Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People's Republic of China

Abstract

If the pursuit of happiness is a modern right bequeathed to the world, however unintentionally, through the universalist agenda of Western colonialism, it is interesting to reflect on the model of personal fulfillment offered by the alternative modernity of Maoism—not just as an exercise in cultural history, but more importantly as a backdrop to what often appears as an almost diametrical reversal in post-revolutionary China. Whereas the Maoist subject was not to divorce the personal from the political, for the postsocialist subject (in keeping with the global trend since 1968), the political itself becomes impossible, and happiness can be pursued only along the most private trajectories of desire. In either case, a certain pathology emerges that effectively makes some form of self-destruction a condition of personal fulfillment. What is interesting in the case of cinema is that, in both instances, the repressed returns in the form of residual generic conventions—silent visual reminders of what has been sacrificed.