Online Response #8: The Story of Qiu Ju & the Struggle for Heroic Individualism

Gender roles are established (and go against type) very early in The Story of Qiu Ju.  The titular character first appears with her sister-in-law as they search for medical care for her husband, Qinglai, who has been injured by the village chief, Wang.  The result of a dispute over the construction of a shed on public land, Qinglai and Wang’s verbal attacks on each other become personal, the former mocking the latter on his inability to produce a proper male heir.  At this the chief takes great offense and physically beats Qinglai, a chile farmer, thus incapacitating him by, among other things, kicking him in the groin.  In this manner Qiu Ju’s husband becomes emasculated, figuratively and nearly-literally, as he is unable to provide for his family or even save face in what becomes a prolonged conflict.     

            One might argue that much of Qinglai’s emasculation is exacerbated by Qiu Ju’s insistence on justice, or at least her idea of justice.  After repeated settlements mediated by the village, district, and city justice systems, Qiu Ju is still not satisfied with any of their decisions, all of which center on money for her husband’s medical bills and lost wages at the expense of Wang.  What she really wants is an apology from the village chief, or at least an acknowledgement that he is in the wrong.  Qiu Ju’s active pursuit of justice contrasts sharply with her husband’s increased apathy, though.  He ultimately becomes so tired of her crusade that he tells her, “Go, and don’t come back!” when she makes her second trip to the city.  While some interpret her tenacity as characteristically female, albeit in an unflattering, stereotypical way, Qiu Ju fits the mold of a Nietzschean tragic hero (pre-Socratic), at once demanding justice but also standing firm in “defiant belief” as an opponent of this story’s version of the all-powerful: the state. 

            Qiu Ju has a “double essence,” a “simultaneously Apolline and Dionysiac nature.”  On one hand she demands justice or some semblance of it, either through an actual apology by Wang or a court statement declaring his fault.  Like the Aeschylean tendency to justice, however, Qiu Ju’s quest requires a certain amount of suffering, even the possibility of “limitless suffering,” to accomplish its ends.  Other characters surely question the benefit-to-harm ratio of her continual struggle for justice.  Let’s move on is the common refrain heard from Wang, Officer Li, and her husband.  Giving up the fight would end the suffering, at least in the short term, but her fight is not just for Qinglai and herself; they have a baby on the way.  Aside from all matters related to Wang and Qinglai’s dispute, Qiu Ju is bringing a child into a world full of suffering; in particular, a poor, rural, not-far-from-feudal community in which citizens endure hard labor for not much money in primitive conditions with few resources.  She is, in a way, like Prometheus, in her awareness of life’s inevitable suffering.  Take Goethe’s Prometheus, for example, and substitute Qiu Ju, her opposition of the state, and her knowledge of the world in which her son or daughter will live:

“Here I sit, forming men

In my own image,

A race to be like me,

To suffer and to weep,

To know delight and joy

And heed you not,

Like me!” 

Life is full of suffering no matter what, but to submit to an unsatisfying decision would be to falsely believe that justice has been served. 

            Like Prometheus fighting against gods he cannot possibly defeat, Qiu Ju fights against the all-powerful state.  It is not until she hears of the city’s decision that she realizes whom her enemy is.  From the moment she files the first complaint to Officer Li until the moment the city’s decision is erroneously sent to Wang, Qiu Ju considers the state to be an ally, always seemingly helping her in her plight yet masking their insincerity with a dose of condescension.  Recognition of the state’s true motives occurs when she discovers the city’s first decision and decides to continue her fight; she finally takes off her coat in which she has been bundled from the beginning of the film, thus breaking her long-held, but increasingly tenuous, red associations.  

Somewhat hesitantly, her battle now is with the state, represented by the Director, whom she still considers a “nice man.”  Circumstances alter the opposition in her conflict when Wang saves Qiu Ju and her baby’s lives during a complicated birth.  Grateful and eager to forgive, Qiu Ju invites Wang to a celebration one month later.  Unfortunately, Wang cannot attend because the police are on their way to arrest him, with new evidence of Qinglai’s injuries retroactively upgrading the charges against him.  When Qiu Ju hears the sirens, she runs and she runs and she does not stop, but the film does. 

            Qiu Ju realizes that Wang is no longer the enemy; he never really was.  The state has failed Qiu Ju, as it had many others who lived through the initial hope and subsequent disappointment of the Cultural Revolution.  In a society that prides itself on community, Qiu Ju, heroically individualistic, “must suffer for the fact of [her] individuation.”  Though far different in status from the students who protested at Tiananmen Square just a few years earlier, she has the same desire: namely, to be heard.  Nietzsche, while possibly having qualms about the supposed masculine characteristics of the tragic Dionysiac figure represented in a woman, would be proud of Qiu Ju’s subversive stubbornness, for he says, “Humanity achieves the best and highest of which it is capable by committing an offence and must in turn accept the consequences of this, namely the whole flood of suffering and tribulations which the offended heavenly powers must in turn visit upon the human race as it strives nobly toward higher things.”                

Online Response #7: The Crowd, Marx, and Simmel

Upon arriving in New York City, John Sims reveals a certain amount of naiveté, his innocence reflected in his white suit and hat.  Aware of the difficulties that many face when trying to make it there, he claims to have what it takes to get to the top.  “You’ve gotta be good in that town if you wanna beat the crowd,” he says to a fellow newcomer, his meritocratic beliefs unwavering.  In an early scene, John goes on a double date with his friend Bert, and the two social climbers and their dates ride in a carriage, literally perched above the crowd walking on the street.  With pity, John points to a street performer and wonders what could have gone wrong in the man’s life.  I bet his father thought he would be the president someday, he says to his date, Mary.  Ever the idealist, John tries to will his way into success.  His attitude and determination will keep him out of the crowd, those who are all “in the same rut.” 

            As the story progresses, his dogged insistence that things will work out becomes less believable.  He claims to have “real prospects” to his disapproving in-laws; he continually speaks of a time in the future when he will get his “big job”; he also promises that the birth of his and Mary’s first child has had a positive effect on his attitude, saying, “I’ll be somebody now…I promise.”  John experiences some success, especially when he wins a $500 prize for the Sleight-o-Hand copy he writes.  Ultimately, though, the deterministic quality of the city beats him down, and through a tragic sequence of events he becomes a part of the crowd.  In a humiliating reversal, he takes the same street-performing/advertising job that he mocks earlier in the film; at this point he must realize even the lowliest of the crowd is not in his or her current state for lack of dreaming big.  After all, John’s father dreamed that his son would accomplish big things. 

            Like the German idealists who preceded Marx, John’s worldview first “descends from heaven to earth.”  In other words, he believes that an idea instigates action.  It is only after he experiences life in a modern urban setting, though, that he becomes aware of the external forces that affect one’s thoughts, dreams, and overall outcome.  “Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life,” stated Marx.  John surely would have agreed with this statement after the death of his young daughter and his successive career failures.  His consciousness is most notably affected by his life circumstances when he walks with his son on a bridge.  Letting his son walk ahead, John climbs over the fence and considers throwing himself into an oncoming train, hardly the actions of the young go-getter at the beginning of the film.  “The nature of individuals…depends on the material conditions determining their production;” his suicide attempt comes after not only the death of his daughter but also after he has quit several increasingly demeaning jobs.  The Crowd argues that man is subject to his environment; strengthening its ties to Marx and the idea that circumstances determine consciousness is its dehumanizing portrayal of urbanization. 

            Simmel opens “The Metropolis and Mental Life” stating, “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”  John certainly struggles to claim individuality in his working conditions.  Determined to set himself apart, to be one of the good ones, he toils at his desk, one of hundreds perfectly aligned in a warehouse-like room in the pre-cubicle 1920s.  

Despite earning an $8 raise after years of service, his aspirations lead him away from his company, where things are going more slowly than he has hoped, to dreams of riches in a career of advertising.  He claims his first copy was stolen, but his second idea, the aforementioned Sleight-o-Hand, brings him more happiness than anything else in his story.  The joy he and Mary experience is fleeting, though, when a truck hits their daughter, right as they celebrate their new possessions bought with the prize money. 

            Another negative aspect of urbanization is evident following the death of John’s daughter.  Deeply affected by her death, John is shocked at the response of others, whom seem to have moved on.  One man tells him, “The world can’t stop because your baby is sick.”  The narrator later states, “The crowd laughs with you for months, but will only cry for a day.”  Simmel explains this indifference in the following manner: “The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the bluntness of discrimination.  This does not mean that the objects are not perceived…but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial.”  John obviously cares about his daughter, but to others she is just another girl killed in an accident, an all-too-common occurrence in a city of more than a million people. 

            As a form of self-preservation, the urban dweller must perceive others in a detached fashion in order to meet his needs.  Simmel explains, “This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve.”  He continues, “If so many inner reactions were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and where one has a positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.”  After years living in the city, John’s reserve is so engrained that he cannot imagine someone else as a regular person with problems like his.  Desperate for work, he rushes into a line of other men who are equally desperate to earn.  He justifies his aggression by saying he has a family to feed, to which another man replies, we all have families. 

            Considering the discouraging tone of The Crowd, the film ends, interestingly, on a happy note.  The family, at least, is smiling, as father, mother, and son laugh with others at a vaudevillian act.  John, still jobless, purchases the tickets not knowing his in-laws are helping his wife and son pack their belongings so they can get away from him.  As a last-ditch effort to win them back, he pulls out the recently purchased tickets and invites them to the show.  The family’s enjoyment can hardly be interpreted as triumph, though; rather, they, like the rest of the crowd laughing in the audience, have accepted their fate as subjects to the often-cruel city.  

Online Response #6: Siegfried and Shelley

            Echoing Sidney’s claim that poetry creates a better reality, a model to emulate and aspire to, Shelley states, “Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an object, were unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation they identified themselves with the objects of their imagination.”

            The Nibelungenlied’s Siegfried belongs alongside the aforementioned heroes as an embodiment of ideal perfection.  His exploits are proof of a powerful and crafty being: in order, he slays a dragon, gains possession of a vast treasure, and uses his magic cap to win and subdue Brunhild, Queen of Iceland, for King Gunther of Burgundy, in exchange for permission to marry Princess Kriemhild.  Like Achilles, he has one fatal flaw: instead of a vulnerable heel, Siegfried has a weak spot on his back where a linden leaf landed just before he bathed himself in dragon’s blood, the source of his near-immortality.  When Brunhild discovers it was Siegfried (disguised as Gunther, thanks to the magic cap) who broke her spirit, she claims he not only symbolically deflowered her when he took her arm ring but also literally took her maidenhood.  She convinces Gunther to kill Siegfried, and he conspires with Hagen von Tronje, who, with the help of an unwitting Kriemhild, finds the exact location of Siegfried’s corporal weakness.  While hunting, Hagen fulfills Brunhild’s wish when he and Siegfried are alone at a spring. 

            Siegfried, as portrayed by Paul Richter, certainly meets the expectations of an epic hero in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.  He is physically superior to any other character in appearance and strength; as the embodiment of Germany, its legacy, and its ideals, Richter’s Siegfried provided a moving image for the first time to a centuries-old epic hero.  Shelley argues that poetry teaches “self-knowledge and self-respect,” and it is hard not to imagine German viewers at this time identifying with Siegfried and feeling puffed up as his superiority, divinity even, becomes apparent over the course of the film.  The flip side of this heightened sense of self, unacknowledged by Shelley, is the stratification of others that results.  That Siegfried is clearly superior means that others are either average or inferior; Richter, in all of his Aryan perfection, clearly represents German purity, while Alberich and Brunhild just as clearly represent Jewishness.  This dichotomy problematizes one of Shelley’s key claims of poetry: “Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is most deformed.”  Alberich meets all the requirements of a deformed character, but nobody at any point would consider him beautiful.  Epics have always had villains and monsters, of course, but the advent of film made it possible to ascribe recognizable physical characteristics, many of the stereotypical ethnic variety, to them, effectively making the unfamiliar familiar, an anti-Shelleyism.  One of Shelley’s primary ends, love, is thus thwarted.  Shelley’s definition of love—“a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own”—is impossible when one raises himself up at the expense of putting down the other. 

            Die Nibelungen: Siegfried caught Germans at a particularly vulnerable time; in the midst of the Weimar Republic’s reign, the average German despised the government that had committed the ultimate betrayal by agreeing to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.  The economy floundered due to the reparations they agreed to pay and the resulting inflation.  According to The Holocaust Chronicle, “In the early 1920s, one dollar was worth 100 marks.  In January 1923 the mark fell to 18,000 per dollar.  Hyperinflation had replaced inflation.  Later in the year, the exchange rate soared to 4.2 billion marks to the dollar.”  The disappearance of a middle class is felt in Siegfried, considering the different groups represented in the film.  What groups outside of nobility, after all, are represented?  The blacksmiths figure prominently in the film’s exposition, and their portrayal is anything but positive.  Their living conditions are primitive, squalid, and their appearance Neanderthal.  Out of this muck comes Siegfried, transcending the hopelessness of his upbringing.  Siegfried, juxtaposed with the other blacksmiths, must have been an inspiring figure, especially to those Germans, harshly affected by the war, who remembered better times. 

            A downtrodden people need a restorative narrative; the Germans found theirs by looking to the past and claiming Teutonic, or völkisch, purity.  Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw explains, “The central strands of völkisch ideology was extreme nationalism, racial anti-Semitism, and mystical notions of a uniquely German social order, with roots in the Teutonic past, resting on order, harmony, and hierarchy.  Most significant was the linkage of a romanticized view of Germanic culture (seen as superior but heavily threatened by inferior but powerful forces, particularly Slavs and Jews), with a social Darwinian emphasis upon struggle for survival, imperialist notions of the need for expansion to the Slavic east in order to safeguard national survival, and the necessity of bringing about racial purity and a new elite by eradicating the perceived arch-enemy of Germandom, the spirit of Jewry.” 

            At least two characters in Siegfried are represented with distinct Jewish characteristics/stereotypes: Alberich and Brunhild.  Alberich, interestingly, takes on a somewhat different role in Siegfried than in the Nibelungenleid.  In the latter he guards Siegfried’s treasure; in the former he is defeated by Siegfried and is turned into stone.  In literature dwarves have been known to hoard treasure, so an anti-Semitic German audience would have associated them with Jews.  Alberich’s appearance is strikingly Jewish, in more ways than one: his visage bears a resemblance to the following propaganda poster that claims a Rothschild stronghold on the world.  

His exaggerated crown of thorns suggests a perversion of the crucified Christ.  While “cunning” in the Nibelungenleid, he ultimately works with Siegfried.  Collaboration was not meant to be in Die Nibelungen, though, as Alberich means to deceive Siegfried. 

            Brunhild, too, is assigned a high degree of Jewishness in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.  She is Siegfried’s foil, her dark, thick hair and pointed features contrasting sharply with his golden locks, among other things.  Her relationship with Gunther is interesting in its implications of German purity, or lack thereof.  Gunther is an emasculated figure, willing to acquiesce to impure, outside influences.  He allows Burgundy to become tainted by Brunhild.  A contemporary German viewer may have connected Gunther to the leaders of the Weimar Republic, who were perceived as ideological weaklings.  Like Alberich, Brunhild is portrayed differently from the source in Die Nibelungen, and though the differences are subtle, they emphasize her Jewishness/Otherness.  When she is defeated in competition and taken to Burgundy, she is unwilling to submit to Gunther.  As mentioned, at Gunther’s request Siegfried uses the magic cap to disguise himself as Gunther, and he promises to break her will, on condition that he does not actually take her maidenhood.  In Siegfried he lives up to the promise; after he steals her arm ring, the audience sees him slip away, as the real Gunther slides in to take his place.  The Nibelungenleid implies that Siegfried actually took Brunhild’s maidenhood, despite Gunther’s plea not to.  Such miscegenation would have been unthinkable to the German viewer. 

            Die Nibelungen, following in the footsteps of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, “attempted to recapture Germany’s grandeur and mystical past (The Holocaust Chronicle).”  It offered models to imitate, and many Germans of the era arguably internalized its romanticized version of purity.  To the modern viewer, though, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried stands as an example of romanticism gone wrong.  Shelley is correct in his belief that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  What he failed to acknowledge were the possible negative effects of creating the better-than-reality persona: if his or her enemies are given human (ethnic) characteristics, the poet is perpetuating worse-than-reality stereotypes.     

Online Response #5: The Fountain, Death, and Kant

Tommy and Izzi, husband and wife in The Fountain, regard death very differently.  When Izzi first reveals her sickness in the bathtub, she explains why she has delayed in telling Tommy about her increasing inability to sense hot and cold: “Because I feel different inside…I feel different.  Every moment.  Each one.”  The supersensible perceptions of her sickness take precedence over the literal loss of her senses.  As her cancer progresses, Izzi, unlike Tommy, who becomes more and more desperate, accepts the inevitability of her passing with eagerness.  Speaking of her fall at the museum, she says, “I wasn’t afraid…when I fell, I was full, held.”  It’s clear in this scene that Tommy and Izzi, while speaking to each other, do not understand each other.  In response to Izzi’s reassurance, Tommy replies, “I know.  I caught you.  I held you.”  His memory deals with the sensible world, the sight of Izzi falling, the feeling of lifting her up.  Her welcoming attitude towards death is mental, internal, and places her in the supersensible world, at odds with Tommy and his goals.  For Tommy the idea of death is terrifying; for Izzi it is beautiful.  To illustrate death’s beauty, Izzi recounts a story she heard from Moses Morales, her tour guide when she visited Mayan ruins.  The story, which involves heavy doses of Mayan legend, ends with Izzi paraphrasing a theme: “Death was his father’s road to awe.”  Izzi experiences death’s beauty in a Kantian sense, as she is able to view it arguably disinterested, differently than someone with full health, like Tommy. 

We desire that which is agreeable; Kant uses hunger to demonstrate this idea: “Hunger is the best sauce; and to people with a healthy appetite anything is tasty provided it is edible.  Hence if people have a liking of this sort, that does not prove that they are selecting by taste.”  Tommy, in comparison, desires immortality.  Not only does Tommy desire immortality; by dint of his profession, he believes he will create a means for immortality (in fact, his last name, “Creo,” means “I believe,” but what he believes is different than what Izzi believes).  What he desires is physical immortality, and he has a vested interest: his wife.  He wants to prolong his time with her, as evidenced by the repetitious memories of his sensible experiences: the sight of a healthy Izzi with long hair, wearing a red dress, beckoning him to follow, the feel of the hairs on her neck as he leans in close to her.  If Tommy desires, or better put, “needs,” to find a way to immortality, it follows that he fears death.  In the three categories of Kantian judgment, “agreeable” never rises above the subjective.  It is always sensible because it satisfies a physical need, or desire, which leaves the subject unable to judge the object in an unbiased manner.  What we fear, the corollary to what we desire, is also subjective.  The biological imperative to survive is assumed in most healthy things, but what does one near death feel about survival?  Tommy meets resistance when he assumes his desire is universal, both when he informs Izzi of the new discoveries that will help her and when he fights with his lab partners, the latter frustrated at his attempt to play God in the face of scientific ethics. 

Tommy’s desire to achieve immortality is an attempt at transcendence, but one does not transcend death by being forever mortal.  His self-perception as conqueror (helped by a certain amount of projection in the conquistador story of Izzi’s book, definitely not an object in itself) of his wife’s cancer leads him to view her as an object of the sensible realm.  Izzi’s body is a vessel, which, although living, is susceptible to all manner of wear and tear, not unlike a tree.  Izzi as tree does figure prominently in one of the film’s narratives as Tom, bald and meditative, accompanies her to Xibalba.  In a scene involving Tom and the tree, Izzi/Isabel appears, tying together each of the three different narratives and leading Tom to his first feeling of true transcendence, a harmony of the sensible and supersensible.  Up to this point, Tom has arguably viewed death as sublime.  His “imagination strives to progress toward infinity, while [his] reason demands absolute totality as a real idea.”  As he struggles to conquer the unconquerable, he grows frustrated at Izzi’s demand to “finish it.”  Finish what—the book or the belief that he will live forever?  It is not death, “the object,” that is sublime, “but the attunement that the intellect [gets] through a certain presentation that occupies reflective judgment.”  The more Tommy convinces himself of the possibility of immortality via scientific discovery, the more terrified he is of death, an object that exceeds the capacity of his senses.  With Izzi’s encouragement, Tom acknowledges that he will die, which will ultimately reunite them: “Together we will live forever.”  Like Izzi, Tom’s view of death, not an object in itself, has changed, and it is now beautiful to him.