Rigor Mortis

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A review of the film Rigor Mortis (2013) "Geung si" (original title), Director: Juno Mak Writers: Lai-yin Leung (script), Philip Yung (script) Stars: Anthony Chan, Siu-Ho Chin, Fat Chung

I watched Rigor Mortis on the airplane on the way back from Boston last month. This film was dropped in my lap by a scholar I met at the conference named Sean Allen (His abstract is write at the top of this link).  He gave a wonderful presentation on Daoism in horror films.  Talking afterwards we had lots of ideas to share and I left with a list of films to see!  The next day he dropped Rigor Mortis in my lap, extracting a promise that I would review it.   

I think we can understand Rigor Mortis as an assertion of cultural archeology. My sense of traditional theater/opera going back 200 years or more, is that the horror-ghost-supernatural genre was very widespread, it may have even been the dominant genre. But like horror today, it isn't the art form that inspires a lot of literary intelligence. To the contrary, if it is written about at all it is often to say, "that was a scary waste of time." But some of us consider it the most creative genre in terms of costumes, props, music and sets, not to mention the most forgiving of bad acting.  The horror genre is the most willing to utilize improvisation and ultimately the most willing to risk offending concerned mothers, government officials, and just about everyone else. I suspect this was true in historic China as well.  

The makers of Rigor Mortis obviously had a broad knowledge of popular religion, as there are 100's of cultural artifacts in there, actually it would be fun to watch it again and count them. The whole thing can be framed as and example of the land of Millet dreams. The notion of a millet dream world is key to the cosmology of Chinese religion, it comes from a story first written down about 1500 years ago about a scholar who is struggling to start his career, he happens to meet an old Daoist in a café and falls asleep over his millet.  He dreams his whole life, apparently in real time, and then wakes up with his millet still warm.  You can read about it in this wonderful new complete and concise history of Chinese Literature  by Sabina Knight.

In the film, an old apartment building becomes the location of the millet dream, which doesn't actually involve any millet, they use stir-fry instead, and begins at the end of a career not the beginning.  It works well because the notion of another reality as a metaphor for where we are living our lives is ultimately and traditionally conceptualize spatially. That is, the unseen-world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, gods, and demons is ever present, all around us, below us, above us, inside us, beside us, manoeuvring around in chaotic time tunnels. Like and old apartment building.

The basic tentative working hypotheses of Chinese exorcists when dealing with ghostly and demonic forces is that upright conduct has the capacity to lead to the complete resolution of chaotic forces.  On the other hand, sex, blood, pain, and other yin substances and actions tend to draw out chaotic forces and even feed them. Thus, in this film an exorcist has to walk this line between drawing out chaotic evil and resolving it.  He does this while managing another not-so-well-behaved exorcist who would like to harness some of that slimy red yin power.  There are some scary monsters and basically the whole thing is about the undead, conceptualized as conflicting emotions which live on fear, lust and pain, endless loops of suffering.  You know, a real family film.  

Rigor Mortis doesn't actually let us know for sure whether it is a dream world imposing itself on reality or whether reality is just an illusory aspect of a dream world. Thus it posits the basic traditional-- Zhuangzi is dreaming he is a butterfly, and the butterfly is dreaming he is  Zhuangzi-- Operatic framework of illusion vs. disillusion (See Sophie Volpp ).

At this moment in history this sort of illusion vs. disillusion art work strikes me as a comic attack on modernity and rationality.  Truth isn't knowable so it isn't that important, lighten up already, it's just fake blood and special effects!  When it is all over we can get back to the important work of friending and unfriending people on Facebook.   

At the Daoist Conference in Boston the issue was raised that in popular film there is often label confusion between tangki or other ritual experts and Daoshi (literally: Officails of the Dao).  I would suggest that this may actually reflect real anxiety about the difficulty lay people have in knowing which types of ritual experts to trust.  Popular culture, documented in written plays and more recently by anthropologists of village level ritual, sometimes portrays Daoshi as wild warriors and liminal exorcists with amoral magical powers.  As we learned at the conference, some groups of elite literati were comfortable using spirit writing to create new forms of Daoism.  I think we are headed toward more expansive definitions of Daoism which may include illiterate but theatrically intelligent forms of Daoism.

Still there is good reason for caution about changing our definitions of Daosim.  I hope the discussion continues to be framed by Clifford Gertz's ideas that we try to be a form of literature which is expert at relating what people say about themselves, and each other.

Anyway, it is a fun movie, plenty of crows blood, creepy rituals and powerful talisman--check it out!

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The Natan Sharansky  definition of democracy is that you can go into a public square and say what ever you want without fear of violent retribution. He specifically pointed out that an election does not signify democracy if this basic right is not being met. That perspective led to the Phillips measure of democracy (that's me), namely that one can make a horror movie. Horror movies require the freedom to express ones greatest fears and the social networks capable of bringing together economic resources and expert skills. If it hasn't made a horror movie, it isn't a democracy. For great swaths of the world it is a decent measure. There are a few exceptions that prove the rule, in the early days of film technology, governments hadn't yet figured out that horror movies could be a threat so there are a few horror movies that got under the wire in the 20's and 30's. Then there is India which simply does not make horror movies (perhaps this is because images of horror are sacred in India?). The other big exception to the Phillips rule has been Hong Kong, which has made a lot of horror movies over the years.

Hong Kong was not a democracy, but under British rule the rights of self-defense, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to a lawyer, and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances were pretty much intact. But now Hong Kong has been handed over to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). So naturally I asked Sean Allen (who later gave me my copy of Rigor Mortis and who is an expert on Hyper Masculinity in Asian Horror), "Has Hong Kong made a horror movie since the PRC took over?" He answered that there was indeed a lull, for a few years the masters of horror were holding their breath, but in the last 3 years a number of very serious horror movies have been produced.

This is a real source of optimism for me. I am an American, I believe strongly in Democracy, but societies that protect basic contract rights, rights like self-defense, and freedom of speech can exist alongside democracies. I don't know what the future holds, but the PRC is allowing Hong Kong to make horror films and that is a reason to be optimistic. I now have a list of new horror films to see and review for my readers, as well as some older horror films that deal with Daoist priests.  There is no way of knowing whether or not we are in some sort of millet dream, but as long as the horror movies keep coming, I'll pretend that we are.

 

22/52 a Guessing Game

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This is a silly post about being in Boulder, Colorado.  I'm sitting in a fancy café watching the end of the Tour De France, incidentally.  This café has marble tables and black leather seats.  Everyone here is in incredibly good shape, it is on a major bicycle route.  But Boulder is like this in general, people are in great physical condition.  

Anyway, there is a game people play in Boulder called 22/52.  Incidentally, I was pretending not to be listening into a conversation in another café when I learned about this game.  The rules are simple, you are hanging out with a friend and you see someone in the distance, you then say "22/52" and you both guess whether the person is closer in age to 22 or to 52.  If you guess differently the game is on.  As the chosen target gets closer it usually becomes obvious who won. You can play for push-ups, or beer, or just bragging rights.  

I'm not sure this game would work anywhere but in Boulder but if you have nothing better to do, you can play it all day here.  There really are that many "fit" people here.  

This makes me think about a concept my father invented called "Social Sorting" back in the late '80's or early '90's.  The idea is now popular with economists, especially when thinking about where people choose to live.  The idea is that people sort themselves out into different groups by looking first at a "flag" or a signal that tells a person they may want to join, second experiencing a "screen", which is some kind of measuring-up, assessment, or perhaps a necessary barrier, and third the "overflow,"  which weeds people out who for whatever reason don't fit in.

Anyway this all gave me a really cool idea for a Tai Chi video commercial.  Instead of 22/52 it would be called 42/72.  The camera would start way off in the distance (perhaps a few shots from a helicopter) watching someone doing Tai Chi (or Baguazhang or some other type of gongfu).  "42? or 72?" flashes on the screen, then the camera zooms in on this really old woman jumping around like a grasshopper.  It should repeat three times with different people in different location for variety.  At the end it can have some tag-line like, "Aging with power and grace:  The art of Tai Chi."

 

A Junk in New York and London 1851

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Check out the latest article by Ben Judkins about a Junk that was sailed to New York and then London in 1851.

The most exciting thing about it is that a group of 20 Southern Chinese sailors, hired to sail the boat, just happened to have enough martial arts and opera training to put on shows in New York and then in London for 2 years.  That is strong evidence for two things:  

One, that martial arts and opera training were wide spread at least among sailors.  Actually opera might not be the right word here but they had some kind of theatrical performance training, most likely amateur.  

Two, they conceptualized martial arts as a performing art that could easily be incorporated into a larger performance.  

There is a lot of other fascinating stuff in there too, a ground breaking law suit, a visit by Charles Dickens, and Westerners playing Chinese opera instruments.  There is also some suggestion that the religious rituals they performed for themselves were accessible as performance.   Now I want to know more.

"Don't Talk" Rightly Won the Nobel Prize for Literature

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I try to write reviews of books I think my readers will find stimulating.  These don't always fall in the Daoist or Martial arts categories.  At the recent conference on Daoism I attended in Boston, I met Sabina Knight who was interviewed widely after Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  Her review of Mo Yan's work is a must read, The National Interest.  If that link doesn't work here is a link to the PDF.

Here is another link to an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, she was also interviewed by NPR if you prefer pod casts.  

After reading Knight's review I had to go out and read Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out .  I'm not going to write my own review because this one is so good, but I will add some comments.

If you know a bit about post 1949 Chinese history, it is increadibly entertaining to hear a first person account of the various eras from the point of view of a donkey or a pig.  The layers of irony get so deep you really can't crawl out of the well.  It is as if Mo Yan is doing an exorcism and you, the reader, are the demonic force being ensnared by irony and then entrapped in a deep well of meaning.  

The layers of irony are not just historical, there are just as many layers of irony from literature both Chinese and International, the pig with human attributes for instance is clearly a bit of slop thrown in Orwell's direction.  The Cultural Revolution through the eyes of a pig is so infused with theatricality that in 500 years it could perhaps be included as an 'outer chapter' of Sun Wukong's Journey to the West.  Outlaws of the Marsh makes an appearance too.  The characters faces often have color as if they were painted for a performance.  And I found this great description of the kind of music I use when teaching Northern Shaolin to kids:  "It penetrates clouds and pulverizes stones."

Sabina Knight points out that the title is a reference to Buddhism and that throughout the novel he is using phrases which are taken straight out of Buddhist scripture.  There is also an enormous amout of popular religion floating around the book, again layered in as irony with new meanings and absurd contexts.  For instance there is a chapter title (52) "...turn fake into real."  I read this as a reference to the Daoist elixir practice (jindan).  

It is not an easy book to read.  But is has magical qualities that make it worthwile.  It seemed that each time as I neared the end of the book a new section mysterously appeared.  The novel follows a landlord executed in 1950 sir-named "Ximen" or Western Gate, which is cosmologically the gate we pass through when we die.  He is then re-incarnated as a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, a monkey, and finally a big headed boy.  

This is an amazingly rich work, the Nobel Prize folks got this one right.  May they escape torture in Lord Yama's Court.  Mo Yan's name means: "Don't Talk," he is one of the most iteresting political writers of our time. 

Some Fun at King Yama's Court

 

The View From Manywheres

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This Blog Post at The Last Masters about Kungfu Women is a great read.  (hat tip to Ben Judkins).

I've been reading Why Do Men Barbecue?: Recipes for Cultural Psychology   By Richard A. Shweder.  I read his Thinking Through Culture when I was like 20 years old or something.  It was great, it probably goes on the list of the first 10 books that really made me think.  The sad thing, for me, the sad thing about who I am, is that the only person I could talk to about the book was my father. (My father had a radio show called Social Thought and was the one who gave me the book.) For whatever reason, I just wasn't around people who had both the interest and the ability to read and think about complex and challenging ideas.  
That is one of the things I love about going to a conference on Daoism, there are a lot of people with whom I can have deep and far ranging conversations.  HOLY SMOKE!  I met two people in two days who had read Elaine Scary's The Body in Pain.  In my mid-twenties I was desperate to find someone who had the capacity to read that book, to no avail.  And yet at the Daoist Conference in Boston I met two people in two days!

Here are two great quotes from Richard A. Shweder...more to come:

The knowable world is incomplete if seen from any one point of view, incoherent if seen from all points of view at once, and empty if seen from nowhere in particular. 

There is no single best place to be raised, whether you are a girl or a boy.  But one of the really good places to be raised is any place where you learn that there is no single best place to be raised, whether you are a boy or a girl. 

 

Article on the Boxer Rebellion

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The Economist has an article on the Boxer Rebellion that is interesting.  The comments are interesting too.  One of the things I like about the Boxer Rebellion is that the deeper one goes, the more ambiguity one finds.  In the article and in the comments we can see the struggle to claim that one side, or one view, is righteous.  In order to achieve this, one has to use powerful tools of reduction.  So that is an interesting exercise, while I was reading it I was trying to identify the reduction.  What is being conflated?  What is being left out?

 

Trivial and Not So Trivial

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My executive assistant tells me that this sort of blog post I've just written below is very obtuse.  She says it is unreasonable to assume that my readers are going to try to connect all these seemingly disparate ideas.  Normally the writer does that work.  But perhaps readers will be inspired if I say that this type of obtuse post is a new type of puzzle, like one you might find in a daily newspaper, whereby readers have to stop and think about how it is possible that all these things are connected.

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I've written a number of blog posts, and sketched out a few others in the last week, but could someone please explain to me how people finish things when the weather is so nice?

The weather in Boulder, Colorado, keeps trying to suck me away from my work.  Fortunately I have my early morning practice/teaching otherwise my guilt level about not getting work done would be off the charts.  I am considering becoming a night person and sleeping through the day.  I don't want to become a victim of good fortune.

Speaking of being a victim, I found some pants that I really like.  I can't even find the exact name (sorry) but they are made by Kuhl and are made out of stretchy material.  They are strong and comfortable and you can kick over your head and do the splits in them if you can do those things!  

I also wanted to comment on shoes.  I'm hard on shoes they tend to get torn up form all sides if I'm doing a full range of training in them.  The barefoot shoe movement has been fantastic.  I have for years and years been pulling all the junk out of my shoes and trying to find the flattest, toughest, lightest shoes I can.  I was very happy with Saucony-Hattori.  They are the lightest and most comfortable shoes ever.  

But I have also been wearing Merrell's, they aren't quite as comfortable, and they don't fit my feet quite as well as the Sauconys, but they are tougher.  They really hold up to a beating.  So I have to give it to the Merrell's trail runners.  They are a better shoe, if I consider the big three; tough, flat, and light.

The sad part of this story is huge numbers of people have been getting horrid cases of plantar fasciitis.  This actually has nothing at all to do with shoes, and everything to do with bad habits and overly enthusiastic marketing.  I went into REI about a year ago and the shoe guy was trying to sell me 'barefoot' shoes and was explaining how I need to run on my toes or something.  It was obvious he didn't know what he was talking about.  It is simply a failure of personal responsibility all around.  This is how the fashion goes.

Improvements in society, be they artifice, culture or freedom, can get taken away because people won't take personal responsibility.  Usually it is a bit complex, like it is in this case, it is partly the fault of individuals, part marketing, part distributors, partly just problems seeing how changes in artifice, culture or freedom will change behavior. 
It looks like the barefoot movement is on the way out because people are getting sued.  I'm considering buying a ten year supply because I've been waiting for these shoes for 30 years, and there is a chance they will disappear.   

Nia Sanchez, Miss USA!If you missed the controversy about Miss USA Nia Sanchez, you can catch up here.  Can I use the word retarded on my blog without offending people?  There is actually a movement falsely calling itself feminist that is trying to promote less responsibly for women.  It will fail, but it has the support of a lot of government agencies at the moment and a lot of universities too.  It can do a lot of damage before it goes down in flames.  Let me be clear, if you want personal agency, personal responsibility is non-negotiable.  If taking a set of actions has consequences that would be different if you took a different set of actions, you are responsible for that.  I mean, you can't have an anvil fall on your head unless you walk under it.  Someone might be trying to kill you, that doesn't make you somehow not responsible. 
That is the basic philosophy of self-defense.  You are the agent of your own freedom.  This is a new idea and I am grateful to Miss USA for helping to spread it.