Why We Need a Chinese “The Wolf of Wall Street”

(Note: The Wolf of Wall Street is not actually my favorite movie of 2013.  I just said so to make the first sentence of this easier to write. Currently my favorite film of the year is Gravity. But I haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave or Before Midnight yet, so it’s really anyone’s game).

It took a manager in a Chinese state-owned enterprise asking me to help double-team his mistress in a Shanghai hotel for me to realize why The Wolf of Wall Street was my favorite film of 2013. I was watching the movie for a second time – still puzzling as to why I found it so enthralling the first – when the manager (or someone claiming to be such) added me at random on WeChat, China’s red hot mobile messaging app. As I gazed upon Leonardo DiCaprio’s character enjoying a three-way, I fended off the manager’s requests for explicit photos to prove I was man enough to do the same. Finally, I made the connection: in spirit, if not quite in the details, The Wolf of Wall Street embodies the hidden, hedonistic thrill that drives so much of China’s official corruption.

The Wolf of Wall Street tells the story of how unscrupulous stock broker Jordan Belfort and his firm Stratton Oakmont made fortunes selling penny stocks to clueless investors, and in the process paints one of the most vivid portraits of materialistic debauchery ever committed to film.  The movie confronts American viewers with the “self-indulgent thrill” of these crooks’ lifestyles, and dares them to identify with and even covet it.  Only near the end does Scorsese pull the rug out with a literal and figurative gut punch that lays bare the (self)-destructive nature of Belfort’s corrupt Bacchanalia, and a closing shot that can be interpreted as mocking the film’s audience for having been drawn to his ways.

If only we had such a cinematic argument in China! Alas, while the government here has made fighting official decadence a priority, it still finds the subject (self-incriminating as it is) a little too sensitive to permit Wolf’s get-it-all-out-there approach. China’s state-controlled film and television is too often tasked instead with damage control, parading a series of airbrushed imagery that casts most officials as nobly dull – not dissimilar from the commercial for Belfort’s firm that opens Wolf.  “Stability. Integrity. Pride.” goes the achingly corporate slogan for Stratton Oakmont, whose offices are shown full of humdrum, competent worker bees. A key difference between the treatment of elite corruption in China and America is that the Belfort’s sanitized commercial is just a two-minute prelude to a 178 more minutes of felonies, sex, drugs, and record-setting vulgarity that lays bare the demented amoral attraction of Wall Street. In China, the bland façade is all there is.

Which is too bad, because in China we would have so much material to work with.  The “wild, hyper vulgar exuberance” and “essential vitality” that powers Wolf’s Wall Street crew courses through the corrupted members of the Chinese elite as well – but as astrophysicists must infer from redshifts that the universe is expanding, we must infer as well from tantalizing glimpses of the elite’s decadence: a crashed sports car here, grainy photos of an orgy there, and everywhere rumors swirl about the accumulation of luxury finery, mistresses, and obscene numbers of houses.

A Chinese The Wolf of Wall Street could actually dovetail nicely with the government’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign. Imagine a film that first revels in this simple premise: that China is an authoritarian-capitalist nation whose economic pie is growing so fast that an official can gorge himself on the proceeds with little fear of his subjects or superiors noticing; that legitimate opposition to such an official’s continued enrichment can be demonized as a threat to “stability” to be snuffed out with state resources; that here a cascade of material and carnal pleasures is filling the gap of a traditional value system decimated by years of Communism.  And that all of this together is – like Jordan Belfort’s morphine – kind of awesome.

That would be the seductive message of the film’s first two-thirds, in which a young man enters the government with naïve hopes of Serving The People only to have them dismissed by a mentor figure filling Wolf’s Matthew Mcconaughey role.  Our official learns that China’s masses are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, leaving his main tasks to be extracting the greatest benefits from his official perks while learning how to arrange infrastructure and land deals to maximize the potential for GDP growth and bribes.  These would be the gogo years after the financial crisis, when China’s epic stimulus package unleashed an all-you-can-eat buffet of corruption on local governments. Sybaritic pleasures follow: banquets overflowing with endangered species and lubricated with a biblical flood of rice wine; drunken nights at karaoke parlors-cum-brothels; a mountain of luxury goods given as gifts; a pretty wife followed by a harem of underage mistresses, who he hides away in his growing collection of illegally-owned apartments and villas.

(Eventually our protagonist would find himself at risk of caught in the Party’s anti-corruption drag net, and would seek to squirrel away his ill-gotten gains in a safe haven abroad.  Canada being such a popular choice for corrupt officials on the run, perhaps we can call in Jean Dujardin to repeat his role from Wolf, this time as a banker in Quebec?)

Putting all that hedonistic excess up on the screen will be an explosively cathartic exercise for hundreds of millions of Chinese more often asked to pretend that such impulses are under control (or don’t exist). Going further, a successful Chinese Wolf could lure its audience into empathizing with and eventually envying its protagonists, until an about face near the end that hints at the shattered lives and neglected nation that are left in their wake. A final shot that echoes Wolf could be priceless, settling on a slack-jawed crowd of young civil service exam takers, lusting for the perks of official life while oblivious to their collective contribution to dragging the country into a Nationalist-style corruption meltdown. Played right, it could scare any audience straight, by making people think twice about getting into government for the wrong reasons.

A Chinese The Wolf of Wall Street would need a new name. We’ll swap Wolf for Tiger, in deference to President Xi Jinping’s desire to rid the Party of “Tigers and Flies” (high-level corrupt officials and their small fry brethren).  As for Wall Street, we’ll need to exchange America’s avenue of avarice for something with Chinese characteristics.  Zhongnanhai – the Beijing compound where all the central party leaders live and work – could be a good candidate, but going after central government bigwigs is all too often still a nono – some tigers are too big to go down. Chongqing could be an alternative. In the wake of the Bo Xilai scandal, the city in its 2007-2012 incarnation has gained a reputation as China’s high church of official corruption. The film wouldn’t necessarily have to be about Bo himself – that story is too well known and specific.  But perhaps there is a self-indulgent acolyte of Bo’s (a tiger cub, if you wll) whose story we could grab and embellish to fit a three-hour film.  Anyway, that would give us the name: The Tiger of Chongqing.

China’s government and its media watchdog SARFT would never let this movie happen.  But man, what a world if it did?

Another Shameless Plug

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this another Tea Leaf Nation article that went up while I was traveling in and around Xi’an.

http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/09/why-millions-of-chinese-are-also-watching-breaking-bad/

For most of August and September I was spending far, far too much time reading reviews and analysis of Breaking Bad online, which helped me procrastinate from writing more articles. And that’s when I realized the best approach would be to combine the two…

Can you spot what’s wrong…

… with this pirated DVD cover?

I for one don’t recall the helicopter in <Django Unchained>.

I’m not going to go dig up the original to check, but I’m pretty sure they pasted the Django characters over the background to the poster for GoldenEye.

For Your Consideration

January is always the best time for watching pirated American films in China.  Most of the year, little DVD shops and sidewalk hawkers start selling DVDs of new Hollywood releases weeks or even days after they hit theaters back home.  Slide them into your home theater though, and it quickly becomes apparent the copies were made from a camcorder placed in the back of the theater. One’s heart sinks as all the telltale signs become apparent – a blurry picture at a slightly skewed angle; audience members’ heads in the bottom of the frame; muffled soundtrack further compromised by the audiences’ laughter, gasps, and whispers.  This is the price you pay for buying a disc for 70 cents a week after the film is released.

I began to eschew the latest films entirely and focus instead on bootleg versions of television shows and older films – ones where the pirates could copy high-quality transfers from existing DVDs. I got used to not seeing new American films until the DVD release made it easier to get a watchable version. The one exception is January, in the middle of Oscar season, when China’s pirated DVD racks overflow with copies of awards screeners.  Awards screeners are DVDs of high-profile pictures that the studios send to Academy members in hopes of winning votes for their films.  Screeners are sent out long before the consumer version of the DVD is released to the public.   The discs usually lack extras or bonus content, but the movies themselves are crystal clear and distinguished by messages that appear on the screen at regular intervals throughout:  “For your consideration” and “For Academy screening purposes only”.  I am not sure who allows screeners to fall off the truck and make their way to China, but I want to thank them for making January such a pleasurable month for imbibing American culture in China.

I scored a copy of “Skyfall” this afternoon and cheered when “For your consideration” appeared on the screen – more than makes up for the Skyfall disc I bought in December, which was so blurry it felt like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens and the voices were dubbed into Russian.

Shanghai on Film

This afternoon I had lunch with my manager and we got to discussing Skyfall, the upcoming James Bond film that reportedly has a sequence set in Shanghai.  With no background on the movie we debated what the way that the director Sam Mendes would portray Shanghai.  The conversation quickly became a game of seeing who could come up with the most banal, cliched ways to put the city on film.  I’ll probably try to run through those cliches later this week when the VPN is more stable and I can upload some photos.

Anyway, we ended up wondering how long it would take for a movie to do for Shanghai what Lost in Translation did for Tokyo, raising the city from a mere setting to a character in its own right.  That movie used a couple of fresh-off-the-boat Americans as a lens for exploring Japan’s capital in ways that felt organic rather than constrained by common stereotypes. I suppose some sticklers would argue it traded old exotic Japan stereotypes for new ones that are no less pernicious, but I’m not that picky – a step forward is a step forward, and Shanghai could really use a baby step away from the Blade-Runner-meets-tile-roofs motifs we see whenever the city shows up on Western screens these days.

Battery is running low, VPN is going in and out. Will have to continue thoughts on China, Shanghai, and film at some other time.  Some random bullets:

• Made a second attempt at an kung pao chicken omelet today, cooking more of the kung pao chicken ingredients separately before adding to the omelet.  The prepared chicken I got at the Carrefour really isn’t doing it for me; I might try sausage or eschew meats altogether next time.  I wanted to add salt and pepper to the egg while it was still in the bowl, but lacking ground pepper I added Sichuan peppercorns instead (are they even related, besides the use of ‘pepper’ in their English names?).  Bad idea. My mouth was so numb after finishin the omelet that I literally good not taste the mandarin oranges I had for dessert.
• Attended a talk this morning about real estate investment opportunities at a fancy hotel in downtown Shanghai.  Ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs, chicken sausage, and hash browns at an all-English event with mostly Western guests.  The talk was interesting, but events like this really make me long for the next time I can get my boots dirty out in the ‘real China’ (you know, the part where they don’t serve hash browns).

Movie Review: White Deer Plain

Last weekend I went to the theater to see a film called White Deer Plain.  Going in I knew little except what I had been able to tell from the ads – it looked like an art film set in rural China, and I hadn’t seen one of those in a while, so decide to have a go. Later I heard it had won some awards on the festival circuit and its mainland release had been delayed so the Chinese censors could cut out all the sex scenes.  It must have been a long damn movie in its original form since the nudity-free version was still nearly three hours long.

Neutered though it was, I ended up liking the movie a lot, though maybe not for the all the reasons the filmmakers wanted.

The film is set in a rural town in northwestern China, not far from the city of Xi’an (famous for the terra cotta warriors).  It tells the story of the town’s struggle to keep pace with the changes and chaos afflicting China between 1911 and 1937, a period in which the Chinese empire imploded for good, a republic was proclaimed, bands of warlords roamed the land as order collapsed, and Communists and Nationalists duked it out before both being knocked off balance by Japanese invasion.

This period of history is fertile ground for historical fiction, and a lot of movies (foreign and Chinese alike) have mined it before.  Telling the story from the perspective of a rural backwater has a lot of potential, and the movie creates a lot of good moments showing how tectonic national events trickle down to impact the townsfolk. My favorite sequence is when the ill-equipped villagers struggle to get rid of a gang of uniform-clad bandits who thinly disguise their shakedown of the year’s wheat harvest as a donation to the military.  Even at three hours, though, the movie comes close to buckling under the weight of all the history it is trying to move through.  There are big leaps in time that undercut the drama and make the story seem episodic and disconnected.   The film is based on a well-known work of fiction and I imagine it was butchered pretty thoroughly to get it down to a feature-length film – perhaps a multi-part miniseries would have been better?

Also suffering from the plot’s mad dash through thirty-odd years of turmoil is the family drama that lies at the core of the film.  Plot synopses describe the story as revolving around tensions between the town’s primary two families, but the trigger that really gets things going is when one of the families’ sons goes to another town to work in the fields and comes home with a prospective wife in tow.  Much family intrigue and deleted sex scenes ensue. I suppose this was intended to be the movie’s main selling point, but there were so many characters with such byzantine relationships that I had trouble getting invested.  The leaps in time led some characters to drift in and out of the story, and the plot’s shifting focus made it difficult to know whose narratives were most important to keep up with (actually I can imagine this critique being labeled at a lot of Chinese fiction – maybe it’s just something to get used to). That the film was spoken mostly in western dialect with fast-changing Chinese subtitles didn’t make comprehension any easier.

So why did I come away still liking the film? The one word that sums it up best is evocative.  White Deer Plain brings China’s rural life in this time and place to life more vividly than I can recall ever seeing on film before.

Much of the credit for this goes to the cinematography, which perfectly realizes the town and the surrounding fields.  From my own geographic understanding, I believe the town is located north of Xi’an where the fertile soil that supported China’s first emperors meets the dry, brownish-yellow hills where Mao Zedong and his Red Army based themselves in World War II.  Going north and west from there takes one to the western fringes of the Great Wall and eventually the Gobi Desert.  Though this area was once the center of Chinese civilization, by the time the film takes place it has become provincial and almost a borderland.  You don’t need to know any of that going into the film, however, because the director and cinematographer portray the village with enough grit and dust that you can sense what a frontier town it is. The hills often appear in the background as reminder of its place at the margins of civilization.

The real star, though – and I know how weird this will sound at first – is the wheat.  Wheat is the villager’s reason for existence; it is the end-product of the farmers’ hard work, their source of sustenance, and the object of desire for the covetous thugs and armies that pass through the village.  The cycle of planting and harvesting determines the rhythms of life, and there are countless beautiful shots of various stages of the process.  The film’s opens with an extended shot of undulating wheat fields reminiscent of the quintessentially American amber waves of grain.  We often associate Chinese farming with rice terraces and wet paddies, but that stereotype is only true in the south. Northern China is wheat country, a point the film makes forcefully from the start and never lets up.  There are unforgettable wide shots of characters dwarfed by vast rolling fields. One would never guess that the golden mounds of  wheat that pile up at harvest time could look so inviting – apparently the protagonists agree, since at least one deleted amorous encounter takes place on top of a massive bale.   The theme that wheat molds nearly every facet of the town’s existence is woven in nice touches throughout the film – see for example extended scenes of roughneck farmers pausing from the harvest to noisily slurp wheat noodles.  A poor harvest near the end threatens the whole town with starvation.

One of the movie’s posters makes visually literal the overwhelming influence of grain on the town.  I guess it might be a little on the nose to show one of the protagonists about to be swallowed up by a wheat tsunami, but at least the point is clear:

In the end, then, I applaud the movie for breathing life into the dry and academic fact that rural life depends on making stuff come out of the ground.  The filmmakers easily could have avoided the fundamentals of rural existence in favor of tarting up the story with salacious plot threads, but they chose to embrace both and in so doing invested the whole film with a powerful sense of place.  When the credits rolled I wanted nothing more than to trot to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket to Xi’an and its environs.  The canal-crossed water-and-rice towns around Shanghai seemed dull and colorless by comparison.  Here’s hoping some more films like this come along soon.