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Big Fish Reviewed by Qiu Jin Superficially, "Big Fish" lends itself to a postmodernist approach to movie culture, in the way that "Artificial Intelligence" "lends" itself to Freudian and postmodernist analyses, although this is just a scheme to aid the movie's smoke-screen defense of the imperialist-patriarchy. "Big Fish" is heavy on what postmodernists would call "pastiche," which is the combination or merging of cultures or styles from different historical periods, in this case, historical periods as depicted in B-horror movies, "Leave it to Beaver," "The Twilight Zone," Westerns, and so on. Will Bloom grew up hearing the tall tales told incessantly by his father, Ed Bloom, the "big fish." Will knows nothing else about his father's life. As Ed nears his death, Will goes on a journey to try to separate fact from fiction. Meanwhile, Ed's stories are rendered on the screen using special effects. While Ed's stories, taken literally, are clearly fantastical and incredible, it turns out that fact and fiction aren't so different--says the movie. Ed really did meet a persyn with gigantism, who joined the circus. Ed really did meet the fictional poet Norther Winslow. And Ed really did "save" two Cantonese- or Taiwanese-speaking Chinese wimmin from the People's Liberation Army. We shouldn't pick and choose between postmodernism and Maoism on a daily basis. It is not "postmodernism is useful for understanding this movie, and Marxism is useful for understanding that movie." This is where the illusion of "Big Fish" falls apart. The truth does matter, all the time. While depicting u.$. involvement in the Chinese civil war (or the Korean civil war) as being heroic, "Big Fish" has the nerve to tell us, through a Black doctor, that the truth doesn't really matter, that people should just accept the version of reality that they like. Maybe Ed Bloom has been suffering from progressive brain damage and really does believe his own stories, but that doesn't matter. Will Bloom isn't supposed to care; he's just supposed to accept his father's version of reality for what it is: just a version. "Big Fish," like postmodernism, glorifies "perspective" and "viewpoint." On the contrary, MIM would sympathize with Will's search for the truth. There is no "viewpoint" on whether Communists have liberated or oppressed wimmin. There are only truth and anti-communist lies. Regardless of what the script of "Big Fish" says, there is some confusion in the public's mind as to whether Ed parachutes into China, maybe Canton after the Second World War, or liberated Korea during the Korean civil war. What "Big Fish" shows is the young Ed parachuting into the middle of a stage performance by two wimmin, who are conjoined twins in Ed's story. They speak both Cantonese and English and sing a love song, in English, for an audience of PLA soldiers who are off-duty. The soldiers are depicted as being entranced, robot-like in their responses, and stupid. Two of them start doing exaggerated kung-fu moves when they see Ed, and another soldier, who comes off as being secretly anti-communist, is too quick to stand guard for the twins when they ask to be alone with Ed. The audience is meant to think that the twins are being held captive by the PLA, maybe after it liberated Guangzhou. They escape with Ed to the united $tates, and "Big Fish"'s audience is left with the impression that all this is worthy of a tall tale. For that alone, "Big Fish" is a reactionary movie. The surrounding scenes are just padding. If the makers of "Big Fish" themselves didn't think that the Chinese scene was important, then they treated the depicted events in a matter-of-factly way. There is no question that the two wimmin entertainers are "saved" by Ed, because they appear at the end of the movie, along with other characters from Ed's stories, in order to disprove Will's lingering doubts about his father's stories. In reality, Kuomintang and U.$. troops(2) looted cities and raped wimmin on a large scale during the Chinese civil war, and continued to bar wimmin from production and political work. In contrast, Communists worked for wimmin's economic equality, wimmin's health, and ended centuries of oppressive tradition, and wimmin took the lead in land reform, collectivization, and other parts of the revolution. Communists did not go around enslaving wimmin in the areas that they liberated. Although MIM would not oppose depiction of prostitution in film, "Big Fish" shows Chinese wimmin being prostitutes, while simultaneously extolling Amerikkkans. The juxtaposition of different historical styles does have one function in "Big Fish": that is to make patriarchy something universal and permanent, even in revolutionary China. The wimmin in Ed's life quickly enter and leave the picture, as well as their romantic relationships with Ed--with the exception of a womyn whom Ed met when she was eight, and he was eighteen. They meet again and nearly have an affair. This is another negative element of the movie. If Jenny is gender-oppressed when she is an eight-year-old child, that does not automatically mean that she is gender-oppressed when she is an adult. In fact, the grown Jenny is represented as being a single, petty-bourgeois womyn who still desires casual or romantic sex with men older than her. Since the movie is not clear on this point about which people are actually gender-oppressed, it is a distortion of reality. Similarly, there is a difference between the average Euro-Amerikan womyn in 1900 and the average Euro-Amerikan womyn in 2000, and even a quantitative difference between Euro-Amerikan wimmin in 1950 and Euro-Amerikan wimmin in 2000(1). "Big Fish" proceeds from the past to the present in order to prove, incorrectly, that the majority of contemporary Euro-Amerikan wimmin are gender-oppressed. Even as "Big Fish" implies, ahistorically, that all Euro-Amerikan biological wimmin are gender-oppressed overall, it demeans wimmin in general. Although it is impossible for Jenny to be the old witch who appears early in the movie, Jenny matter-of-factly says that maybe she is the witch in Ed's stories because the witch is Ed's symbol for anyone who isn't Sandra Bloom, his wife. The movie glosses over the issue that the only "witches" in the movie are wimmin. Karl the Giant as gender-oppressed One persyn in the movie who is gender-oppressed is actually a biological man suffering from gigantism, Karl the Giant. Because of his body, Karl, with the help of the young Ed, is run out of the town of Ashton and is forced to take work in a circus. One of the "funny" moments in "Big Fish" occurs when the circus ringmaster (Danny DeVito) tricks the illiterate Karl into signing a contract to put himself into "involuntary servitude." When they arrive in the u.$., the two Chinese wimmin entertainers are recruited by the circus ringmaster, and the audience is supposed to think that Ed did them a favor.
Notes: 1. Moreover, there is a big difference between the average Euro-Amerikan womyn in 2000 and the average light-skinned womyn in 1900. "The colonized peoples have been the proletariat, while the white [Euro-Amerikan] working class has been a labor aristocracy. This has been camouflaged in capitalist history by retroactively assigning white racial membership to various european immigrant peoples who weren't 'white' at the time" (http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/books/raceburn.html). This illustrates the danger in "Big Fish"'s juxtaposition of wimmin from different historical periods and locations. "Big Fish" retroactively assigns the status of "woman" to historical wimmin in order to draw similarities between historical wimmin, who may have been socially wimmin, gender-oppressed, and today's Euro-Amerikan wimmin, most of whom are net gender oppressors. "Big Fish" doesn't even pretend to be feminist, but pseudo-feminism does the same thing in retroactively applying the status of "woman" to historical wimmin. 2. "On 24 December 1946, Shen Ch'ung, a girl student at Peiping University, was raped by an American Marine. This incident led to widespread anti-American demonstrations by students in many Chinese cities, and to demands for the immediate withdrawal of all US Military forces" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw9/mswv9_14.html). "This incident occurred in Peiping on December 24, 1946. A girl student of Peking University was raped by U.S. soldiers. Consequently, from December 30 through January 1947, students in scores of big and medium cities in the Kuomintang areas struck and demonstrated against the United States and Chiang Kai-shek, demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops from China. More than half a million students took part in this movement" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw4/mswv4_17.html). "William Pierson, a corporal, and other U.S. marines raped Shen Chung, a girl student of Peking University, in Peiping on December 24, 1946. This aroused the great indignation of the people throughout the country against the atrocities of the U.S. forces. In January 1947, brushing aside the people's protests, the Kuomintang government handed over the chief criminal, Pierson, to the Americans to be dealt with at their discretion. In August the U.S. Navy Department set this criminal free with a verdict of 'not guilty'" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/classics/mao/sw4/mswv4_69.html). "After the war, the Japanese government was afraid that United States and other Allied troops would commit atrocities in a similar manner as their own troops did when invading China in 1937. In order to prevent rapes, on August 18, 1945, the Japanese government opened the 'comfort stations' for use by Allied troops.(21) According to Japanese documents and testimony from former 'comfort women,' the women at these stations were forced to serve as sexual slaves to the American soldiers.(22) The first "comfort station" opened for the use of United States troops in the Tokyo area on August 27, 1945, with reports that terrified "comfort women" began weeping, clung to posts in the building and refused to move(23)" (http://www.cmht.com/casewatch/cases/cwcomfort2.htm). |