The Good at Forgetting Village

I saw this movie on Amazon Prime called “The Village of No Return,” in Chinese that’s 健忘村 Jiànwàng Cūn. It should have been translated more literally as “The Good at Forgetting Village.” I thought the movie was great. It is weird and crazy too. It is a dark comedy from Taiwan.

The plot is that a Daoist magician shows up in this small town with a device that can erase memories. The iconography of the device is from the epic play Canonization of the Gods (Fengshen Yanyi). The device fits on your head and there are hands sticking out where your eyes should be, there is also a puppet-like merry-go-round of seahorses on it. Okay that isn’t much of a plot but this movie isn’t directly about the plot. It is about Chinese trauma through the 20th Century. The village is a model village.

English speaking culture and language is biased towards seeing the future as better. We don’t necessarily believe that, in fact we often reject that idea, but we are biased towards it. Chinese language and culture is the opposite, they are biased towards seeing the past as superior, obviously they also do not necessarily believe it. But in the film, forgetting becomes a way to maintain the bias.
Sitting and Forgetting (Zuowang) is the name of one of the central practices of religious Daoism, it is a type of meditation. In the movie this is not made obvious but it is probably obvious to most Chinese viewers. Certainly the ambiguous power of forgetting is a major theme. Perhaps the amorality of forgetting is a better way to put it. The power to make people forget leaves them docile. People are manipulated into bliss. Utopian-dystopian bliss. This is a cross-cultural theme, and an extremely dark one. Anyway, I’m not sure I can say exactly what the movie was about, haha, but it was fun and I recommend it.