Week 6 – No Room For Empathy

In the movies mentioned previously, whether it is ones which have been used as a sort of propaganda or those which have been banned, there have been scenes filled with emotions. In many of the scenes in government backed films, the emotional scenes are able to provide a sense of togetherness to the audience.

In the movie To Live, which remains banned in China today, there are multiple emotional scenes depicting realistic struggles of Fugui’s family. These scenes often represented intimate moment during which the family celebrated or grieved. For example, when Fugui’s daughter, who has become unable to speak due to an unfortunate illness when she was young, gets married to a respectable man, the family celebrates. They take celebratory photos, and the audience are able to see a moment of genuine relief in the interactions between Fugui and his wife as they no longer need to worry about their daughter not having any support after their death, since she is partially disabled due to her speech issue. When their son dies during an accident, and the man who was involved happened to be a man Fugui was indebted to during the war. When this man visits Fugui’s son’s grave, Fugui and his wife become absolutely furious, unable to believe that the man dares to visit their son’s grave. Throughout the film, the man continues to apologize, offering money and gifts which has never been accepted. After a series of struggles, this man goes to Fugui and his wife, and they welcomed him into their home when he seemed unwell after his wife’s death. The emotions within each scene evoked empathy within the audience, as though they could not agree with the actions of each character, they could at least see them to be human.

In Platform, though Jia Zhangke does not focus on one person within the large group of the theater troupe, the audience views their daily life as a collective. They see the love affairs amongst the teenagers, and how it progressed as they matured and the country modernized. Some of the actors were even Jia’s childhood friends, who displayed the reality of their childhood well. One specific scene is when the police barges in on a young couple — part of the theater troupe, and demands to see their marriage license, which they don’t have. This causes them to be taken away, as apparently a hotel room with the opposite gender with no marriage license was enough to be taken into custody, as if these private affairs were the affairs of the public.

In Wandering Earth 2, there are also numerous emotional scenes. A notable one is Tu, a computer scientist deciding to sacrifice the remains of his daughter’s life to contribute to the “saving of mankind” (a very long complicated sequence). This effectively kills all of his connections to her. Another scene is when the main character is forced to leave his sick wife and only child to go also “save mankind” and become isolated in space, forever. A third scene is when hundreds of volunteers were needed to detonate bombs on the Moon — it would kill every volunteer — and a few of the older soldiers volunteered the entire generation of older soldiers to volunteer in replacement of the younger soldiers. In the plot, all of their sacrifices were meant to literally save mankind from crashing into the sun, and contributed to China’s strength as well. Yet the key component was their sacrifice, within an arbitrary situation. In a New York Times article written in 2022 about the censorship of films in Hong Kong — a region which historically has been somewhat free from such limitations — it is mentioned how the government especially is looking to ban movies which are advertised to be documentaries. These “documentaries” oftentimes are… documentaries. Yet the government feared such displays of a reality they could not control. Even the plain reality displayed in Platform was unsettling, and the emotional bondage between the individual characters and the audience in To Live was even more damaging.Yet in Wandering Earth, it is demonstrated that these emotions can fully be used to enforce a sense of duty across the audience, the need to contribute and give back to one’s country.