手机

圣诞夜，我看了电影《手机》。这是2003年度最佳惊竦片，看完以后教人混身冰凉。以前小刚拍的东西，目的在于娱民。娱民这东西就不能太往深里走，即使不得不太深，也得表现出荒谬和黑色来。小刚潜水一年，最新奉献出来的东西不深不浅，基本上是写实主义，让人看了毛骨悚然。

《手机》这个片子，从头到尾都给人一种相当疲惫的感觉。我唯一能看出来的故事大纲就是一个中年男人怎么样让生活给活活逼崩溃了，这比恐怖片还恐怖，比记录片还真实。在真实生活中，过着和严守一一样生活的人不是太少，而是太多了。这就造成本片不再是搞笑，而是批判现实主义。

批判现实主义具体什么意思我不清楚，今天也是第一次用。在我理解里，那就是讲述一个大家日常生活里都能见到的故事，然后用极其悲惨的命运惩罚主人公，以达到教育人民的目的，类似地狱写真。我不当人民好多年，也不喜欢被教育。

我曾经类似道德偏执狂一般挑剔周围的世界，但是现在我充分理解人性的种种。人类的精神力量在大多数时候都屈从于肉体的需要，并且因此而造成精神上的痛苦。我曾经以为那是个例，现在我才知道这是通解。如果世间真的存在所谓忠贞不渝，那么最合适执行的对象是和尚，而众所周知和尚是不结婚的。即使肉体能保证绝对的循规蹈矩，但是在精神的辅道上永远都塞满了车。

一个所谓幸福的婚姻，我想更多的是习惯。因为这么过和每天系脸刷牙是一样的，也就如此过下去了。另外我推测另外一个很重要的因素是专注之力。把注意力集中在一点上，其余的欲望才会纷纷坠落，而不是纷纷扬起。这又说回去了，最幸福的婚姻需要和尚来完成。

我是被这片子吓到了，不是因为结果，而是因为作用选择都处于两难境地，且无法改变。这片子让人感觉到，生活没有最糟，只有更糟。看完以后，它能使郁闷者更加郁闷，绝望者更加绝望。

这片子一点都不好笑。

    朋友发给我一串奇怪的代码，说是在Google里搜索，可以看到全球各地的监控镜头。据朋友说，运气好的话可以看到泳装美女。我很是心动，赶紧依法而行，不过我的运气显然并不太好，没有看到比基尼少女，只看到几个在韩国小店里吃饭的大老爷们，还有在瑞士一个仓库旁撒尿的小狗。

    但是这已经足够让我兴奋的了，在别人毫不知情的状况下偷窥他们的生活，这种快感真是无可言喻。

    弗洛伊德说，每个人潜意识中都有偷窥他人的欲望。所以偷窥的历史可谓悠久。从“东邻之女窥于墙”的年代开始，从林中猎人偷窥出浴的阿尔忒弥斯开始，任何一个时代任何一个民族，都不可避免地有偷窥的现象发生。

    在中国，偷窥更是有着悠久的传统。譬如我一直怀疑，“凿壁偷光”很可能偷的是春光，当然，这已经无法考证。有据可循的是，在中国最伟大的小说《红楼梦》里，贾宝玉便因偷看到薛宝钗雪白丰腴的“膀子”，欣喜不已，浮想翩翩。辽国大臣耶律乙辛偷窥到辽道宗耶律洪基的老婆萧观音与伶人赵惟一勾搭成奸，害得皇后最终被赐死。唐明皇李隆基到儿子家串门，偷看到儿媳妇杨玉环洗澡，色心大起，进而演绎出一段惊天地泣鬼神的爱情连续剧，留下名垂千古的《长恨歌》之外，还留下了名胜古迹兼旅游圣地华清池。“在天愿为比翼鸟”的爱情故事，归根结底其实是一个偷窥的故事。

    历史上最得人心的偷窥者是一个叫“牛郎”的人，织女姐姐下凡洗澡，正巧被外出放牛的牛郎同学看到，织女姐姐被迫委身于他，进而演绎出一番令人扼腕的爱情悲剧。由于动机单纯，结局悲凉，偷窥者牛郎得到了广大人民的同情与肯定。

    时至今日，人们对于偷窥的兴趣依然未减，莎朗·斯通主演的电影《偷窥》轰动一时，在窗前放一个望远镜窥探他人私生活几乎成了时尚，美国电视剧《六人行》里，那几个都市男女就以偷窥临楼一个丑陋裸男的生活为乐。木子美披露自己性生活细节的博客引发万人齐观的壮观景象，最后竟导致网站瘫痪。最轰动的集体偷窥事件莫过于璩美凤被偷拍事件。后来璩美凤出了一本书，广告词是“你已经看过了我的身体，请看我的心”，这本书的销售量可想而知不会太好，因为很明显，大众关心的不是她的心而是她的身体。

    科技越来越昌明，网络越来越普及，在这个四处泛滥窃听器、针孔摄像头及红外透视摄影机的时代，我们的隐私保护也越来越脆弱。正如卞之琳那首叫《断章》的诗：“你站在桥上看风景，看风景人在楼上看你。”在我们津津有味地偷窥他人生活的时候，是否也有人在某个角落默默地注视着我们？我们是否如《楚门的世界》里那个男子一样，全然不觉地生活在一个被窥探的世界里？

    看看新闻：章子怡情挑霍启山，李冰冰酒店会情郎，刘嘉玲酒店遭偷拍……就连快要被人遗忘的“老艺术家”李金斗，也就这么一个不留神栽进了“针孔”摄像头的偷拍之下……我们在娱乐的同时，难道没有一种兔死狐悲的惊惶？

    电影《手机》的结尾，严守一抱着手机蹲在马桶上，仿佛抱了一个手雷，脸上满是恐惧的表情——天大地大，他竟无所遁形。而在这样一个隐私作古的年代，无所遁形的又岂止一个严守一？

        Cell Phone (2003) marks the culmination of the popular cultural preoccupation with infidelity. A famous TV talk show host Yan Shouyi, tries without success to maintain the delicate network of lies and concealments that allow him to have two different mistresses in addition to his estranged wife.
        The story starts in a small town where the town’s first telephone, which signifies the modernization in China, has just been installed. In a small village nearby, a young man Yan Shouyi takes a peasant woman to the town to make a phone call to her husband. About twenty years later, the middle-aged Yan Shouyi has already become a popular TV talk show host in a big city, owning a wife, a nice job, a BMW, and a mistress. His life and work would not have taken this path if he had not been equipped with a cell phone, the latest wireless communication technology. But the Cell Phone also causes the end of his marriage: his wife accidentally answers a phone call from his mistress complaining about his absence from a date.
        After getting a divorce, Yan starts a new relationship with a college teacher, Shen Xue, while still occasionally dating his old mistress, Wu Yue. On the several occasions when his double life is about to be discovered by Shen, Yan deftly covers the truth with lies. His close friend Fei Muo, a university professor and producer for his television show, is also involved in a similar love affair with a graduate student, which is soon discovered by his wife. Eventually, Yan’s infidelity is discovered by Shen who sees a digital picture of Yan and Wu making love, a picture taken by the digital camera built into Wu’s new cell phone. Not only is Yan’s relationship destroyed, his career also ends as Wu threatens to expose their relationship and takes over his position as the talk show host. At the end of the film, throwing his cell phone into fire, Yan swears that he will never again own one. Then after a dip-to-black, the film welcomes a second ending, Yan’s niece, who is also from the same village, becomes a cell phone saleswoman and comes to demonstrate the latest product to his uncle Yan. (Zhang, 135)
        Given the obvious Marxist bent of Cell Phone’s rhetoric and its fable-like narrative of the dangers of commodity fetishism, one might easily conclude the film as criticism of the effects of rapid economic transformation in urban China, and denial of male dominance. However, underneath this reading which is merely based on the resolution provided by the film, we can find both the cultural underpinning and ideological impacts of the film, whether they are conscious directorial decisions or not, are the other way around.
        The film is based on patriarchal and post-socialist assumptions in the first place. The leading character, wealthy, successful TV host Yan Shouyi, is representing the controlling patriarchal order and the ruling class. The young and charming mistress Wu Yue, on the other hand, is a sexual object and an oppressed worker reinforcing and perpetuating an exploitative capitalistic scheme. Yu Wenjuan, the pregnant wife and later the mother of Yan’s only child, is a cheap labor whose family value in undertaking housework and fostering children is totally underestimated and neglected by both the character Yan and the filmmaker Feng. Shen Xue, the successor of Yu and Wu, is a wonderful replacement of the two women, since she functions as both mistress and wife and has the highest total value. Therefore, marriage and divorce follow the rules of product exchange. The values of women as sexual commodities are estimated by their male owner, based on evaluation and grading of their sexual attractiveness and productivity among others.
        In the second place, the narration neglects and degrades women’s family values.
While there are scenes of Yan Shouyi working at the TV station and attending meeting with his colleagues, which confirms his value in production, there is hardly any scene of the women working. In addition, among the values of women, the four structures proposed by Mitchell, sexuality is emphasized against reproduction, and socialization. While there are a lot of scenes of Yan Shouyi flirting and having fun with her young and passionate mistress Wu Yue, there is hardly any scene of him and the older and less attractive wife spending time together. The cinematic representation of the reproduction process of Yan’s first wife is almost absent in the film. Having been pregnant for months, Yu Wenjuan did not inform her husband at all, and Yan is only informed several months after divorce by his ex-brother-in-law that his first wife had already given birth to their baby and needs money from him.
        Hiding behind socialization of children and the new motherhood are deeper oppressions of women. Spending a lot of time and energy nurturing the kid, the woman Yu did not get the compensation in improving her own social status; instead she lost her job in the big city after she went back to her hometown. As the value of socialization of children is often neglected by the society, this part of the plot is also omitted in the film, and is only told through Yan’s narration, serving as an obstacle that hinders and adds drama to Yan’s women pursuing career. As her value looks invisible, Yan replaces his first wife not with his mistress whose value only lies in sexuality, but with a beautiful college professor Shen Xue who seems to be a more serious and proper wife candidate, but also has the sexual disposition of a mistress.
        From Yan’s perspective, all the three women can be valued on a materialistic basis. Women become commodities, and their sexual attractiveness, job, education status are all counted in their exchange value while man is the buyer who has the right of choice because of his economic power and dominance in a patriarchal society.
        Extramarital relationship is a fatal violation of Chinese social norms and a tradition that often punishes the woman for such “immoral transgression” (Cui 181). In Cell Phone, the mistress Wu Yue, became the conflict's cause and the incarnation of immorality instead of the Male character Yan Shouyi. As an advanced prostitute, she would love to sell her body in exchange for money and power. And, ultimately, she threatens to replace Yan Shouyi as a television talk show host by using the photo she took in her cell phone. Thus, Yan Shouyi becomes the victimized character pitied by the audiences instead of the evil woman.
        The resolution of the film, Yan Shouyi’s abandoning of the cell phone, which may seem like a self-criticism, is actually a displacement and denial of the guilt and regret by reprimanding the modern technology and communication device. Cell phone becomes the scapegoat for Yan Shouyi, the hypocritical and immoral character, and therefore the patriarchal and capitalist order behind the story, which was supposedly to be criticized, is actually being extended sympathy.
        Depicted as the direct cause of all the conflicts between the protagonist and the three female characters, cell phone, the symbol of post-socialist modernity seems to be criticized. Rui concludes that Cell Phone addresses the subject through the director’s satirical take on consumerism and his exposure of the moral crises and ethical issues brought by expansion of high technology into our everyday lives (Zhang, 136). However, in the first 90 minutes of the film, a fantasy of the patriarchal and post-socialist (capitalist) utopia was already created for the male audiences: mistress as a symbol and accessory of urban success. Female audiences were also given a utilitarian fantasy integrated with the narcissistic and masochistic visual pleasure: being someone’s mistress is the shortcut to wealth and success. Thus, the film belittles the value of women, and denies women's independent existential meaning.
        In addition to the narrative constructed to propagate the attractive image of the “successful personage” that has represented the “new ideology” of contemporary China, an image that endorses a reality of growing class differences and income disparities, Feng Xiaogang adopts a lot of meta-cinematic elements in Cell Phone to offset the seriousness of his own criticism, a technique abundantly used in his early films. There are ample shots within the TV station, such as the staff operating camera, and outtakes of the TV host Yan who says his lines wrong, that remind the audiences to question the authenticity of their own movie watching experience. There is also a lot of inserting advertisements for cell phones that deconstructs the movie’s final critical stance towards post-socialist modernity. As the audiences identify and follow the male protagonist throughout the film, they highly enjoy and celebrate his material wealth and “romantic affairs” brought about by his professional success in the patriarchal and post-socialist order. In the meantime, they also accept a message that all women, whether they are educated or not, college professor or press editor, wife or mistress, are all annexed to the life of men.
        As McGrath noticed, the basic narrative structure of Cell Phone already had become so common by the end of the 1990s as to constitute a cinematic genre in itself, a genre that offers fable-like narratives of the moral dilemmas confronted by protagonists facing dramatic changes in personal economics as well as libidinal possibilities in the reform era. In such films, a man takes on one or more extramarital lovers after achieving some sort of economic success and social elevation (McGrath, 98). In many cases, a man’s ability to defy his wife is supported by both his male role and some sort of economic success. Even though these films reveal the social issues of the oppression of women, they neither provide a solution nor hold a feministic point of view that attempt to liberate women. Instead, they stand in line with the successful male protagonists, and celebrate the current patriarchal and post-socialist status quo. In a word, these films are women-concerned, but not at all feminist films.
        Supposedly a subgenre of family melodrama that aims to criticize the social immorality and educate the audiences, the actual impact of the “cinema of infidelity” is rather doubtful. An example is the sex diary scandal of Han Feng, the former senior tobacco official, which culminates the “mistress fashion” in 2010. Even more dramatic than Feng’s films, the purported diary, written in graphic detail, includes boasts that Han was enjoying sex romps with many different women while taking bribes and attending banquets. Populated by Internet users, Han’s case is just one in a million of the government officials and the privileged stratum in Mainland China.