Distance from Wrestlemania! Just eight months after "Daddy" became a huge success in the Chinese market, Amir Khan came to China again with his latest work, "Mysterious Superstar", which he invested in and starred in. Since its release, the film has not only performed well at the box office, but has once again attracted widespread attention: not only because of amir Khan's transnational influence, but also not only because the film is the debut work directed by Amir's long-time agent, assistant and friend Advait Chandan, or Zaira Wasim in "Wrestling", the actress who claims to be "India's most popular post-00s" actress, who once again starred as the female number one. It is also because this film inherits the strong realistic ambitions of Amir's previous works, and brings the concerns of major social issues such as women's rights, women's status, and domestic violence to the screen again, so that old issues take on a new look, and also opens up new discussion space for viewers.
New possibilities for the common people to speak of
The film depicts a slightly old-fashioned story. Yin Xiya, a 14-year-old girl, grew up in a strict Muslim family, loved music, and as the father of the family's only source of income, he did not hesitate to use violence to obstruct, and her mother endured humiliation and burden, and did not hesitate to sell jewelry to support her daughter. Covering her face with a headscarf, yin xiya filmed and uploaded a video of herself singing original songs, which became a hit on the Internet, and later with the help and promotion of the musician Shakti Kumar played by Amir Khan, Yin Xiya struggled and finally walked to the front of the curtain and led her mother out of the family dominated by patriarchal violence and fear.
Like Amir Khan's Wrestling and Satyamev Jayate, women, as weak people in Indian society, once again occupy a central visual and narrative role in the film. The two women in the film, the young girl Yin Xiya and her mother, depend entirely on the income of their father, an engineer, for their survival. Her mother was a full-time housewife, and although Yin Xiya was educated in school, her fate seems to have been written long ago, as her father said bluntly - "If a woman has no culture, she does not want to marry a good family." In this sense, women's fate depends on men like property, and the family becomes a closed-loop space that constantly produces and repeats this relationship of production. Yin Xiya and her mother may not be two subjects with different wills, but only the chronological existence of different stages of the community of destiny of the woman as the "appendage" of the man.
Absolute subservience to male property and family status, in the view of Ranajit Guha, former editor-in-chief of Subaltern Studies, undoubtedly meets the criteria for naming subalterns, a large, underclass of South Asia. In the important document of the study of the common people, "On Some Problems in the Compilation of the History of Colonial India", Guha defined the common people as follows: "As a general term, it refers to the subordinate class of South Asian society, regardless of class, caste, age, gender and position. It can be seen that the group referred to by the common people is undoubtedly vast, and has a high degree of similarity with the words used to describe major historical subjects such as "people" and "masses", but the reason why "common people" was proposed in India contains a linguistic resistance strategy - to make the "common people" and "elites" stand apart. In the view of scholars such as Guha, there are two forms of elitism that dominate the study of modern Indian history, one is colonialism and the other is (native) bourgeoisie, either of which is the creation and achievement of the elite, and there is no place for the common people.
What about the voices that have been drowned out and eliminated in the course of history? As Spielwak said, it's not just a question of being able to speak, it's a question of being heard. In "Mysterious Superstar", elitism as an oppressive force is embodied in the two "ideological state apparatus" in which Yin Xiya lived: one is the school with obvious architectural characteristics of the British colonial era, those that Naipaul and Rushdie often see, composed of white brick buildings, dotted with open and neat green spaces, and inspectors walking around in uniforms, and other elements of modern educational institutions with "southern style", where Yin Xiya has to wear uniform uniforms of the school in a regular manner. On the other hand, the family order dominated by his violent father is on the margins, and the family status is even inferior to that of his younger brother, who has no say in family affairs or personal choices. If the former is broadly a place of reproduction of ideology and the relations of production it encompasses, then the latter is not merely a rehearsal ground for traditional conservative patriarchal practices, but also a capitalist apparatus that, as Michael Hart and Negri call it, a core institution that regulates gender, embodies intimacy and solidarity, and accumulates private property, eroding and weakening the common capacity of the common people. Together, the two form a huge dome above the girl's head, leaving her with nowhere to escape, and straining the story further.
So, where is the export? How do the common people speak, how do they speak? The answer is music. By uploading her recorded songs to the Internet, the young girl Yin Xiya let her voice be heard by everyone, thus gaining great solidarity and the possibility of changing her destiny. In reality, music, the so-called borderless language, does play a real role in the Internet age to achieve class leapfrogging and penetrate the boundaries of nation-states: such as the global promotion of the "Voice" series of talent shows, people have witnessed the realization of the so-called "musical dreams" of many ordinary people; on the other hand, some "vernacular realism" element contained in modern pop music itself seems to be a broader and far-reaching global journey than other media. When the Indian girl in the movie picks up the guitar, a musical symbol that has accumulated too much symbolic capital, it seems to be unimaginatively reminiscent of a similar narrative in "Dream Quest", which just swept the Chinese market a few months ago: an outrageous Mexican boy, through the guitar that can shuttle between the yin and yang worlds, let the music connect this shore and the other shore, this life and the past. Ironically, in the process of appropriating the symbol of the guitar in popular culture texts, the political aspects of its load gradually faded. Its gun-like image is a metaphor for a broad-based story of rebellion, once referring to Jimi Hendrix, The Clash, Victor Jara, behind the history of rock and roll as a whole, the history of the New Folk Movement in Third World countries, and the history of music escaping from the temples of classicism and singing the subversive power it contains with the help of modern bards. When music as the art of time is spatialized and visualized by film, how much of the modern music that the guitar and its representatives, as well as that subversive power, are still real and effective? Is the politics of music still possible? Or how was it exquisitely incorporated by Treasure (Good) Lywood Industries? Returning to this film, this question is particularly important, and we can't help but ask, is Yin Xiya just singing and speaking, seeking a real breakthrough and resistance, or is she returning the other way and entering a game rule that must be experienced from a commoner to an elite?
The politics of masks
What is clear is that Yin Xiya's resistance lies not in the music itself, but in the form of singing: dressed in a black robe common to Muslim women, with only her eyes exposed, a guitar hanging across her chest, appears on the computer screen, and then sings loudly. This setting is also the biggest highlight of the film: the nameless common people appear as anonymous and are once again named "mysterious singers" through the huge network of anonymous actions on the Internet. At first, it was the praise and support of strange netizens, and then there were transnational "supporters in New York", and then later, even Yin Xiya's own classmates gathered together to watch the performance of this "mysterious superstar" with their mobile phones.
In a sense, when Yin Xiya typed the words "mysterious superstar" into the name of her Youtube account, she was no longer herself, and her identity changed from the stubborn schoolgirl to the code in the Internet, and also began a semiotics game. At the end of the 20th century, Marcos, the "deputy commander" of the Zapata movement in southeastern Mexico, led the local people to carry out more than a decade of negotiations and confrontations with the government in a masked manner. In Marcos's view, the act of masking is not merely a realistic choice to conceal one's identity, but more importantly, it avoids the historical inevitability of the accumulation of political and symbolic capital and ultimately the establishment of a new order and domination while rebelling against order and domination, in other words, the substitution of one power for another, "today's cloud imitates yesterday's cloud"—and the power structure itself has no substantial change. This is exactly what Scholars such as Spiewack fear in the study of the common people, regarding the common people as a specific, completely new and "discovered" historical subject, consciously independent of the elitism, and then becoming the subject of writing history, and in fact falling into the essentialism they oppose. In order to avoid such traps, the concern for the common people, the listening to the "silent place of history" means retracing the traces of history, through the methods of anthropological and cultural research, discovering fragments of the voices of the common people, thus presenting a different story. To paraphrase Duzanchi's concept, the historical writing and active voice of the common people can also be seen as a kind of "double-line history", which sees history as a transactional narrative that recreates the past by using, suppressing, and reconstructing the meaning that has been lost in the past, not only reawakening the meaning that has been lost, but also "revealing how the past provides causes, conditions, or connections to make transformation possible."
From this point of view, the anonymous subject identity of the masked warriors of the Zapatista Movement makes the faceless present countless faces, and the same is true of the masked "mysterious superstar", who is not only Yin Xiya, but also countless people. To paraphrase Deputy Commander Marcos, the "mysterious superstars" could also be "blacks in South Africa, Asians in Europe, Palestinians in Israel, Jews in Germany, communists in the post-Cold War era, pacifists in Bosnia, single women on the subway at 10 p.m." – in short, those "excluded, persecuted, resisting minorities that burst out the cry of 'enough is enough'". Looking further, it symbolizes not only the innumerable identities, but also the "quasi-object" in the sense of Latour, which breaks free from the airtight dichotomy of the subject-object from the famous to the nameless, the "intermediate image" that is active in the grid of social action. In contrast, this process of "generation" and change, which can only be achieved with the help of the Internet, is even more valuable: it creates a rift in an order ruled by local and foreign elites hand in hand, where subalternity nourishes and grows, and where countless identities and possibilities are constantly flowing, generating, and unleashing new political possibilities.
But it is patently naïve to pin such a postmodernist, semiotic guerrilla-style strategy of social resistance on a Bollywood film. Just as a loaded pistol is bound to fire a bullet, the veil must be lifted in a well-made, well-scripted film that meets mainstream Bollywood values and market aesthetic expectations. At the end of the story, Yin Xiya and her mother change their minds at the moment before they board the plane, deciding not to live in Saudi Arabia with their father, but to continue to pursue their freedom and independence in India, and then walk out of the airport to the scene of the annual singer's award ceremony and take the stage. There, she unveiled her veil, showed her true image, and made a true confession to her mother, and the emotional return point of the film finally fell on the family affection. The world thus knows the true identity of the "mysterious superstar", Yin Xiya has become a superstar, and the masked singers of the past no longer exist, and the political capital and popularity capital accumulated through the anonymous network have been cashed in at this moment, so that the musical girls in the position of the common people have achieved a leap in class, and also herald a beautiful future that is bound to come. However, the solution of the problem of the speech of the vast unheard group has also fallen disappointingly from the exciting masked, anonymized collective action into the elitist-commoner dichotomy. It is not difficult to imagine that the veil lifted by Yin Xiya will surely cover the faces of more people more cleverly at that moment, and the moment when the "Indian dream" is realized is a brief compromise between the common people and the elite, and it is also a moment when the film once again combines reality and fantasy, so that the words of the common people slide from possible to impossible again.
The Revelation of India: Between what can be said and what cannot be said
On the other hand, the popularity of Indian films in China in recent years is worth playing. On the one hand, films such as "Mysterious Superstar" pay close attention to social reality, so that the underlying issues into the mainstream public vision, so that the film has a transmutation of national differences, not only in the country to attract attention, but also to trigger wide resonance on the Chinese screen. This also reflects the higher expectations of Chinese audiences for the social function played by movies, reflecting the embarrassing reality of the words of the social underclass that have been absent for a long time on the Chinese screen.
On the other hand, China and India, which are also the latecomer modern countries of the BRICS countries, share similar trajectories in the development process, and are also facing many issues such as population issues, environmental pollution, and social equity. In the global capitalist landscape, although China and India are located at the southeastern ends of Asia, they share an isomorphic political and economic position as a labor power and a major market in Asia. Whether the current market performance and Chinese recognition of Indian films is a similar emotional structure shared by audiences on both sides, as a mirror image of each other's care and confirmation of their respective identities, or some kind of emotional continuation of the experience received by third-world films with specific era characteristics and collective memory through the translation and broadcast of "Wanderer" and "Caravan" in the 1960s and 1970s, with the characteristics of a specific era and collective memory, has become a question worth pondering. It is worth noting that the improvement of women's rights in India in recent years reflects a positive interaction between film texts and real-world situations: in March 2017, the Indian parliament passed a bill allowing some working women to receive 26 weeks of paid maternity leave, which will benefit about 1.8 million women and make India the third highest maternity leave country after Canada and Norway; in June of the same year, the Indian parliament approved the Punjab government's policy of free education for girls from nursery to doctoral level In November, the Indian Navy welcomed the first female pilot in its history, and at the same time welcomed the first female officers... The news is certainly heartening and shows Chinese audiences and filmmakers the multiplier of the social benefits of cinema beyond market success.
Returning to the film itself, how does Indian cinema accurately identify similar conditions that developing countries will inevitably experience, and in what form can it effectively heal or stitch together the wounds and fractures shared by different societies? The revelation of the incomplete attempt of "Mysterious Superstar" is precisely that it once gave a glimpse of the possibility of the masked people in the digital age to speak out, but in the ever-present film industry and the capitalist global production order it represents, it chose to let the rhetoric once again move towards the internal solution of capitalism. The rebels on the screen jumped and eventually became a thud in the palm of the Buddha, and as soon as the masked nameless people appeared, they were immediately sealed in the "mirror within a mirror" of the movie. It is the film that uses the magic of light and shadow to outline the possibility of speech, and it is also the film that uses narrative and reflexively reveals the media limitations and realistic limitations of speech. This reminds us that there is a particular vigilance to be paid attention to when asking new questions about old questions, as Naipaul once said: "In India you need to know how to distinguish between the sky full of rainbows and the flocks of sharecroppers who work in the sunset and look extraordinarily small; how to distinguish between beautiful and noble handicrafts and a pair of dry and thin hands that make these things." "Here we can add that you need to know how to distinguish between mysterious superstars and those that will no longer be mysterious.