Cross-cultural transactions in the film adaptation of Wolf Totem

Abstract

Jiang Rong’s novel Wolf Totem incited a debate over the veracity of its representation of the steppe and the Mongolian culture, which accounts for the obsession with the real in its Sino-French film adaptation. Unfolding a historical trajectory from a “war against nature” during the Cultural Revolution to the present “war of pollution,” the film delves into trans-media rendezvous with polymorphous facets of a Chinese story. The French director Jean-Jacques Annaud can be seen as the simulacra of the Westerner, an envisioned symbol the novel associates with the nomadic spirit of the Mongol in its attempts to reflect on the “weak” Chinese national character. The film fosters its interpretation of the wolf totem towards a new set of social relations through creating a loop of transcultural appropriation. As the Chinese production team anticipates a blockbuster for a global audience which evades the controversial Han viewing position of Jiang Rong’s writing, the French team’s cultural sensibilities register a European imagination of the Mongol that once dominated Eurasia. That said, the western re-territorialization of the borderland resonates with Jiang Rong’s strategy of otherness, transposing a socio-cultural anxiety onto the gendered body of the other.