3. Commercial Overground Shi-Nema: Some Notes on Cinematicity and Its Propensity for Selling Dream (Un)Real Estate in Contemporary China

Huallywood is a portmanteau that combines the prefix “Hua”—roughly meaning Chinese language or Chinese culture with the suffix “llywood” to evoke Hollywood. The term “Huallywood” is a self-adopted industrial and academic moniker used to describe various Chinese film industry manifestations and products. As critics and scholars often note, this label betrays Chinese cinemas’ global Hollywood aspirations (see e.g. Shao 2014; Fleming and Indelicato 2019; Fleming 2019).

It is fascinating to note in passing some of the plot and character details either gained or lost in the adaptation from the Hollywood film. The figure of Zigang’s father only appears in the Chinese film, for example, with this being a character whose own age and attitudes are used to contrast the more modern and urbane Zigang while highlighting some of the on-going changes reaped upon the traditional patriarchal family unit under China’s on-going reforms.

In finding textual support for such claims, she points to how various female characters’ notion of success is negotiated around commercial products and branded goods, while their ventriloquised inner voices appear “almost totally concerned with issues of consumption and the judgement of others based on material possessions,” while “female-oriented products [become narratively] associated with happiness and positive new beginnings” (Woodland 2018, p. 45).

Here, we might put Fincher’s work on the asymmetric distribution of real estate among the genders in China into dialogue with Baudrillard’s work on “the system of objects.” For, as Baudrillard has proposed, under a totalitarian consumer culture system the body itself increasingly became a particularly privileged object and sign within another series of objects and signs. Zigzagging back to Fincher we might recall that while the groom was encouraged to own or put the down payment on the house, the bride and her family were often tasked with furnishing and decorating the empty concrete shell or cell (which would often amount to the same financial cost of the down payment).

Fincher notes that although the family of the bride would often spend a similar amount of money furnishing the new home as that which is laid down by the groom (or his family), the wife would not appear on the property deeds and thus essentially be trapped in the marriage for financial reasons.

In the world of biology, for example, there is an abstract topological plane of mammalian body forms from which all existing mammals are actual expressions of, but can never collectively exhaust the richness and potentials of, the virtual plane from which they derive. In working to clarify why this would be, it helps to return to a pedagogical explanation offered by Slavoj Žižek in his essay “Deleuze’s Platonism: Ideas as Real” (2007), which anchors its discussion to artworks. Therein, Žižek describes a common enough experience of going to see a movie, which although somewhat disappointing we intuitively feel must be adapted from a better novel we have not read. However, on tracking down and reading the book, we are further disappointed to discover that this too is sub-standard and is not the quality we expected with regard to that which the film failed. As such, both actual artworks come together to somehow point beyond themselves to a third “purely virtual” artwork that is patently better but does not in fact exist (Žižek 2007). Here, two actual media forms help reveal the virtual and help us grasp how the virtual or that which inexists is richer and more populated than the actual. So while this chapter can be said to deal with that which we found inexisting in China—(un)real estate—we return to these spaces later in the book to see how the virtual and potential manifestations we describe below become actual, which occasions their deeper embedding within a shopping lifestyle mall (Chap. 6).

Incidentally, the showroom is located facing away from the actual river banks it proposes to inhabit, which have not yet been developed and still constitute mud flats in parts.

The term “infomatics” is related to ‘informatics’ but more often than not associated with corporate displays and app design. The term “infomatics” often connotes visually stimulating and attractive ways of rendering and relaying information and data.

The background track to this promotional video is Carla Bruni’s Tout le monde from the album Quelqu’un m’a dit, which is a popular album from which songs have often been taken for advertising, and film. Somewhat ironically, the song is itself a critique of socialism: “This melancholy song tells of how everyone has known disappointment—forgotten childhood memories, remains of dreams (‘restes de rêves’), and devastation—and then absurdly suggests that this solitude should be fixed by passing a law—‘Il faudrait que tout l’monde réclame auprès des autorités, / Une loi contre toute notre solitude,’ (‘Everyone should demand from the authorities / A law against all our solitude.’), musing on French socialism” (https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Quelqu%27un_​m%27a_​dit).

The island-style romance featured in this promotional video is not unlike the videos of “destination weddings” increasingly found circulating on Chinese social media platforms like Weiboa and WeChat (Zhuang and Everett 2018).

As noted, the Chinese government actively encourages only married (heterosexual) couples to buy apartments, with “government restrictions on buying property […] making it increasingly difficult for a single person—of any sexual orientation—to buy a home” (Fincher 2014, p. 89). The success of such interpretations can be supported here by a narrative that unfolded during an interview with X, wherein she described how the parents of one of her female friends will not acknowledge her boyfriend’s marriage proposal until he buys an apartment.

In this case, the track The Mass by Era, which is a “new-age music project” that “mixes Gregorian chants with contemporary electronic… arrangements,” with lyrics either in “pseudo-Latin or Latin,” apparently popular among some Mixed Martial Arts fans because it has been historically used as a walk-out track for top fighters (https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Era_​(musical_​project)). So there is a link to battle or even competition and this to some extent is captured by the song’s Chinese translation into 闪电部队在前进, i.e. shan dian bu dui zai qian jin, literally “lightning army in the past advanced” or perhaps “advance of the former lightning army”).