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Paradoxically though, almost everyone works in demolition, gangs roving up and down the river, lighting out for whatever serendipitous employment territory they can find. No country for old men here—for “nostalgics,” as one character calls them, living on memories of a world past vanishing. But yuan, the paper currency—always time for those, every denomination a picture of some natural wonder or other threatened with extinction. And even in this brave new world of capital, where “change” is the official watchword (hello, Barack Obama) and everything’s been ruthlessly commodified—three yuan for a ride to an island underwater, another three or twenty for a night in a shabby workmen’s hotel—there’s still that vestigial craving for the obsolete and comfy. Like those waterfall engravings on the bills …
Or maybe it’s something else—the future as SF excavation site, some weird archaeological dig, like Blade Runner in reverse. Which shouldn’t be surprising if you consider that Jia (in Unknown Pleasures) and his cinematographer Nelson Yu Lik-wai (in All Tomorrow’s Parties—aka the “Chinese Blade Runner“) have tramped over this kind of ecologically straitened turf before. Strange and otherworldly, even spiritually ravaged, like the “burned-over district” in 1840s New York state—except instead of Jesus saving, there’s now unappeasable Moloch, lord of the economic flies. A variation on the technological sublime, in the 18th-century Burkean sense, combining sheer raw terror with reverential awe …
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
