Laopu/landlord Huang Shiren (黄世仁) is on the stage, accused by the ghostlike white-haired girl. Ghost or human, Laopu touches this ambiguous terrain no less than the accuser in a dramatic moment. Acting as a role he once belonged to in a broad sense of class, Laopu joins the trend initially against himself. Huang Shiren is chanting the political slogans with the audiences against himself and suddenly feels something wrong. Allegorically, this points to Laopu, who should have yet doesn’t feel anything wrong. What unravels here is the logic of self-negation in the phase of social transformation, which must be internalized and self-adapted in order not to always feel something wrong.
The logic of self-negation is for all, who and which are relegated to the remnants of the dark old society but are still retained the chances to regenerate, partially for the evocation of a reshaped subjectivity, and partially for the demonstration of a promiseful de-oppressive regime. The “labor camp” for the prostitutes is one of the apparatuses of this logic. In a closely watched space, former prostitutes are deprived of the right to live as before and even, the right to die, yet are endowed a self-supporting and dignified future life. The enforced space itself has already indicated that these women are taken as corrigible vermin, although they are ironically taught to ascribe their “sins” to the brothel madam or social mechanism other than the degrading fate during the pedagogy of “speaking bitterness”. In other words, the labor camp is designed to erase the structural inscriptions of the feudal or capitalist society on the body and spirit of the prostitutes, but at a cost of implicitly duplicating the prejudices to them and negating all their past, their personal history except a good nature that hasn’t decayed totally. I’m not denying the seminal impact of this discipline, especially the redistribution of body, from the haircut, physical examination, regular routine and factory labor—every motion, every form or sign is politically considered--, which transforms the objectified body “for play” or “for sale” to the autonomous body for socialist construction. Indeed, life is not so bad for some of these reformed women. Nevertheless, I have to point out two problems remained. First, how can we really distinguish the transformed body, the labor in the factory with the capitalist production that reduces human to machine? The great will of working for socialism or the bright scene in which these seemingly free women are running through the rape flower fields cannot explain all. Second, the pedagogical apparatus and public opinion push the former prostitutes to thorough self-negation, which reduces their past to nothing or dirtiness. For instance, in a scene Xiao’e is irritated by a forewoman who suggests the money she made before was “unclean”, and as a counterpunch Xiao’e declares that money is all the same and call her names later. That’s how the traditional discrimination for prostitutes slips into the conjuncture of the new logic of self-negation. “Unclean”, this is a too rough generalization for the complicated situation of subjectivity and feelings of the prostitutes. To some extent, strategically, it is precisely this kind of thorough negation that leads to the impossibility of the reformation, because no room for the past, no empirical agreement for the future.
Back to the specific details in the movie, I want to future stress the bifurcate of Qiuyi and Xiao’e: For Xiao’e, does the labor camp really change something? (Also, we don’t know whether the former prostitutes are married to the former clients.) Or rather, is the self-negation effective on her? For Qiuyi, escaping from the negating process of the labor camp qua an entrance to a new social life, what is left for her in the society? We see another direction of redistribution of body— To take tonsure, give up her hair that is cherished as a feminine character (versus the haircut of the disciplined ones) and become a nun. But where she comes back to at last is still the symbolic position of Laopu’s embrace, the only position having something to do with an acceptable past.
HD中字
