手机

前几年过年关的时候，总是会有原来的同学三三两两聚会在一起。有一个好朋友是个男孩，读书的时候，总是称我为兄长，不过几年，就已经为人夫了，两口子都不漂亮，也不出色。


和他的妻子吃饭的时候是坐在一起，说起外遇的话题，她和我的观点不谋而和，我们都认为如果要是碰到自己的老公有了什么，只要大家还过得去，就睁一只眼闭一只眼，因为我们都觉得，人生的路很长，我们都不能保证我们自己的思想会不会出轨。说道这个话题最后，我们还笑，只要他不是太过份，只要我们彼此都还有颜面。





事情过去了几年，我开始没往结婚上想，也有几年，电影电视里不断在讨论外遇，不过都与我无关了。如果有一样东西，你从来不会失去，大概就是因为你从来没有得到过。


今年新年前和白羽一起去看了今年的贺岁片——《手机》，老调重弹，大概总是因为这曲子还没有过时，男人女人，就算不谈婚姻，爱情里占有和背叛也是永恒的话题。





故事的一开始是从河南某家农村里平淡地诉说了乡里第一部电话开通的时候，守一的表嫂坐着守一的自行车去打电话的情景，然后，在类似秦腔一样的哭音响起，哭得我心慌，那句歌词我依稀记得是：你的媳妇叫吕桂花，吕桂花让问问你，最近你还回来吗？


当镜头拉开，全部是矿工的人头，广播在继续找人，而这些男人，都没有表情，没有说话，我还以为是一部反应民工过年的片子，我没有想到，这个故事是在说，结婚女人对自己老公的牵挂，也没有想到，这是一个从古到今一直都有的话题。女人依靠男人，企盼稳定，而男人，也想有个家，可是他们又怕约束，还有怕“视觉疲倦”。不，我说错了，他们不是怕，这只是一个事实。虽然我们都在说，爱情消失了过后，还有感情可以维持在两个人中间。但是我们自欺欺人了，还是我们只是没有找到那一份“合适”呢？





故事里的墨非（张国立）说，如果这是在古代就好了，一个人上京赶考，要好几年才回家，你回来了，你说什么就是什么。他对着严守一（葛优）说，相处了，几十年，是真的有点视觉疲倦了……


电影里，严守一是个节目主持人，他的生活在继续，他的节目也在继续，他的节目里不断地讨论着“诚实”、“心里有病”，可是他的生活仍然不可能改变这一切，拿起手机，他张口就是谎言，那谎言被丝毫也没迟疑的说出来，说得我们大家都知道他拿起手机会说什么，我们在电影院里笑，可是她的女人却笑不出来。





故事里有三个女人。


严守一的前妻于文娟，她是在家里拖地板的时候，接过了严守一情人的电话，然后在发现严守一外遇的时候，断然离婚，而在离婚后生了孩子才让严守一知道，他们离婚的时候，她怀孕了。


严守一的老师沈雪（徐帆），这是个很独立的新时代的女性，她是个认真的人，所以她有几出戏，一个是他们第一次见面的时候，她不能容忍严守一漠视她的教学，把严的手机扔进了垃圾桶。也是她的认真吧，她在下学夜不睡觉还要抓夜归的学生，也还有她为严守一代酒，这些是快乐的，后来，他们住在一起了，沈雪的地位就显得夹生了，他们不是夫妻，严的过去有一个老婆，而且是一个生了孩子的老婆，严的外面，还有一个女人，一个很漂亮很年青的女人。最后沈雪在烛台前一根根地划着了火柴，此时，她在想什么呢？是在想，男人的心理总是如此，看穿看悟了？还是在感叹其实多一事不如少一事，不需要搜他的包，不需要知道太多的秘密呢？


严守一的情人武月（范冰冰），这里忍不住要称赞她几句，虽然我觉得她演这个角色，应该有更多人不喜欢她，但她确实演得很有神采，漂亮，青春，还有疯狂。





故事的报幕很有新意，导演编辑，作词作曲，每个人都是存在《手机》电话号码薄的一个名字。是的，我们的生活在改变，男人过去出去工作，女人不会知道他身边发生的世界，广播找人，现在，通讯如此发达，你的手边有一部手机，所以她找得到你，她也不放心，她找不到你，她也不放心。


手机做得越来越好，可以录音了，可以发彩信了，可以拍摄了，是我们的生活空间受到了挤压，还是我们阴暗的心里没处可躲呢？


其实我无意讨论什么道德问题。这方面我有些冷漠。这本来就是个对错无法分得太清的世界。





只是觉得很有趣，还有几个有趣的片断。


墨非和严守一说，女人和女人站在了一起，最怕就是“结盟”呀。


但其实，男人互相为彼此掩饰，女人则互相妒忌。


里面李燕在知道自己老公有外遇后，和深雪一起去电信局查手机的通话记录，李燕没有劝慰，对话里多少有些兴灾乐祸，还有一点挑拨离间。





在这个故事里严守一的外甥女来京考试，主考官要她表演一段小品是她爸回来后干的第一件事情，结果外甥女冲门而出，再没有进来，原来她爸回来第一件事是串门。沈雪问她，你就不会编一编，他就不兴和你妈说说话？小姑娘硬着脖子说，“他们没话说。”


这个实在的小姑娘当然不会选上。


所以我们知道生活本来就改变了我们，我们已经习惯了谎言，也许也在不停地说谎。


女人是不是你不敢承受，有一天你的婚姻也是走到无话可说的地步呢？





但是我们还是在等，还是在问。


于是那首歌仍然在响起。


“你的媳妇叫吕桂花，吕桂花让问问你，最近你还回来吗？”


……


……


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        Cell Phone (2003) marks the culmination of the popular cultural preoccupation with infidelity. A famous TV talk show host Yan Shouyi, tries without success to maintain the delicate network of lies and concealments that allow him to have two different mistresses in addition to his estranged wife.
        The story starts in a small town where the town’s first telephone, which signifies the modernization in China, has just been installed. In a small village nearby, a young man Yan Shouyi takes a peasant woman to the town to make a phone call to her husband. About twenty years later, the middle-aged Yan Shouyi has already become a popular TV talk show host in a big city, owning a wife, a nice job, a BMW, and a mistress. His life and work would not have taken this path if he had not been equipped with a cell phone, the latest wireless communication technology. But the Cell Phone also causes the end of his marriage: his wife accidentally answers a phone call from his mistress complaining about his absence from a date.
        After getting a divorce, Yan starts a new relationship with a college teacher, Shen Xue, while still occasionally dating his old mistress, Wu Yue. On the several occasions when his double life is about to be discovered by Shen, Yan deftly covers the truth with lies. His close friend Fei Muo, a university professor and producer for his television show, is also involved in a similar love affair with a graduate student, which is soon discovered by his wife. Eventually, Yan’s infidelity is discovered by Shen who sees a digital picture of Yan and Wu making love, a picture taken by the digital camera built into Wu’s new cell phone. Not only is Yan’s relationship destroyed, his career also ends as Wu threatens to expose their relationship and takes over his position as the talk show host. At the end of the film, throwing his cell phone into fire, Yan swears that he will never again own one. Then after a dip-to-black, the film welcomes a second ending, Yan’s niece, who is also from the same village, becomes a cell phone saleswoman and comes to demonstrate the latest product to his uncle Yan. (Zhang, 135)
        Given the obvious Marxist bent of Cell Phone’s rhetoric and its fable-like narrative of the dangers of commodity fetishism, one might easily conclude the film as criticism of the effects of rapid economic transformation in urban China, and denial of male dominance. However, underneath this reading which is merely based on the resolution provided by the film, we can find both the cultural underpinning and ideological impacts of the film, whether they are conscious directorial decisions or not, are the other way around.
        The film is based on patriarchal and post-socialist assumptions in the first place. The leading character, wealthy, successful TV host Yan Shouyi, is representing the controlling patriarchal order and the ruling class. The young and charming mistress Wu Yue, on the other hand, is a sexual object and an oppressed worker reinforcing and perpetuating an exploitative capitalistic scheme. Yu Wenjuan, the pregnant wife and later the mother of Yan’s only child, is a cheap labor whose family value in undertaking housework and fostering children is totally underestimated and neglected by both the character Yan and the filmmaker Feng. Shen Xue, the successor of Yu and Wu, is a wonderful replacement of the two women, since she functions as both mistress and wife and has the highest total value. Therefore, marriage and divorce follow the rules of product exchange. The values of women as sexual commodities are estimated by their male owner, based on evaluation and grading of their sexual attractiveness and productivity among others.
        In the second place, the narration neglects and degrades women’s family values.
While there are scenes of Yan Shouyi working at the TV station and attending meeting with his colleagues, which confirms his value in production, there is hardly any scene of the women working. In addition, among the values of women, the four structures proposed by Mitchell, sexuality is emphasized against reproduction, and socialization. While there are a lot of scenes of Yan Shouyi flirting and having fun with her young and passionate mistress Wu Yue, there is hardly any scene of him and the older and less attractive wife spending time together. The cinematic representation of the reproduction process of Yan’s first wife is almost absent in the film. Having been pregnant for months, Yu Wenjuan did not inform her husband at all, and Yan is only informed several months after divorce by his ex-brother-in-law that his first wife had already given birth to their baby and needs money from him.
        Hiding behind socialization of children and the new motherhood are deeper oppressions of women. Spending a lot of time and energy nurturing the kid, the woman Yu did not get the compensation in improving her own social status; instead she lost her job in the big city after she went back to her hometown. As the value of socialization of children is often neglected by the society, this part of the plot is also omitted in the film, and is only told through Yan’s narration, serving as an obstacle that hinders and adds drama to Yan’s women pursuing career. As her value looks invisible, Yan replaces his first wife not with his mistress whose value only lies in sexuality, but with a beautiful college professor Shen Xue who seems to be a more serious and proper wife candidate, but also has the sexual disposition of a mistress.
        From Yan’s perspective, all the three women can be valued on a materialistic basis. Women become commodities, and their sexual attractiveness, job, education status are all counted in their exchange value while man is the buyer who has the right of choice because of his economic power and dominance in a patriarchal society.
        Extramarital relationship is a fatal violation of Chinese social norms and a tradition that often punishes the woman for such “immoral transgression” (Cui 181). In Cell Phone, the mistress Wu Yue, became the conflict's cause and the incarnation of immorality instead of the Male character Yan Shouyi. As an advanced prostitute, she would love to sell her body in exchange for money and power. And, ultimately, she threatens to replace Yan Shouyi as a television talk show host by using the photo she took in her cell phone. Thus, Yan Shouyi becomes the victimized character pitied by the audiences instead of the evil woman.
        The resolution of the film, Yan Shouyi’s abandoning of the cell phone, which may seem like a self-criticism, is actually a displacement and denial of the guilt and regret by reprimanding the modern technology and communication device. Cell phone becomes the scapegoat for Yan Shouyi, the hypocritical and immoral character, and therefore the patriarchal and capitalist order behind the story, which was supposedly to be criticized, is actually being extended sympathy.
        Depicted as the direct cause of all the conflicts between the protagonist and the three female characters, cell phone, the symbol of post-socialist modernity seems to be criticized. Rui concludes that Cell Phone addresses the subject through the director’s satirical take on consumerism and his exposure of the moral crises and ethical issues brought by expansion of high technology into our everyday lives (Zhang, 136). However, in the first 90 minutes of the film, a fantasy of the patriarchal and post-socialist (capitalist) utopia was already created for the male audiences: mistress as a symbol and accessory of urban success. Female audiences were also given a utilitarian fantasy integrated with the narcissistic and masochistic visual pleasure: being someone’s mistress is the shortcut to wealth and success. Thus, the film belittles the value of women, and denies women's independent existential meaning.
        In addition to the narrative constructed to propagate the attractive image of the “successful personage” that has represented the “new ideology” of contemporary China, an image that endorses a reality of growing class differences and income disparities, Feng Xiaogang adopts a lot of meta-cinematic elements in Cell Phone to offset the seriousness of his own criticism, a technique abundantly used in his early films. There are ample shots within the TV station, such as the staff operating camera, and outtakes of the TV host Yan who says his lines wrong, that remind the audiences to question the authenticity of their own movie watching experience. There is also a lot of inserting advertisements for cell phones that deconstructs the movie’s final critical stance towards post-socialist modernity. As the audiences identify and follow the male protagonist throughout the film, they highly enjoy and celebrate his material wealth and “romantic affairs” brought about by his professional success in the patriarchal and post-socialist order. In the meantime, they also accept a message that all women, whether they are educated or not, college professor or press editor, wife or mistress, are all annexed to the life of men.
        As McGrath noticed, the basic narrative structure of Cell Phone already had become so common by the end of the 1990s as to constitute a cinematic genre in itself, a genre that offers fable-like narratives of the moral dilemmas confronted by protagonists facing dramatic changes in personal economics as well as libidinal possibilities in the reform era. In such films, a man takes on one or more extramarital lovers after achieving some sort of economic success and social elevation (McGrath, 98). In many cases, a man’s ability to defy his wife is supported by both his male role and some sort of economic success. Even though these films reveal the social issues of the oppression of women, they neither provide a solution nor hold a feministic point of view that attempt to liberate women. Instead, they stand in line with the successful male protagonists, and celebrate the current patriarchal and post-socialist status quo. In a word, these films are women-concerned, but not at all feminist films.
        Supposedly a subgenre of family melodrama that aims to criticize the social immorality and educate the audiences, the actual impact of the “cinema of infidelity” is rather doubtful. An example is the sex diary scandal of Han Feng, the former senior tobacco official, which culminates the “mistress fashion” in 2010. Even more dramatic than Feng’s films, the purported diary, written in graphic detail, includes boasts that Han was enjoying sex romps with many different women while taking bribes and attending banquets. Populated by Internet users, Han’s case is just one in a million of the government officials and the privileged stratum in Mainland China.