There is no denying that the film provides an unusually, perhaps uniquely rich set of images of contemporary North Korea. While the voice-over and narrative perspective are not entirely uncritical, the film’s effort to remain apolitical backfires for me. By not being “political” and simply representing things “as they are,” the film’s perspective largely becomes that of the girls: in love with the general, awed by the games, and allowing to stand the constant refrain that all the nation’s problems are caused by foreign imperialists. This becomes most apparent during the girls’ field trip to Mount Paekdu which, with its lilting music and shimmering nature photography, is all but indistinguishable from a propaganda film, not because if is “political,” but because it adopts the girls’ perspective. As if a child’s perspective –the spontaneous (i.e. carefully engineered) emotional responses of a select group of pre-adolescents who emerge from the trip vowing to become “daughters of the general and of Mount Paekdu”— were somehow untainted. As if, as the director says during an interview, “You can drop the politics and people can be people.” The humanistic effects of the film are occasionally powerful, and I wouldn’t dismiss them entirely: it is indeed difficult to avoid the feeling of people being people, and to take some satisfaction in it. But precisely in these most “human” moments we find –if not everywhere and always, then at least in North Korea—the intimacy of the intimate and the national, the private and the public. As one of the gymnast’s families sits around the television, snacking, joking, and expressing affection through casual touches, someone proclaims: “No wonder even the arrogant Americans tremble in fear when they see this!”
As many printculture readers no doubt already know, the “mass games” are not so much “games,” in the sense of competitive athletic events, as they are an organized blend of dance, theater, and spectacle on a grand scale. Less a game, then, than the production of a series of “mass ornaments.” No matter how much Busby Berkeley or Nuremberg you’ve seen, they are occasionally jaw-dropping.
A lot of the commentary on this spectacular enactment of the individual’s incorporation into the collective tends to draw on a reservoir of clichés about not just communism but also about Asian character more generally. Yet the mass ornament is far more an import of Western-style modernity than it is the expression of some long-duration cultural tendency toward collective harmony. Nor is the mass ornament the expression of “totalitarianism” in any narrow sense, but rather, it seems to me, the overt manifestation of a conception of mass politics that might now seem naïve or dated, but that in the first half of the twentieth century could be found left, right, and center:
In many ways, then, the sight of the games produced, for me, a kind of illusory time travel effect similar to the sight of all those vintage American cars driving around in Cuba. But of course no nation is “outside” or even “behind” the times, and in A State of Mind we see plenty of evidence that North Korea is hardly unaware of or impervious to the outside world, most obviously in the references to the American invasion of Iraq (with the sense that the DPRK might be next), and in the postponement of mass games themselves because of the SARS outbreak.
(The DVD includes a CNN piece on the film, including the “crawl” from the original broadcast: an interesting if accidental historicization of 2003, with nothing to make the American breast swell with pride: Lynndie England pleads guilty; car bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan; a hospital worker’s strike; and oh yes, the runaway bride. The spectacle of the Vaseline-lensed reporter earnestly asking the director whether the games aren’t just propaganda is ripe for a Mythologies-style take-down.)
For me the most conceptually interesting questions raised by the film had to do with the relationship between spectatorship and participation, between collective observation and collective experience. The number of participants in the games is so great that throws out of whack the implicit quantitative sense of a performer/spectator ratio. If five people watch a dance performed by five hundred, it upsets what I think is our normative sense of what performance is “for” or “about.” In some ways the issue is mooted here by the fact that the mass games are routinely rebroadcast on the country’s one television channel, so all the participants get to be spectators anyway.
The implicit ratio of participant/audience I have is, of course, bourgeois and, broadly speaking, modern: mass observation of a skilled minority. With the mass games we have something like an effort to put the masses equally on both sides of the equation. The way in which this plays out is, however, unexpected. The predictable critique here would be to say that what is ostensibly for “the people” is in fact for the dictator, reenacting on an industrial scale the logic of kingly spectatorship. So: not the masses watching the artistic elite, but the masses performing for the one. As it happens, however, the performance for the one is, precisely, the official discourse, while the performance for the many is the reality. The girls interviewed in the film do not speak of mastering an art, of making their parents proud, or even of serving their nation or advancing the cause of socialism. They speak always and only of performing for the General. But when the time comes Kim Jong Il is “unable to attend” any over the forty performances that take place over twenty days.
No grand syntheses offered here, but the occasion of the Beijing Olympics has me scratching my head about some basic and, to my mind, not yet resolved questions about the relationships among sport, politics, and spectacle. The mainstream media routinely phrases the matter in terms of “keeping politics out of the Olympics” (for or against), but mass games seem to me one of the essential forms of political life, in the sense of the polis gathering and representing itself to other political entities and, perhaps above all, to itself. That is, regardless of any specific content (Darfur, Tibet, or a Black Power salute), the event itself is irreducibly, even primally political. (This would apply just as much to a high school soccer game or the Super Bowl as well as to events that are more overtly marked as national in character).
I had planned to conclude these scattered reflections by predicting that the Beijing Olympics could not do what China hopes because the Olympics themselves are now something of an atavism. This is no doubt an American or at least Western perspective (akin to declaring the death of the novel or the author), but I suspect something much broader than that. Steroids, judging scandals, the general surplus of spectacle in contemporary life, and not least the intense popularity of non-Olympic sports can all make the Olympics seem irrelevant or, worse still, quaint. Handball, dressage, and the modern pentathlon (running, swimming, pistol shooting, show-jumping on horseback, and epee fencing –in case you were wondering) are no doubt of intense interest to those directly involved, but they don’t sell a lot of jerseys or cereal. This says nothing about their intrinsic worth or interest; the point is simply that I’m not sure how charged or global in reach the symbolic force of Olympic athletics is these days. The function of any given form can be surprisingly flexible over time, but it does seem possible that a Chinese Olympics might be less the announcement of a Chinese twenty-first century than a reenactment of early-to-mid-twentieth century rituals of international legitimation.
Such was my original concluding question. But the bits of the opening ceremonies I was able to catch were genuinely impressive, even beautiful. Perhaps the Olympics, like the once dead-seeming novel (or author), are a form that has possibilities its creators never imagined. By thinking of “the Olympics” as outdated, perhaps I was falling into precisely the “time machine” illusion I described above. And if there is anything to the idea that there is something primally political about the form of athletic spectacle, perhaps China is also reinventing the political.
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