In the name of love: Female impasses within capitalist logic in Lou Ye’s The Shadow Play

Abstract

As one of the leading six generation directors, Lou Ye often captures the changing social and political atmospheres in China by portraying melodramatic relationships with jolted camerawork, convoluted time frames, and emotionally charged narratives. The intimate, damaging, and symbiotic ties among individuals in the private, domestic space in Lou’s works are often symptomatic of the trenchant social inequality and the inherent violence in capitalist values. This paper studies Lou’s 2018 crime drama, Feng zhong you duo yu zuo de yun (The Shadow Play) and analyzes the way the film unpacks the upward narrative of capitalism as inherently gendered and discriminative. As the diegesis unfolds in a disjointed temporal order and heterotopic spaces in which high-rise skyscrapers and demolished residential buildings coexist, the film documents the way China’s thirty years of reform and opening up perpetuate heteronormative gender performance and subjugation of women. Illuminated by Lauren Berlant’s notion of “cruel optimism” that characterizes modern individuals’ futile yet tenacious struggles and negotiation in their everyday experience with capitalist mores under the false hope of prosperity and success, the paper investigates the way the female characters’ conformity to norms and improvised coping mechanisms lead to their downfall and insinuate a yearning for an alternative form of human bonding to that prescribed by masculinist hegemony.