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If linguistic unity can be achieved only by taking advantage of the
audience’s limited or nonexistent knowledge of Chinese local languages,
from the filmmaker’s perspective, to what extent can hybridized Mandarin
still sound coherent and harmonious? The answer has to do with the
director’s vision regarding Fenyang as a microcosm of China and the
consequent view of Mandarin varieties as a collective voice for the Chinese
masses. Jia never set the reconstruction of a local Fenyang identity as his
ultimate goal. In response to a question about his extensive use of local
dialects and local features in an interview with Jian Ning (1999: 108), Jia said
that his emphasis is not locality or regionalism, but the general existential
state of the Chinese masses. His ambition—to have his hometown, a small,
landlocked county in North China, stand for China—is more explicit in a
statement about shooting Platform. Without mentioning a word about
Fenyang throughout the piece, his statement begins: “The film takes place
over a period when the greatest change and reform were going on in China.
. . . The narrative of Platform follows the development of the characters
against a background of social change. The natural cycle of birth, age,
illness, and death evokes a melancholic feeling of the impermanence of
life” (Jia 2003b: 190). In a sense, Jia manages to transform the particular
and the specific into the universal and the general. In an interview with
Stephen Teo (2001), Jia, reflecting upon the delineation of characters in
his films, says that he endeavored to “go beyond the local factor” and to
“create real human beings who possess universality or universal human
emotions.” Indeed, numerous critics read his films through metonymic,
or more precisely, synecdochic substitution. For instance, Elbert Ventura
regards Platform as “an allegorical epic that traces China’s snarled transition
from Maoism to the economic liberalization of the 1980’s.” 18 Similarly,
Xiaoping Lin (2005) tends to interpret many of the details in this movie in
an allegorical way.
But the dialectic between particularity and universality in the film is
not so easily reconciled. It is exactly his protagonists’ hybridized and impure
18
See Ventura’s review of Platform at
http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=a
vg&sql=1:220970~T1.
Modern Chinese Literature and Culture • 179
MCLC 18.2.indd 179
12/20/06 2:01:37 PM