From "Daytime Fireworks" to "Blizzard Is Coming": Why Do Crime Mystery Films Love Old Factories?

The black danger in the labyrinth of the factory does not come from the outside, but from the disintegrating factory life itself.

Stills from "The Blizzard Is Coming"

Working Class: From Political Concepts to Professional Identity

It seems that in all the movies that show the restructuring of the old state-owned factories, there is a routine of blowing up the chimney and blowing up the factory building. In 2008, Jia Zhangke's "Twenty-Four Cities" blew up a factory building in Chengdu, and in 2011, Zhang Meng's "The Piano of Steel" blew up a chimney in the northeast, this time it was dong Yue's recently released work "Blizzard Is Coming". At the end of the film, in Hunan in 2008, Yu Guowei, a former security section officer after his release from prison, and a group of veteran workers looked at the chimney in the distance without a word, and suddenly fell and turned into a white smoke.

However, in The Piano of Steel, the moment of blowing up the chimney is the moment when the once lost "working class subjectivity" is regenerated. Veteran workers jointly wrote letters hoping to preserve the chimney, retired engineers' creative launch on defending the chimney attracted a large number of veteran workers, and the "bomb chimney" allowed them to spontaneously gather together to defend their history and memory. The chimney extends the retired engineer's long lyricism about the chimney, accompanied by Chen Guilin's fantasy of how to superimpose ideas on the two chimneys and turn them into two gold bars, and even more summons the collective emotion about the socialist state-owned factory. However, in "Blizzard Is Coming", because the film sets the narrator of the story as a murderer who seems to others to be "crazy with the surname Yu", the memory of the past is in a state of confusion and fragmentation. When Yu Guowei returned to his memory of the glorious place of the 1997 model worker, the factory auditorium, the old man who guarded the door told him that the efficiency of the security section was not good, no one had ever obtained a model worker, and in 1997, everyone was busy finding a way out, and he did not have the heart to evaluate any model worker. The unreliability of the narrator's memory is exposed here. Next, when the soulless Yu Guowei looked at the chimney from afar and was destroyed, the "exploded chimney" became a complete and useless mourning. The audience even has to ask, where did these people who watched the chimney bombing come from? When the chimneys explode, people may stop and feel sad about it, but the common memory does not give rise to any possibility of rebuilding the "subjectivity of the working class". Because, perhaps, there is no "collective memory" enough to unite the old workers, and the memory has long since dissipated in the wind.

In my opinion, the greater crisis of the workers' memory in "Blizzard Is Coming" is that "restructuring" and "layoffs" are not suddenly descended as an external force into the large state-owned factories that were originally full of collectivist atmosphere, on the contrary, before the arrival of "restructuring" and "layoffs", the factories have long been torn apart, and "people's hearts are scattered and the team is not good." Many members of the Security Section hooked up with thieves, and the workers thought of watching the liveliness, going to the lighted stadium to dance, "spending twenty yuan to touch it at will", and even when Yu Guowei himself spoke as a model labor representative, he said in the first half of his speech to thank the factory leaders and workers and make greater contributions to the security work of our factory, and the second half suddenly turned to how to "live out their own wonderfulness" through "struggle" - this is a typical personal struggle discourse, and the collectivist spirit has almost ceased to exist. And the reason why he is so concerned about defending and solving cases is only to keep his job, and it is best to be transferred to the Public Security Bureau and become a "career editor" policeman.

Yu Guowei does not belong to the "working class", but is closer to Chekhov's "small civil servant" who has been tricked by the system and fate - no, he is even more miserable, he wants to be a "civil servant" and cannot be "outside the editor" ("Blizzard Is Coming" was originally titled "The Past Outside the Compilation"). The working class was once a political concept, but as early as the 1960s it was showing signs of a shift to a professional concept. In the film "Don't Forget" born in the "Socialist Education Movement" in the 1960s, Ding Shaochun, a young worker, was tempted by his mother-in-law who opened a fresh goods shop and was uneasy about factory labor. Through the earnest teachings of his father, Ding Haikuan, an old worker, Ding Shaochun eventually re-emerged as a worker. One of the interesting details is that Ding Shaochun believes that the mother-in-law who opened a fresh goods shop and his old worker family are simply "different from each other". Therefore, compared with Ding Haikuan, an old worker of his father's generation who emphasized "proletarian consciousness", Ding Shaochun understood his post purely from the perspective of professional division of labor rather than class consciousness. And when Ding Shaochun and Ji Youliang, a model worker of the same age, talked about factory life, what they most longed for when they were young was that the workers "carried a lunch box" and lit up the factory entry permit that was "stuck with a big steel seal"; when they became workers themselves, the happiest thing was that "the society recognized that we were workers.". Here, there seems to be no difference between ji Youliang, a model worker, and Ding Shaochun, who is not an exemplary worker. In their understanding of the identity of the worker, there is no trace of "class consciousness", but is full of joy at the welfare and social recognition of the worker as a privileged identity. For the younger generation, "worker" no longer means "leading class", but only a professional identity. However, the "worker" of that era was an enviable profession. As Jia Zhangke's "Twenty-Four Cities" in the old workers relished: workers have high wages, there are soda drinks, labor gloves, and three pounds of pork can be guaranteed every month in difficult times.

Factory: Historical ruins with a black labyrinth

In "The Blizzard Is Coming", the old man in the auditorium said to Yu Guowei: "The Security Section has no benefits, and the labor model never evaluates the Security Section." The so-called "efficiency" means that the logic of production efficiency has long penetrated into the logic of "labor glory". When the tide of the market economy swept in, the workers were no longer glamorous and decent occupations, and the sense of honor that had been associated with them quickly disappeared. In 2011's "The Piano of Steel," laid-off workers are not skilled and outdated, but are recreated as skilled craftsmen. This point was highly praised by many critics when "The Piano of Steel" was released. Similarly, in "The Blizzard Is Coming", Yu Guowei has not always been a conscientious "preparatory civil servant". As a "detective", he also has his own moment of self-satisfaction. When someone praises him at a glance to see who has done something bad, he will squint, raise his head, and say with pride: "No way, this is the ability." However, the mastery of skill points will not lead to a rebuilding of honor and dignity, because the market economy gradually replaces the principles of labor and equality. Just like "The Piano of Steel" shows the joy of the labor process in the lyrical scene of the red dress dancing, the "steel piano" created by the skilled craftsman still cannot make Chen Guilin better than his ex-wife who has become rich on the issue of child custody.

As a result, the workers' memories in "Blizzard Is Coming" become the opposite of "The Piano of Steel" and even "Twenty-Four Cities". "The Piano of Steel" attempts to recreate the passionate years of collective labor of workers in large state-owned factories, and "Twenty-Four Cities" is about "Chengdu, only your vanished side is enough to make me glorious for a lifetime" - that is about the glorious history of the "third-line" factory. And "Blizzard Is Coming" is more about the black side when the glory and passion receded. In the movie, in the winter of 1997, there are horrific serial murders, there are male workers who kill their wives in a verbal quarrel, and Yu Guowei goes crazy step by step. This made the old policeman ask: What happened this winter?

"Blizzard Is Coming" takes the crime that occurs around the factory as the main clue, and the 2014 release of "Daytime Fireworks" also uses the old factory as the criminal background. Going back in time, in one of the popular film themes in China in the 1950s, "anti-special films", how to identify the secret service activities against factories is an important object of expression. In the first anti-special film of New China, "The Invisible Front", female agents were installed in rubber factories in the northeast. The 1950 film The People's Giant Palm and the 1963 Stalker showed the sabotage of secret agents in steel mills and power plants, respectively. The affinity between the factory and the crime genre is that the factory itself is a labyrinth. The presentation of the "labyrinth" attribute is precisely the charm of the video style of "Blizzard Is Coming". The most exciting part of the film is the plot of Yu Guowei hunting down the suspect in the factory. Factories filled with conveyor belts, pipes, steel frames, and even rails and trains are the best hiding places, and dangers lurk everywhere. The living area around the factory also has the attribute of a "labyrinth", the workers wearing uniform blue overalls and black raincoats are the homogenized masses in the maze, and Yu Guowei, who walks through the intersection of the three factories to find criminals, is the wanderer in the maze. In this sense, the film brings the dilapidated factory landscape of the 90s to a similarity to Baudelaire's Paris as a modern city.

In fact, the seemingly silent, ruined factory is itself a product of China's unique modernization process. Since the mid-1960s, under the increasingly tense international situation, the Chinese government has relocated a large number of factories originally distributed in the coastal and southeastern regions to the central and western regions, which is the beginning of the "third line" construction. Since the workers in the "third-line" factories are mainly immigrants, small societies are often formed inside the factories that are independent of the outside. Although "Blizzard Is Coming" is set in the fictional city of Changning, Hunan, the Hunan dialect is rarely used in the film, and the old policeman also hopes to return to his hometown in the north after retirement, these details point out the background of the film's era.

The interior of the "third-line" factory is a factory life organized by the "unit system" with Chinese characteristics. The unit system comes from the military tradition of the revolutionary period, and implements a comprehensive supply system for all aspects of the life, clothing, shelter, and transportation of the staff and workers of the unit, as well as the birth, old age, illness and death. It is this highly organized "unit" that brings about a high degree of order within the factory. Therefore, in the "anti-special films" of the fifties and sixties, the factory was accidentally invaded by external destructive forces, but the conspiracy was always quickly uncovered by the workers who were all over the factory, always alert, and loved the factory like home. The "wave of layoffs" in the 1990s brought about drastic changes in the life of "third-tier" industrial cities, and the originally orderly life under the "unit system" collapsed in an instant. The 1997 issue of "Unemployment Shockwaves - Report on China's Employment Development" (Yang Yiyong et al.) cites a survey of more than 6,000 unemployed workers by the Henan Provincial Federation of Trade Unions, of which "34% of the workers live by cutting down on food and clothing and selling their property, 20% of the workers live on the help of relatives and friends, 4% of the workers rely on loans and scraps to survive, 3.3% of the workers rely on relief funds, and some even beg along the street." ——1997 is the year in which Yu Guowei was laid off in "The Blizzard Is Coming". In such economic difficulties, it is almost inevitable that the crime rate near the living area of the old factory will increase. The black danger in the labyrinth of the factory does not come from the outside, but from the disintegrating factory life itself.

A suspense film with no results

The fall of laid-off workers from the "leading class" has made them unable to cope with reality not only in terms of material conditions, but also in their psychological state. Someone once discussed an old story in the "wave of layoffs" in the Northeast Tiexi District. After the layoff, the life of a couple is very difficult, one day because the family can not come up with the money to buy sneakers for their son, the wife can not stop complaining about the husband, the husband silently walked to the balcony, jumped down. In this story, the commentators see the symbolic death of the working class that was once the "father" after being "laid off". (Liu Yan: "Memory and Production- Commenting on the Film < Steel's Piano >") And in "The Blizzard is Coming", Yu Guowei had an ambiguous encounter with the female worker dancing in the lighting stadium before the layoff, and after the layoff, he no longer touched the swallow. The layoffs became a "castration" of the working class, a symbolic death of them as men and a complete fall of the subject's identity.

The fragmentation of the memory brings about the fragmentation of the memory. Only in this sense can we understand why the "anti-special film" that also occurred in the factory, which also occurred in the factory, has become a "suspense film" with clear results in the 50s and 60s. "Laid-offs" allow factory workers to be thrown out of the collectivized "unit" and become scattered individuals wandering in the "market." Workers who have lost their subjective identity can only give fragments of broken memories and can no longer have the overall vision that they once could have given in the position of the "working class". Yu Guowei, who was once a "detective" in "Blizzard Is Coming", is no longer omniscient and omnipotent. He indirectly killed his own apprentice and beloved woman, and the murderer was forever lost, and he was even more toyed with by his own fate. His utter defeat as a detective was also a failure of the working class. Thus, in the 90s, when the subjectivity of workers collapsed, the daily order of factory life was broken, and the factory was caught up in the boundless black vortex, and there was no way to escape...

However, when I saw Yu Guowei struggling desperately after being laid off in the movie, and his human nature was twisted to the point of madness, I also remembered the state-owned factory living area where I grew up. Like Hengyang, the filming location of "Blizzard Is Coming", my hometown is also one of the bases for the construction of the "third line", and the turmoil brought about by "layoffs" and "restructuring" in the 90s accompanied my entire childhood. Just as the flood of the northeast triad was almost in sync with the wave of layoffs, in the 90s, my hometown often had social news of flying car robberies and murders and rapes, which scared me until high school and still did not dare to walk at night. In order not to lay off his post, the uncle downstairs threatened to commit suicide by holding a gas canister in front of the factory director's house. He escaped his layoffs, but suffered from liver cancer in a factory that later transformed into a private company due to frequent socializing, and is now dead. The neighbor's uncle, who was originally the chairman of the union, could not stand the relent of being employed by a private boss after the restructuring, so he ran away from the field, and then fell off the scaffolding, and is still limping. Another uncle wanted to discipline his son, who was severely addicted to the Internet, but was accused by his son: "You yourself nod to the leader, why do you point fingers at me." Later, he also left the factory, which was deteriorating, and people in their fifties still lived in ventilated sheds. The auditorium for group activities was also demolished as in the film and converted into a commercial house. Only the towers and chimneys are still strong, Dad said, and they were built with the help of the Soviets, and they were particularly difficult to demolish.

More fathers and fellow villagers went south to Guangdong after being "laid off", from "working class" to self-employed households and migrant workers, and then dispersed. Today, even if I want to piece together a memory of the factory again, I can no longer find it.