tsing’s project of tracing the production and consumption of matsutake mushrooms while watching the documentary, and how Mardi Gras was probably an appealing topic because it is so visually rich and also allows the filmmakers to draw from the tropes of free and liberal West vs. repressed and conservative East as well as that of obnoxious American vs. shy Asian.
But allow me to go back to the phrase, “structures of exploitation”. I remember that you posed a question in class yesterday along the lines of “is it the structures per se that is the problem?” As I’m mulling over this question, I’m reminded of the scenes where Roger Wong and Dom Carlone each say “if it weren’t me, it would be someone else”: if Wong hadn’t set up the factory, someone else would have; if Carlone didn’t have a contract with factories like Wong’s, someone else would be outsourcing to them anyway. This statement seems to overlap with Pun Ngai’s assertion that “[t]he hegemonic interest in displacing a possible class society with an open society…[is] a political process that is often legitimated by reference to irresistible and invisible market forces” (38). These are the stories they tell themselves to sleep at night; to be sure, these are statements that are probably true. In some strange parallel perhaps to Pun Ngai’s observation that the dagongmei are not dupes, Carlone and Wong are not entirely oblivious to their acts of exploitation. Both parties conceive of their positions as created and bounded by structure. A dagongmei in the film says, “Those of us who are not educated and don't have good family background have no choice but to work hard and support ourselves.” Wong and Carlone attempt to absolve their guilt by portraying their agency as diminished because they are tied to the system of capitalist competition.
This rhetoric parallels a discourse I often hear in Korea about cram schools. Everyone in agrees that the situation is insane: kids as young as five attending private language schools, middle and high schoolers spending more than 12 hours a day studying at school and in cram schools. It’s become almost impossible for a student of the lower class whose family cannot afford cram schools or private language academies to enter what are considered the top colleges in South Korea. But, many parents say that they cannot stop unless everyone decides to stop all together at once. Everyone is afraid of falling behind, of their child and family becoming the unfortunate victim. Nevertheless, some choose to depart from this excruciating cycle. Of course the choice to do so is influenced by many external factors such as class position. The perception that going a different way is a viable option at all is itself dependent on many external constraints. But while I see the decision (for those who can afford it) to not send one’s child to cram schools as a difficult and brave one, I refuse to believe that one cannot break the cycle unless everyone agrees to. I find it impossible to agree with Wong and Carlone’s assertion that “they can’t help it”.
Pun Ngai, like many of the authors we have read in this class, walks a tightrope between power and resistance. Her use of the concept of performativity, and emphasis on dagongmei as a subjectivity that is both made and unmade, seems to resonate with Butler’s notion that the very constructedness of these structural positions allow for acts of resistance in their performance. So perhaps we return to that old line from Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please”. Agency is a fraught concept. We are born into a world that is already in a state of play and internalize its rules over time. But people are not equivalent to the systems they inherit.
“If you got something that gives you joy, don’t question it.” Yet Ms. Pearl already has questioned, and is fairly aware that her moments of joy are dependent upon the suffering of others. Toward the end of the film, we learn that the dagongmei she wonders about have written a letter requesting their employer to adhere to minimum wage laws. Ms. Pearl herself is shown bustling about her home as she hosts more than a dozen people post-Hurricane Katrina. It is easy to feel powerless, but they show that there are still some choices that have been and can be made. These choices are never those of the fully informed and autonomous liberal subject. Yet it would be irresponsible to not strive to do one’s best.
2) Mardi Gras: Made in China
The film Mardi Gras: Made in China, despite its trenchant critique of capitalist alienation, does not ultimately call for an overthrow of transnational capitalism. The factory worker makes it clear in her anonymous letter at the end of the film that she does not want Americans to stop buying Chinese-made beads, as she earns her livelihood in their manufacture. She does, however, call on consumers to pressure Chinese factory owners to scale back their harsh discipline – to “stop punishing us.” For Roger, the owner of the bead factory, punishment is the holy grail of proper management. He bemoans the failure of the predominately female workers to conform to the discipline of the industrial process. He couches his admonitions in the language of morality – it is important to make workers feel “guilty” for their transgressions. This all-encompassing regime extends even to the relatively private universe of the dormitories. A patriarchal benefactor par excellence, he acts as though he has his workers’ best interests in mind when he forbids romantic liaisons on factory grounds – “they will only end up hurting themselves,” or somesuch. He is doing them a favor by fining and firing them for such behavior.
Pun Ngai traces the authoritarian regime of the factor in chapter three of her book Made in China. (A popular phrase!) The harsh restrictions that Roger places on his workers make sense in the light of what Pun describes as the deep divide between rural and urban Chinese people, or in reform China, between urban capitalists and rural socialists. Media often depict migrant dagongmei and dagongzai as a destructive, boundary-pushing mangliu (blind flow) of undisciplined bodies. Managers like Roger, raised in capitalist Hong Kong, see it as necessary to submit this heterogeneous mass of bodies, speaking diverse dialects and originating in distant regions, to a disciplinary regimen of punishment in order to produce one standardized body – the ideal capitalist worker. As Pun notes, this vision of an ideal worker is a self-Orientalizing one: “slim body, sharp eyes, nimble fingers, shy, and hardworking” (77). Although both male and female workers are present in the factory, the vast majority are dagongmei, and this circumstance, combined with an Orientalizing management approach, constructs dagongmei as passive bodies in need of disciplinary inscription at the hands of male bosses and suffocating self-inscription under the catalytic influence of the electronic eye. This appraisal negates the agency of women who come to the city to realize themselves as individuals apart from the strictures of rural familial bonds, fully aware, as Pun insists, of the abuses they are likely to encounter.
Pun describes class relations in a Chinese factory as a shadowy, unspoken realm – one that everyone nevertheless possesses a keen awareness of. She interviews several workers whose piercing insights lay bare the inequality separating them from management. This knowledge, while brought home by the experience of labor, is no secret in rural areas, and is present in the minds of most workers as them embark for the city. Once in the factory, workers are aware of the degree to which timetables artificially and violently dissect their lives. “No one,” states Pun, “was a dupe” (100).
Concurrently, Pun documents a number of myths that perpetuate a desire for urbane experience among rural women. Workers returning to the provinces for the New Year do not bring back stories of devastation and sleep deprivation on the tip of their tongues. Instead, they “bring back 1,500 yuan…and many exciting stories of their experiences in Shenzhen” (Pun 58). In the film, on of the female workers brings a watch home for her little brother as a token of affection. This watch is more than a watch; it embodies all the romance of wage labor, without any of the mind-numbing repetition. This watch, this talisman of experience, has no connection to its own creation; it is not even very useful in itself. It is like a drug, like alcohol – like mardi gras beads – meaningless in itself but a wonderful excuse for transcendence. The younger brother who wears the watch piggybacks on the arc of Capitalism and taps a rich seam of su zhi that point him toward the future – without his having to understand its material consequences.
Roger uses similar romantic language in reference to factory discipline, language that elides the material threat of punishment and replaces it with artificial consensus. As he lauds the dedication of workers who resist the urge to speak to each other on the line, on-screen text alerts us that the punishment for talking is a full day’s wages deducted. Roger knows this rule but presents the documentarians with an infinitely rosier reduction. Perhaps he even believes it himself. It is necessary to see su zhi as something essential, not as a strategic choice by autonomous workers who may equally choose to disrupt the production line tomorrow. The message of both Pun and the filmmakers is an anti-Orientalizing one: while romantic narratives may tantalize dagongmei into the factory, never do they surrender agency to indoctrination. The very real instruments of punishment lie just beneath the surface, and industrial workers strategically resist and conform to their stringencies. In mind, if not in body, they do not become golems of capital’s myth.
3) Middle Sexes
One theme apparent within both the film and this week’s readings is conceptions of the self as intrinsic upon or exclusive of embodiment. This brings up questions concerning how individuals conceive of their “true/essential self”. Sometimes this self is understood as body-bound, and other times it is seen as transcendent of form. Notions of incompleteness, absence, and wholeness are important in these contexts. It is difficult to fully understand and track the variance within these conceptions (especially in the scope of this assignment), but I think it would be interesting to explore the disparity.
In the portrayal of the hijra in “Middle Sexes”, sex change was thought of as a kind of initiation into the sisterhood of hijras. The sex change signified the final step of transformation for the hijra. In this example, corresponding genitalia is necessary for “wholeness”. “Authentic identity”, in this instance, is not independent of physical form. The filmmakers problematically suggest that Hinduism is part of the reason that transsexuals were not necessarily tabooed within India. They posit the Lord Shiva’s adrogyne as evidence that India is perhaps more familiar and comfortable with this identification. I think it would be interesting to explore the example of Shiva as a potential authoritative resource for alternatives to the male/female binary (final paper?).
Later in the film, we are introduced to a gang of lady-boys in Thailand. The variations in conceptions of “true self” are abundant within this group. For some, sex changes were imperative to the attainment of this abstract self. For others,genitalia was not necessarily pertinent to their gender-identification. In this case, the penis is not necessarily a symbol of masculinity but rather constituent of how the individual has come to recognize/understand herself. However, in another instance the American male partner of the lady-boy voiced that he wanted his girlfriend to keep her penis because it meant that her “male desires” would not be compromised. He is thus suggesting that even though his girlfriend identifies as female, she is still susceptible to the “desires/needs” that are inherent to her male genitalia. In a way, he is positing an agency onto genitalia that is autonomous of the individual.
Notions of embodiment became increasing complex and diverse in Boellstorff’s ethnography of Second Life. Specifically in the example of “wearing”, which is essentially the ability to change embodiments from anything from a baby to a blue orb. “Wearing” suggests that there exists a constant choosing-self that might be exclusive of embodiment. But, it still seems that we are constantly searching for ways in which to formalize the formless, and we use gender to do this. Consequently, we cannot help but be “body-bound”. Any interactive situation is inescapably gendered. Is it possible to refrain from positing form unto the unintelligible? Can we transcend body and say yes to formlessness? Second life suggests not.