“Wow, this is homemade!”

My use of the terms “particle perception” and “technologized eye” is deliberate. On the surface, the terms allude to the technical principles behind the production of their special effects, such as the particle system used to create those fuzzy objects in CGI and digitally realized camera movements. But instead of deploying the technical terms, I use them to emphasize the perception and affect of the effects-heavy imagery upon its home audience rather than the terms’ technical procedures. Indeed. I’ve been using the terms “special effects” and “effects-heavy imagery” in a general sense. Prince once argues that the term “special effects” makes no more sense in digital filmmaking as the common practice of image manipulation has deprived of them their specialness. He prefers the term “visual effects” instead and delegates “special effects” to its industrial currency that refers to “mechanical and practical effects, such as explosions or stunts involving car wrecks” (Prince 3). In the cycle of main melody blockbusters—at least in its spectatorship—such a distinction, however, does not seem rewarding. In fact, some of the spectacles in the cycle are constructed from different effect methods. Take the bombing scene for instance. While the explosions near the end of Sacrifice are produced from practical effects, the explosions on the surface of the moon in Wandering Earth 2 are assumably constructed digitally. However, their similar appearance and deliberate design make it difficult for the audience to differentiate between them.[17] [open endnotes in new window] More importantly, as I suggest, there is no necessity for differentiation in the attraction of such effects-heavy imagery.

To put it more precisely, the spectatorship in the home audience’s consumption of the special effects in the cycle is not one of connoisseurship (as Michele Pierson once writes about the cultural reception of special effects in England and U.S).[18] Rather, it is a sensory experience of how it measures up to the state-of-art cinematic novelties. This sensory experience has its horizon in a globalized modern experience. As the audience’s reviews constantly compare the home products to their Hollywood counterparts—Wolf Warrior 2 to Die Hard and Fast & Furious, Operation Red Sea to Black Hawk Down and Saving Private Ryan, The Eight Hundred and Sacrifice to Dunkirk and Hacksaw Ridge, Wandering Earth and Wandering Earth 2 to Interstellar, The Day after Tomorrow, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner —the criterion for the state-of-art status of the spectacles is how they measure up to a Hollywood look, or in other words, a sensorium globalized by Hollywood. As Miriam Hansen once writes about the global circulation of classical Hollywood cinema, “the worldwide hegemony of classical Hollywood cinema provides […] a sensory-reflexive horizon for the experience of modernization and modernity” (“Fallen Women, Rising Stars” 10). Such a sensory-reflexive dimension of Hollywood films “may take cognitive, discursive and narrativized forms, but it is crucially anchored in a sensory experience and sensational affect” (Hansen, “Mass Production of the Senses” 341).

The Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery in the cycle, therefore, functions in two ways. On the one hand, the home-made spectacles offer a comparable experience of cinematic sensations to those enabled by previous foreign imports or overseas pirates from Hollywood. On the other, the recognition of their home-made status gives this sensory experience a reflexive horizon, which anchors the shocking experience at the historical moment of national modernization. Indeed, the effects-heavy imagery in the cycle is perceived to be almost Hollywood-like other than competitively state-of-art. And for the home industry to produce such an almost Hollywood-like cinematic experience, it needs to mobilize all its accessible resources, from governmental fundings to private capital and from domestic technological affordances to external expertise. Yet it is this almost Hollywood-like imagery which is almost self-made by the home industry that taps into the audience’s affective engagement with the historical moment: a sense of national modernity through the sensory experience of a globalized modern experience at the home cinema.

In this light, the cultural references in the narratives of the films (the revolutionary history, the real-life events or the futuristic writings from a world-famous Chinese writer), the rah-ah jingoism or even the sometimes wobbly CGI all become the anchor that helps the viewer to rediscover their historical position in the spectacular wonder, to recognize that the spectacles are not imports from a more powerful center but products of the home cinema. It is through this process of losing oneself in the spectacular wonder and rediscovering one’s historical position that the cycle mobilizes the national sentiment at the moment. In other words, the “wow” effect in the cycle of main melody blockbusters should be articulated as a “wow, this is homemade” effect. The perception and affection of special effects in the cycle, therefore, should be understood as a historical experience that has its concrete appearances—the fascination with the cinematic novelties of particle perception and a technologized eye—and responds to a concrete historical situation—the home audience’s affective engagement with the current historical moment of national modernity. And it is the deployment of such cinematic novelties in response to a social desire of modernity that marks the cycle of main melody blockbusters and drives its essential appeal.

The modernizing passion

Through bracketing an a prior explanation of the cycle’s politics—that it signals either the success of state authoritarianism or the success of global capitalism—and taking a more pragmatic approach to the films, we see that the cycle of main melody blockbusters involves a more complicated historical experience. As we have seen, the cycle capitalizes on both a cultural taste—the fascination with the cinematic novelties of a specific form of special effects imagery—and a social desire—the desire for a sense of national modernity at the current historical moment. As a result, the sensory experience of the Hollywoodesque effects-heavy imagery in the cycle provides the audience a form of affective realism, a sense of national modernity that taps into the audience’s affective engagement with the historical moment they are in. Categorizing the sensory experience in the cycle as a form of affective realism, however, is by no mean to deny its political nature. Rather, it asks us to move away from those a prior explanations and to look for “relations of meaning that are re-constructed through such [cultural] mixing” (Canclini xxix).

As it is seen, the sensory experience of national modernity in the cycle is by and large enabled by the exploitation of a specific kind of film machinery—one that bears the ostensible impression of industrialization and its technological motors—that of the special effects. This textural and intertextual horizon for national modernity in the cycle well finds its extratextual equivalences at the industrial level and even the broader national imaginary. At the industrial aspect, the capacity to harness such advanced cinematic technologies and other industrial practices has been pursued as the criterion for its own modernization (as seen in the high currency of the expression “industrializing the cinema” in recent years). At the broader national imaginary, just like the cycle foregrounds the presentation of all sorts of machineries and next-generation technologies in its retelling and imagining of the national history (e.g., tanks, guns, aircrafts, drones, AI, automation computation, etc.), the popular image of a strong nationhood is usually imbricated with a technologically-determined historical view. As much as the cinematic experience of national modernity is sanctioned by the globalized sensorium through Hollywood, such an imagination of national modernization bears vestiges from the Western Enlightenment project and its colonial history. And it is such a desire to mobilize cinematic technologies for a modern—or rather modernized—experience and imagination that I would call the modernizing passion.

Here I appropriate Rey Chow’s term of “the primitive passions” when she writes about the cultural landscapes of post-colonial societies in the twentieth century. For Chow, such an interest in the primitive most prominently appears “at a moment of cultural crisis—at a time when…the predominant sign of traditional culture, such as the written word, is being dislocated amid vast changes in technologies of signification” (Primitive Passions 22). What Chow has unpacked is the relation between the demand for cultural identity expression and the machineries and materials that are available for its expression at a post-colonial time. Similarly, the modernizing passion stipulates a set of relation between cultural expression and their available machineries and materials. In the new century when the nation is in need of a new way to conceive of its present and future, the cinema again provides the primary expressive medium yet the materials and machineries it deploys are of a vastly different set. Corresponding to the deployment of special effects, the modernizing passion plays out its fantasies through “a generic realm of associations” that has less to do with the primitive (e.g., the animal, the savage, the countryside, the indigenous, the people) but with the modern (e.g. the cosmopolitan, the machine, the technology etc.)[20] While Chow argues that film—in its singular form—provides the most appropriate material expression for primitivism (Primitive Passions 22-3), we see that the relation between cinematic technologies—especially special effects—and their expressive faculty for an experience of national modernity in the cycle of main melody blockbusters is, indeed, the product of a complex of historical forces: the development of cinematic technologies, the affective engagement of the audience, the investment of the industry, geopolitics and its history, etc..

Juxtaposing the primitive passions and the modernizing passion also helps to surface the politics, or the (re)constructed relation of meaning in the cycle. Chow has noted how the socially oppressed classes—women, in particular—become the predominant component of the literatures in primitivism (Primitive Passions 21). Take the most prominent cinematic cases of Zhang Yimou’s Red Sorghum (1987), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and The Story of Qiuju (1992), we see how the female figure is frequently called up as “a means of putting on display both the glorious and the barbarous aspects of Chinese culture” in response to “the libidinal tendencies of a postmodern, corporatist globalism” at the end of the twentieth century (Chow, “Fetish Power Unbound” 495). Chow has argued that such a centering of the subaltern, the underprivileged, or the woman particularly does not so much indicate that the intellectuals “become ‘enlightened’ and choose to revolutionize their writing by turning their attention to the oppressed classes,” but instead that “they find in the underprivileged a source of fascination that helps to renew, rejuvenate, and ‘modernize’ their own cultural production” (Primitive Passions 21). In the modernizing passion of the main melody blockbusters, however, we see the fascination with an entirely different social class. As critics have noticed the high masculinity in the cycle, the cycle’s entries favor greatly male characters in the center of their national and global actions, should it be the titular hero in Wolf Warrior 2, the military squads in Operation Red Sea, The Eight Hundred, Sacrifice and the Battle at Lake Changjin series or the rescue units in the Wandering Earth series. Similar to the woman figure in the primitive passions, the populated images of the man’s action in the cycle shows not so much an attention to the social class itself but a discovery in it of a source of fascination at the current historical moment of modernizing the cultural productions.

Yet it is in the evocation of the two gendered classes in response to the different demands of their disparate historical situations that we find an entrenched and unsettling power struggle. At these two disparate historical moments, the cinema is similarly evoked as a mechanism for affirming cultural identities with their different cinematic novelties and towards different audiences—in the primitive passions, the exhibitionist image of primitivism for international art cinema screens; in the modernizing passion, the exhibitionist special effects for the domestic viewers. Yet the generic realms of associations they form constitute very much the same world-making: the woman/the primitive/the past vis-à-vis the man/the modern/the future. It is the construction of such relations of meaning that I argue, constitutes the politics of the cycle. As suggested above, such relations of meaning are neither imposed by the single force of global capitalism nor by state authoritarianism; rather, they are the result of a series of coincident or even anachronistic factors including but not limited to the development of cinematic technologies, the investment of different industrial actors from the state to the market, as well as the heritage of the Western Enlightenment project and its colonial history. The coincident and anachronistic coexistence of these factors may bespeak the whimsical appeal of the cycle, but the power-meaning dynamics it reveals stipulates a history of entrenched unsettling cultural regularities.

Conclusion

With the rebound of cinematic entertainment in the post-pandemic era, Chinese cinema together with the global industry is on its way to explore the new normality. The domestic cinema in 2024 has seen the revival of one genre that is long considered as the staple of the home industry outputs: the more down-to-earth comedy.[21] Whether or for how long the cycle of main melody blockbusters and its modernizing passion will extend into the post-crisis Chinese cinema is still to see. So are the cycle’s impacts on the other production options in the broader media ecosystem. For instance, Aynne Kokas has argued that China’s ambition for global cultural influence and Hollywood’s simultaneous desire for the lucrative mainland market in the past two decades create a middle ground that makes possible Sino-US media collaborations including film coproduction.[22] How would the main melody blockbusters’ phenomenal success and the accompanying seemingly waning interest in Hollywood products in the home audience disrupt such an equilibrium and change the pattern of this “new global media order”? (Kokas 13)

At the same time, Chinese media brands have also been charting new paths in the global media landscape. Alongside the acquisition of the international releasing rights of the Wandering Earth movie by Netflix, the 2015 Hugo Award winner by the same novelist The Three-Body Problem had been serialized by both domestic streaming platform Tencent Video and Netflix, making itself another recognizable Chinese (or perhaps better to say, global) media brand. All these cases show the increasing complexities of global cultural economy. How to navigate these complexities remains an important question for all practitioners in the field and it remains the job of cultural scholars and critics to find the regularities underneath such constant fluctuations. In this article, I use the cycle of main melody blockbusters as a case for illustrating such an increasingly complex and disjunctive global cultural order. At the same time, I propose a more pragmatic approach to probe the stable and problematic relations of meaning that lies underneath. Neither a sheer celebration of the increasing volume of exchanges as hybridization nor a downright defeatism of its entrenched struggles, I see such a pragmatics as a form of optimistic pessimism that through its discovery of the unsettling relations of meaning, has the likelihood to bring more “subtle understanding of emerging pleasures, experiences, and powers with serious potential for changing the rule of the game” (Haraway 27).