The deeper problem behind the Matt Damon controversy

When China appears in American headlines for a reason other than stale predictions of China’s impending collapse, Xi Jinping’s aggressive foreign policy, or something spilling out of Donald Trump’s unfiltered and uninformed Twitterhole, one might hope that something more culturally substantial or humanizing might be at hand. Unfortunately, the ongoing recycled and reused discourse surrounding the famed Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s controversial film The Great Wall falls short of this standard by leaving out certain questions of cultural essentialism in how China is represented and how cinema can and has been used more effectively and powerfully for the kind of cultural exchange Zhang hopes to achieve.

The outrage surrounding Zhang’s film’s decision to cast Matt Damon as its main character in a monster-war-flick set in ancient China is only the latest in a series of protests against white-washed films such as Ghost in the Shell, Dr. Strange, and Aloha, and a new part of the sustained effort to correct for the glaring lack of people of color in mainstream cinema. An early tweet that stoked the flame of this new firestorm came from Constance Wu, the “Fresh Off the Boat” star, in which she argued: “We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a]white man can save the world.” She further asserted that there is a need to point “out the repeatedly implied racist notion that white people are superior to POC and that POC need salvation from our own color via white strength.”

Considering these comments further, it seems then that the spiteful hubbub isn’t even really about China in the first place; it’s about Matt Damon the white savior figure in [insert x-place]. To be clear, this isn’t to say that such questions aren’t worthy of serious thought. However, this monopoly on a discourse on China leads to an unfortunate exclusion of other questions worth asking at this rare opportunity. And the very way we argue on the Damon dilemma depends upon certain projections of “Chineseness” that might be worth problematizing. To begin with, we might ask: maybe Matt Damon really doesn’t belong in China, but what “China” are we even speaking of here? The answers offered thus far by those involved in the production of the film provide a rather bleak picture of the prospects of Sino-American mutual understanding.

In response to accusations, the overconfident producer of The Great Wall, Peter Loehr, managed to claim: “With this movie, Zhang Yimou and I set out to defy every stereotype that you can think of.” On the other hand, a more humble and well-intentioned Damon pleaded critics to watch the actual movie first, but “as a progressive person” promised he would learn from this if the criticisms continue when the “creature feature” has its American release in February.

But neither of these comments captures the deeper problem in the way that Zhang’s defense of his film does. He wraps the film in a progressive, subversive sheen by touting his accomplishment in making, “[f]or the first time, a film deeply rooted in Chinese culture, with one of the largest Chinese casts ever assembled…made at tentpole scale for a world audience. I believe that is a trend that should be embraced by our industry.” For Zhang, this $150 million co-production between Hollywood and China is actually “the opposite of what is being suggested” in that it carves out a larger space for Chinese culture to compete on the global market.

When the producer, Loehr, was asked by the New York Times what he thought the film would appeal to in American viewers, he explained that “[i]t’s a classic adventure story with a great group of heroes. Certainly there’s never been a movie shot on the Great Wall before, especially one in which you’re fending off monsters. Plus it’s a huge action canvas that works to Zhang Yimou’s strengths…[Zhang] played with the 3-D effects for eight months.”

These responses, together with our knowledge of the The Great Wall thus far, suggest that Zhang’s film is problematic regardless of Matt Damon’s savior role in the way it essentializes an image of ancient China for the market. In other words, the Damon dilemma is unfortunately nested within a kitschy image of China intended for consumption, an image that fails the very cultural transmission Zhang prides himself in.

Although Zhang and Loehr deflect attention away from Damon to how ‘cool’ it is to bring a high-production Chinese film to American audiences, they only worsen the deeper concern of how China is represented — or, perhaps more honestly, sold and packaged as a cultural product. As much as Zhang purports to be communicating a “deep” impression of Chinese culture, the “China” presented in trailers and interviews appears shallow in its content — in spite of all best intentions. The culture spoken of is reduced to a mere accessory to be used as a backdrop for yet another a monster-fighting movie with shots that look like they could’ve been taken from World War Z.

The Great Wall therefore seems to be less about the actual Great Wall than it is about an admittedly generic tale that uses it as a prop — one element among others. In a particularly tone-deaf and incriminating statement, Loehr also managed to propose: “I think we need to probably start thinking less about China and how to make a good movie that has Chinese elements.” Unless Loehr and Zhang were a producer-director pair directly opposed to each other in their intentions behind the film, cultural transmission in this case is actually self-proclaimed cultural commodification.

And it seems that the disappointing quality and shallow storytelling of the film has not been lost on the Chinese domestic audience. Since The Great Wall’s release in China, it has already become commonplace for some of these viewers more familiar with Zhang’s oeuvre to proclaim “Zhang Yimou Is Dead,” especially a shame given that this is his first entry into Hollywood on behalf of China. This stirred up such a controversy that CCTV decided to host a panel on the limits of legitimate criticism of Zhang, the beloved 2008 Beijing Olympics director.

If Zhang’s filmic treatment of Chinese culture offers a kitschy reduction of China that surrenders history to the market, then where might we find a China with its history intact? This question of course opens up methodological qualms over what history is and how to represent it, but at least one rich approach to history is the exploration of the past as it is actually experienced — of which there is no shortage in China, even if one focuses solely on the last few decades of its postsocialist “progress” from the ’80s onward.

One such thinker who has given a more historical understanding of China is Jia Zhangke, the internationally acclaimed filmmaker whose work Martin Scorsese calls “the finest, toughest, most vitally alive work in modern moviemaking.” Jia Zhangke is perhaps the major figure of the “sixth-generation” of Chinese filmmakers that sees themselves as opposed to the “fifth-generation” — to which Zhang belongs — through their focus on Chinese life as it is actually experienced and remembered in all its complexity. In Evan Osnos’ profile of Jia in The New Yorker, Jia accused Zhang and other older filmmakers: “When faced with the complexity of real society, their hands and feet quiver, and they deliriously shoot a bunch of childish fairy tales.”

If Zhang and those associated with The Great Wall honestly aspire to deeply communicate Chinese culture to the unknowing West, they would do well to avoid new abstractions of “Chineseness” and instead learn from Jia and other postsocialist realist filmmakers. In Chinese film scholar Jason McGrath’s words,

postsocialist realist cinema does not directly promulgate an oppositional ideology but rather indirectly critiques mainstream ideology by foregrounding ordinary people’s experiences that normally go unrepresented by either the officially sanctioned media or the entertainment industry. This tactic of exposing rather than opposing rests on the belief that social contradictions are apparent in everyday life but elided in mainstream representation.

In contrast to Zhang’s repackaging of Chinese culture for a specific audience, this act of exposing rather than opposing is that which is truly capable of bringing together human beings who are superficially divided by nation, creed, skin color, gender, etc. In a manner starkly different from Zhang’s, when Jia was asked whether he makes his films for his mostly Western audience or for the Chinese people, he responded: “I don’t think we need to discuss majority or minority to measure one’s public, because in fact, when you make a film, you’re trying to connect other human beings. You cannot divide humanity between the people of Beijing and immigrants, Chinese or foreigners, Asians or Westerners.”

In other words, the shared humanity that can be found by making visible previously concealed or repressed moments of life can serve as a powerfully authentic and meaningful conduit for cross-cultural understanding. In America, the virtues of this approach have been evidenced by the recent success of Barry Jenkins’ film and masterwork Moonlight. Among other accomplishments, Moonlight deconstructs conventional images of black and gay life by foregrounding and exploring the rich tableau of an individual’s lifeworld that includes, but is not overdetermined by, being black and gay. On these grounds, I would bet one would gain a deeper appreciation for the connections between American and Chinese life from watching Jenkins’ Moonlight in tandem with Jia’s A Touch of Sin than one would from watching The Great Wall.

It would be an understatement to say that there is very little understanding between Americans and Chinese. On our side alone, the American images of China often result from an Othering that reduces China into a nefarious adversary to be defeated and contained, and some sort of Communist, totalitarian wasteland in need of a healthy dose of American-brand liberal democracy. But there is much, much more to China in its personally and collectively lived historical experiences that escape the commodifying machinations of films such as The Great Wall. In this collaboration, Zhang has not given a film about China, but rather what appears to be the excesses of Hollywood only with Chinese characteristics — an echo of the larger condition of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

It’s astounding that the producer of this major Sino-American cinematic collaboration could say something like “we need to probably start thinking less about China,” when it has been so painfully clear that there has been very little thinking to begin with. The Great Wall, at this world-historical moment, is more than a movie that’s likely to be rather bad. It’s an uncomfortably unhelpful film for the sort of understanding needed for us to resolve the deep historical ignorance within which these recurring problems of identity politics are embedded and are only mere symptoms of.

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Truman Chen, a senior studying history, is the editor in chief of Stanford Political Journal.