Authors
Yuan LiTim Beaumont
Topics
Biological and pharmacological studies of plantsYUAN LI AND TIM BEAUMONTIN 2016, A HOMEMADE COMEDY, MR. DONKEY (LUDESHUI € ), WAS THE highest-rated film on the Chinese review platform Douban, China’s equivalent to IMDb, with a score of 8.3 out of 10. In contrast, in the same year, The Great Wall, a film following the Hol lywood blockbuster model and built around celebrities (directed by Zhang Yimou, the renowned “Fifth Generation” director and starring Hollywood star Matt Damon), scored only 4.9. The success of Mr. Donkey can be viewed as a testament to the greater maturation and savviness of the Chinese audience since the Chinese theatrical market began to be opened-up to foreign films in the 1990s. Although it was initially dazzled by the Hollywood blockbusters, the Chinese audience appears to be increasingly weary of them, and is now com ing to prefer dramas with quality stories. With a budget of only $1.4 million US and lesser-known actors, Mr. Donkey grossed over $28 million at the box office and ranked the best Chinese film in 2016 (Mu 2017). Set in northern China in 1942, Mr. Donkey tells an absurdist story of four intellectuals from Beijing who come to a remote, poverty stricken rural area with the lofty ideal of educating the country folk. Ironically, they soon discover that, given their state of isolation, their livelihoods depend on a black donkey named “Lu Deshui € ”—the Chi nese for water-fetching donkey—that is used for that purpose. To cover the cost of keeping the donkey, Sun Henghai, the headmaster, fabri cates an English teacher “Mr. Lu Deshui € ” to receive an extra salary. AsThe Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 55, No. 1, 2022 © 2022 Wiley Periodicals LLC.the story unfolds, this seemingly harmless lie evolves into a series of twisted schemes. When the Education Committee inspector comes to evaluate the school, the teachers try to pass off an uneducated local coppersmith as Mr. L€u Deshui. However, it turns out that the inspec tor knows little English and is impressed by Mr. L€u’s “Hamlet’sSoliloquy” (“To be or not to be ...”), which is in fact the copper smith’s song read in his local Mongolian dialect. Having searched the region for a suitable recipient, the inspector decides that Mr. L€u, the coppersmith, should receive a considerable grant from an American philanthropist, Mr. Ross. From this point, the comedic and farcical elements give way to a bleak portrait of lies, oppression, betrayals, and tragedies.The story of Mr. Donkey is loosely based on a real event. In 2009,Zhou Shen, one of the writer-directors, heard a story from a friend concerning his experience as a volunteer teacher in Gansu province, a less developed mountainous region in Northwestern China. Zhou teamed up with Liu Lu to write down the story. While they aimed to take it directly to the big screen, in 2012 they opted to write it for the stage first due to a lack of funding (Xu 286). After the play gar nered great success over four years, Mahua FunAge, the most com mercially successful comedy enterprise in China, produced the film version. To keep the original flavor of the play, the film was also directed by Zhou and Liu, and the original cast of the play were retained. Similarly, most of the theatrical conventions were preserved, such as three unities, dramatic dialogues, and most of the actions fea turing in a limited space.The great commercial success of the adapted film draws attention to the ever-changing relationship between theater and cinema in the Chinese context. Moreover, an analysis of the artistic qualities of the original play, the stage-to-screen adaptation strategies, and the busi ness model of drama IP films in the emerging IP film industry, makes it possible to argue for three key claims. First, the artistic value of the original play stems from its presentation of an absurdist story that calls for an allegorical reading of Chinese society. As such, it can be viewed as a national allegory, a continuation of Lu Xun’s early twentieth-century critique of national characters, especially Chi nese intellectuals. Second, while Mr. Donkey the film retains the alle gorical narrative, it adds melodramatic sentimentality to cater to a mass cinema audience, thus losing the dramatic force of the play text.It is simultaneously too faithful to the original play to achieve a total cinematic translation but cannot work as “filmed theatre” in AndreBazin’s sense of term because of the failure to neutralize the realism stemming from cinema’s photographic nature. Third, the stage-to screen adaptation strategy sheds light on the significance of the intel lectual property (IP) business model—including the opportunities and problems it presents—for China’s culture and entertainment industry. On the one hand, not only has the model contributed to the vitality of Chinese films, even helping to break the monopoly held by Hollywood blockbusters in the Chinese market until 2016, but the success of the film redirected audiences that might otherwise ignore theater back towards the play. On the other hand, however, the model is haunted by commoditization and commercialization and threatens to render the cinematic side of such productions more derivative and less autonomous.Mr. Donkey the Play as a National AllegoryIn the original play, the choice of timeframe, setting, and characteri zation necessitates an allegorical reading of China’s social reality, the defects of the intellectuals, and the dark side of enlightenment.While the play is officially set in 1942, the year is purely emblematic as there are no other historical markers. That year stands out as a dark and critical moment in China’s modern history in which it was under the ruthless invasion by the Japanese army during World War II.However, throughout the play, the war and the political struggles between the Kuomingtang (KMT) government and the ChineseCommunist Party are mostly ignored.1The only reference of note is an indication that the headmaster’s son is going to Yan’an, where the Communist Party regrouped and grew after the famous Long March, a strategic retreat from KMT’s attack. Nevertheless, the year still serves to locate the story within the Republican era (Minguo), which is important as it offers a relatively safe platform for artists to engage in social critiques of contemporary society.When it comes to characterization, the four leading characters are also more symbolic than realistic: Sun Henhai, the headmaster who seems to be decent but insists that the ends justify the means; ZhouTienan, a hot-headed but upright young man; Pei kuishan, the pragmatic, shrewd, middle-aged intellectual who is lovesick for Zhang Yiman; and Zhang Yiman, the only female character, who has very liberated views, especially about sex. As the ruse inevitably unravels, it is so dismal to see how easily each character transforms and deviates from his or her earlier idealism when faced with money and power: benevolence turns to greed, nobility to corruption, uprightness to cowardice, love to spite, and loyalty to betrayal.Zhou Shen had planned to write a realist story about rural life inChina, following the tradition of Sangshuping Jishi (SangshupingChronicles [1988]), a play that features the sorrows of the local peas ants in a small, isolated village in the northwestern part of China (Shi). However, Zhou and Liu found it hard to conceive the story due to their lack of real-life experience in rural China. In consequence, eventually they decided to focus on the issues regarding Chinese intellectuals, using rural China as a backdrop instead. Zhou, a gradu ate from China’s Central Academy of Drama, the leading academic institution in drama, theater studies, and performances, claimed that this story is “not about rural China, but about the problems of Chi nese intellectuals” (Shi).The seemingly absurdist plot reveals the corruptible nature of the four intellectuals and raises fundamental questions: When do ends justify the means? Where should one draw the line? How easily can one be debased by the lure of power and money? The irony and sar casm culminate in a scene in which the coppersmith is asked by the teachers to play dead to avoid contact with Mr. Ross, who is paying a visit to the village. To make the fraud convincing, Jia Jia, the head master’s fifteen-year-old daughter is asked to play Mr. Donkey’s widowed fiancee so that she can keep his grant as heritage. Jia Jia, the only innocent character in this play, genuinely mourns the death of the real donkey that was killed to provide a feast for the inspector.Feeling her sorrow at the “funeral,” the coppersmith mistakenly thinks that she loves him and jumps up from the coffin and shouts inEnglish: “I love you! I love you!” The teachers then try to persuade a frightened Mr. Ross into believing their scam:Ross: This is not possible.Kuishan: This is possibleR: This is not possible!K: This is possible!R: This is not possible!K: This is possible! This is rational. It is rational for the dead to come back to life! There are such records in your Bible! Elijah revives the widow’s son!R: That is a miracle in the Bible!Tienan: This IS a miracle! This is a miracle! Such miracle can only happen in China!R: I still don’t believe it.The inspector: What did you say?R: I said I don’t believe it.The inspector: No matter whether you believe it or not, at least I believe it!!R: Incredible China! Incredible China! I am so excited. Then I will give my money as a wedding gift for them! (Zhou and Liu 61-62)The dialogue succeeds both as a parody of the Republican China depicted in the play, as there were many occasions in which the gov ernment built lies upon lies to the point of absurdity, and as a repre sentation of the Chinese imagination of the American, the Occidental other—rich and kind but also na€ıve and gullible.In his famously controversial 1986 essay, “Third-World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson offers an interesting perspective on the differences between allegories in the “First World” and the “Third World.” He argues that, unlike the lit eratures of the First World, Third World literatures are necessarily national allegories. Jameson claims: Third World texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic, necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society” (69).This assertion has been much criticized for being reductionist and essentialist, and for over-generalizing about the “Third World” to the point of constituting a new form of Orientalism (Ahmad 6).2How ever, even if Jameson is wrong to think that Third World literature is always and necessarily constitutive of national allegories, it can still be contingently true that some Third World literature is fruitfully viewed as such. Regardless of whether China is or ever was viewed appropriately as a Third World country, the story of Mr. Donkey can serve as its national allegory in the Republican era. Jameson’s notion of the personal being the national is quite relevant in a Chinese con text, not least because of its long tradition of allegorical writings, from the canonized Chinese writer Lu Xun at the beginning of the twentieth century, when Modern China was struggling with its nationhood, to contemporary writers, such as the 2012 Nobel Laure ate Mo Yan, as well as Su Tong, Can Xue, Yu Hua, and many more.Together, they use allegorical forms to raise thoughtful questions about individualism, social issues, and sexual freedom. In fact, Jame son, in his 1986 essay, illustrated his idea by citing Lu Xun’s stories as “the supreme example of this process of allegorization” (69).Mr. Donkey can be viewed as a continuation of this tradition of national allegory, but unlike Lu Xun’s critique of the national charac ter of the oppressed mass and the oppressor, Mr. Donkey focuses on the defects of Chinese intellectuals and the dark side of enlighten ment led by them. The poster for the play during the premier in 2012 included a quite sensational tagline: “A message from the direc tor: All intellectuals are paper tigers!” This tagline caused quite a stir because it obviously derives from Mao Tse-Tung’s famous statement in 1946 that “all reactionaries are paper tigers.” As a Chinese audi ence will be aware how the intellectuals were treated during the Mao era, this intertextual reference is poignant and bold, evoking as it does the love-hate sentiments of dazhong (the masses) toward intellec tuals. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the image of Chi nese intellectuals has undergone drastic changes, as might have been expected given the turmoil of China’s modern history. Perhaps the most positive image of Chinese modern intellectuals has been that of leaders of the Enlightenment movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.3However, given the political turbulence and anti imperialist pressure of the 1920s and 30s, the great relationship between already-enlightened thinkers and the still-to-be-awakened populace was short-lived. The image of the intellectuals as “leaders of new culture, ahead of and above the common people” (Schwarcz 9), was undermined by accusations of their being “tuoliqunzhong” (iso lated from the masses). Throughout China’s modern history (1919 onwards), there have been tensions between intellectuals and the illit erate or less-educated masses. Mr. Donkey follows the same logic in highlighting the level of alienation between the intellectuals and the local people.The urban intellectuals in Mr. Donkey have come to the rural area to educate the locals. However, in an ironic Kafkaesque twist, they rarely meet the local villagers and have only six students enrolled at the school. The absence of the students and villagers overshadows everything, outlining the absurdity of their situation. Instead of pro moting education, they are consumed with schemes and lies to get more funding from the government.The only thing close to enlightenment in the play is the transfor mation of the coppersmith in response to a sexual encounter with one of the teachers. When Zhang Yiman offers to sleep with him to make him stay overnight for the visit of the inspector, she shows him how to engage in foreplay in bed by kissing him and nibbling his ears. InThe Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in ModernSocieties, Anthony Giddens points out that in premodern Europe, among the peasantry in seventeenth century, “kissing, caressing and other forms of physical affection associated with sex were rare among married couples” whose marriages were contracted not on the basis of mutual sexual attraction but economic circumstances (38-39). In this sense, intimate gestures, such as kissing and caressing, are considered as signs of modernity and enlightenment. This association between sexual liberty and intimacy on the one hand, and enlightenment on the other, has also existed in China since the May Fourth movement began in 1919.4For example, two of the most prominent female Chi nese writers of that time, Xiao Hong (1911-42) and Ding Ling (1904-86), illustrated enlightenment concepts such as autonomy and individual desire with reference to sexuality, love, and marital choice (Li 68). It is for this reason that the poor coppersmith, a peasant from rural feudal China, and thus of a kindred mindset to that described by Giddens, is completely baffled and dazzled by Zhang Yiman’s intimacy and suggestions of romantic love. The encounter serves as his gateway into the mindset of the modern world.Thus enlightened, the coppersmith also refuses to return to his old life. He starts to learn vigorously but transforms from an honest and innocent farmer into a calculating and vindictive figure, even launch ing a spiteful “civilized” attack against his erstwhile mentor, ZhangYiman. As such, he embodies the dark side of enlightenment. More over, this dark side of enlightenment is also illustrated in the play’s resolution. When Zhang Yiman sinks into madness and commits sui cide, the three male teachers pretend nothing has happened, their reaction signifying that the death of which we can be certain is not simply physical but also moral.Mr. Donkey from Stage to ScreenLike the original play, the film adaptation also charts the drastic transformation of each character as they encounter humiliation, set backs, and threats. However, the rapidity at which these transforma tions take place have led the film to be criticized for a lack of realism. In response, Zhou Shen insists that the story is highly alle gorical, the four characters are symbolic, and hence the transforma tions undertaken in the film would take weeks, months, or years in real life (Zhou 17).Although Zhou’s defense may make sense, the film adaptation of this play has been criticized for cleaving too close to the original the atrical form and thus lacking cinematic language (Yu 114-16). Mr.Donkey the play observes the Aristotelian hierarchy of six elements of theater, placing text-based elements (plot, character, thought, and diction) in the top positions and visual and sensual elements (song and spectacle) at the bottom. The development of the story in the film also depends more on text-based elements than visual narratives.Because films and stage plays have different grammars and modes of engagement, adaptation includes an element of transcoding. Tradi tionally many have assumed that this means that a film adaptation must be inferior to the play on which it is based because some of the theatrical qualities will be lost in the translation. However, AndreBazin refutes this view in his “Theatre and Cinema” in which he identifies two approaches to adaptation: “filmed theatre” and adapta tion to the requirements of cinema. In the case of the former, rather than attempting to disguise the film’s theatrical origins, its theatrical character is emphasized, thus injecting “the power of cinema into the theater” (84). Bazin cites Laurence Olivier’s films Hamlet, Henry V, and Macbeth among the classics, along with contemporary works, such as The Little Faxes by Lillian Hellman and Wyler and Jean Cocteau’sLes Parents terribles. He notes how both the classic and contemporary adaptations of this kind expose the cinema audience to the devices and acting styles of theatrical artifice and are by no means necessarily inferior to the originals (88).Linda Hutcheon follows Bazin’s argument in affirming that in the case of film adaptation of the theater: “There seem to be two possible ways to proceed. The artifice can be acknowledged and cinematic real ism sacrificed to self-reflexivity, or else the artifice can be ‘natural ized’” (46). She also cites the example of Hans-Jurgen Sybergerg’s 1982 film of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal (1872), which “uses an anti naturalistic mise-en-scene that is both strikingly theatrical and bravely uncinematic” (46).Both Bazin and Hutcheon maintain that, since the theatrical stage serves to distance the audience from everyday life and is therefore unsuited to realism, the central question for the success of a filmed play lies in how to neutralize the realism of a cinematic production stemming from its photographic nature. As Bazin puts it, “It is a conquest of realism-not, certainly, the realism of subject matter or realism of expression but that realism of space without which moving pictures do not constitute cinema” (112). According to him, the dra matic force of the text is lost if cinema techniques are used to make the audience forget the boundaries of the stage. He therefore argues that this is a problem of decor and editing. Rather than extending the stage, cinema must rein itself in to present “a space oriented towards an inner dimension only, the closed and conventional area of the theatrical play” (107).To examine the film Mr. Donkey from this perspective, it could be argued that it is neither the “adaptation to the requirement of cin ema” or a successful filmed play. On the one hand, it is faithful to the original play in terms of its recounting of the plot, its focus on dialogues, and its presentation of the characters without recourse to any significant cinematic innovations. But on the other, although most of the action in the film takes place in a limited space that could be taken to resemble a stage (i.e., the school classroom), the decor and the organization of space are still too realistic for a success ful filmed play. Moreover, the use of panoramic longshots of the rural area, and the scenic details of mountains and houses, remove the audi ence from the space on which they need to remain focused in order to appreciate the play’s theatrical artifice as opposed to finding it unreal istic. Thus, the allegorical spatio-temporal setting of rural China in 1942 serves the stage better than the cinema as films usually work on naturalistic conventions (Figure 1).Overall, while the film adaptation retains the play’s theatrical con ventions, the aura of the original play is somewhat lost, partly due to the failure of decor and editing, and partly due to the decisions made by the adaptors. First, the adaptors deleted the parts that are highly poignant and absurdist on stage. The vulgar language, with its sexual overtones, is largely deleted in order to bypass the stricter filmFIGURE 1. One of the panoramic long shots of the rural area in “NorthernChina.” [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] censorship. The most absurdist scene in the play portrays the ridicu lous reactions of the coppersmith to the sight of the inspector’s mili tary cap. He is afraid of the cap and cannot help but quiver and kneel every time he sees it on someone’s head. However, as he transforms into a vindictive literate with some bargaining power, his fear dissi pates, and eventually he takes the cap from the inspector and wears it. Here the cap symbolizes power and authority, thus paying tribute to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. However, in the film version of Mr. Donkey, this important prop and the related scenes are edited out, probably for being too theatrical.Another problem with the film adaptation stems from the adap tors’ belief that the film would be more popular with a cinema audi ence if it was more sentimental and melodramatic than the original play. As the film poster says, “Let me tell you a joke, and don’t you cry.” This is achieved principally by adding scenes focusing on the victimization of Zhang Yiman. This victimization stems from the coppersmith’s rise to power combined with his desire to exact revenge upon Yiman for the non-requital of his love. In one added scene, the coppersmith orders the performance of a ritual of humiliation in which the headmaster cuts her hair and others shower her with verbal abuse. The film employs one of its very few montages to show the juxtaposition of this public shaming of the female character alongside the past happy and harmonious moments of the four teachers. The FIGURE 2. From Mr. Donkey. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] camera lingers on her face while she sobs, emphasizing her sadness and disillusionment, and eliciting a sentimental gaze, giving the audience time both to look and to experience emotion along with her (Figures 2 and 3).As Bazin observes, the members of a film’s audience tend to iden tify themselves with the characters of a film (99). In consequence, they are more likely to be overwhelmed by sentimentality and less likely to remain critically distanced and intellectually alert than in a theater.As Yiman is driven to insanity due to the collective persecution, the audience witness her picking flowers in the field, the same flowers being crushed under the feet of a chaotic crowd, and her eventual sui cide signaled by a gunshot offscreen. All these cliched visual or audio images contribute to the sentimentalism of the end of the film. InSentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films, Rey Chow points out the persistence of the sentimental as an affective tendency charac terized by emotional excess in the contemporary Chinese cinema.This sentimentalism often takes the form of “exaggerated grief or dejection or a propensity toward shedding tears” (15).Since Yiman’s character is given a relatively harsh and grim depic tion in the play; the film’s abuse scenes revert to a more traditional presentation of women as victims and scapegoats. Compared with the male intellectuals, who are eager to bow to power and money, Yiman seems to retain a certain innocence. However, she still reveals a darkFIGURE 3. From Mr. Donkey. [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] side by contriving with these men to acquire the grant, and shows little concern for the rural students at all. Moreover, while she poses as a modern woman, in pursuit of an autonomy of subjectivity and sexuality, she is more driven by impulse than feminist principles, with her casual attitude to sex leading her to instrumentalize her body to achieve her goals. For example, when the coppersmith super stitiously refuses to take photos under the command of the inspector,Yiman sleeps with him to change his mind. However, the end of the film slides into a typical Chinese melodrama in which Yiman is depicted as an understanding, innocent, and traditional woman, who is willing to accept self-sacrifice for the larger good.Mr. Donkey and the Film Adaptation of Drama IPs inChinaThe preceding analysis suggests that Mr. Donkey the film neither achieves a total cinematic translation of the story presented on stage nor amounts to successful “filmed theatre” in Bazin’s sense of the term. In consequence, this raises the question of how it could be so successful in the film market in 2016.One explanatory factor is the quality of the play text upon which it is based. In his “Predicting Success of Theatrical Movies: An Empirical Study,” Barry R. Litman outlines three crucial decision making areas to determine the success of a film: the creative sphere, the scheduling and release pattern, and the marketing efforts (159).After more than three decades, these three areas remain significant, with the creative sphere being of the greatest importance. According to Litman, the creative sphere refers to “the total creative efforts expended in making the film” of which the actual story is “of para mount importance.” The more visible and famous that the story is from a previous medium, such as a play or a novel, the more likely it will have “a natural advantage in pre-selling the film” (159).Mr. Donkey the film has succeeded in telling a quality story full of allegorical meaning based on the original play text. In fact, film adaptations of high-quality plays have been popular among Chinese audiences for a long time. As early as the 1920s, Chinese cinema relied on theater for contents and forms. There has been a rich popu lar interest in traditional operas, and the consumption of these moralistic stories constitutes a large part of the film industry. Earlier successful cases include the filmed plays such as Gu’er Jiuzuji (An Orphan Rescues His Grandpa [1923]), Xixiangji (West Chamber [1927]),Baishezhuan (The Legend of White Snake [1956]), etc. They were all based on the traditional theatrical forms with concentrated scenes, thus explaining why the earliest form of film was named yingxi (liter ally meaning “film theatre”) (Yu 118). These film adaptations have a long-standing market in China because the audiences care more about a good story than cinematic autonomy or realism. The Chinese audi ence’s relative lack of cinematic cultivation, and their focus on plot and narratives, make it comparatively easy for them to accept the film version of Mr. Donkey despite some film critics’ concern about its lack of cinematic elements.Another explanatory factor for the success of the film that may be overlooked is a new business model in the production, adaptation, circulation, and marketing of Chinese films in recent years—the so called “film adaptation of drama IPs.” Indeed, the term “intellectual property” (or IP) is one of the hottest buzzwords in China’s culture and entertainment industry today (Qin 2016). IP can be a novel, a play, a story, or even a concept, which is later redeveloped into a film,TV drama, online game, or any other commercially derived product.Such transmedia productions, available across multiple platforms via novelization, animation, gamification, and filmization are not new in the West. Some Hollywood blockbuster franchises, such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Hunger Games (2012-15), and Sherlock Holmes (2009) already exemplify this transmedia adaptation strategy, which is based on fan culture oriented primarily around social media.In the epilogue of the second edition of Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation, Siobhan O’ Flynn addresses this phenomenon by ana lyzing the impact of this strategy on how adaptations are produced, controlled, and distributed:As adaptations are often undertaken to capitalize on an existing fan base (the readers of the Harry Potter books are a guaranteed audience for the films), tapping into the marketing potential of existing fan communities on free online platforms is a pivotal goal of the industry today. (180)The rise of the IP industry in China follows the same business logic.Due to the rapid rate of adoption of social networking platforms, media conglomerates are scrambling to utilize these new modes of communication to monetize content wherever possible (O’Flynn 180). At the beginning, most of the IPs are born from online novels or stories, which can usually be made available to internet users instantly while bypassing China’s traditionally staid publishing industry. These online IPs, with genres like fantasy, romance, and martial arts, become well-known quickly. The capacity to accumulate a large legion of fans almost immediately makes them a “goldmine” for the entertainment industry, which suffers a lack of experienced screenwriters or original screenplays (Zhao). The year 2015 saw an eruption of cross-media IP adaptations from online novels, includingTV dramas, such as Miyue Zhuang (The Legend of Miyue) and Zhen huanzhuan (Empresses in the Palace), as well as one of the highest-gross ing films, Xunlongjue (Mojin: The Lost Legend), which earned $250 million after its release in December 2015, making it the fifth high est-grossing movie ever in China.As more capital poured into the newly evolving IP industrial chain, some investors also turned to theater for IPs with quality stories and popularity. Since 2013, the film adaptation of drama IPs has become a new growth area in China’s film industry. Film adapta tions of popular or well-known contemporary staged plays from mainland China and Taiwan include Fenshou Dashi (The Breakup Guru [2014]), Shi’er Gongmin (12 Citizens [2014]), Huali Shangbanzu (Office [2015]), Lian’ai Paibanbiao (I Love You, Too [2015]), and Guonian Hao (The New Year’s Eve of Old Lee [2016]), to name a few. Of course, not all the drama IP films have attained commercial or artistic success, but Mahua FunAge’s productions provide an illustration of what can be achieved. In 2015, the theater company produced the film version of Xialuo Te Fannao (Goodbye, Mr. Loser), a well-acknowledged com edy on Mahua’s stage, gaining $20 million at the box office. In that year, this ground-breaking film adaptation also boosted Mahua’s drama revenue by 42.01 percent. Benefiting from this win-win strat egy, Mahua went on to produce four more drama IP films, includingMr. Donkey (2016), Xiuxiu de Tiequan (Never Say Die [2017]), and Licha de Guma (Hello, Mrs. Money [2018]). Within three years, the six drama IP films garnered more than $70 million at the box office (Yang 137).The rise of IP films coincides with the rise of homegrown Chinese films, and the Hollywood blockbusters loss of their de facto “monop oly” on the Chinese market since 2016. In that year, for the first time the single most successful film at the box office was Chinese rather than American (“Domestic Films”). Since then, domestic movies have gradually consolidated their advantage over their Hollywood counter parts and have become “the key driver for box office growth inChina” (Pham 2019). In this context, as one genre of the IP model, drama IP films certainly contribute to the growth. For example, in 2017, Mahua FunAge’s Never Say Die grossed about $31 million, thereby surpassing that year’s Hollywood blockbusters such as Trans formers: The Last Night ($22 million), Pirates of the Caribbean: DeadmanTells No Tales ($17 million), and Kong: Skull Island ($16 million) (“Movie Box Office”).This IP model also gives rise to a new marketing strategy that changes the relationship between advertiser and consumer. Between 2012 and 2016, the play Mr. Donkey was staged four hundred times, toured twenty-one cities, and was seen by an audience of around 270,000 people. Once a fan-base for the play was established among college students and urban young people (aged between twenty and thirty), the film could be marketed to them and, thence through them, to their friends, family, and the broader nontheater attending popula tion. Acknowledging today’s hybrid media landscape, MahuaFunAge’s promotion campaign was a combination of online and offline activities, with greater emphasis placed on the former than the latter.The offline promotions consisted principally of touring campaigns in the universities in major cities, such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guang zhou. In contrast, its online promotional activities via China’s popular social media, (e.g., WeChat, Weibo and Douban, the analogues of Facebook and Twitter), focused on debates and discussions centered on the spoiler and the poster (Yang 138). This strategy has been referred to as “word of mouth marketing,” and is highly valued given the num ber of internet users it can access, and the way in which their technol ogy-facilitated social connectivity can turn consumers into advertisers.A post by a fan on a social media takes a short while to be seen by hundreds of friends who follow them, and it can rapidly travel to thou sands more. Some well-planned messages have been shared by millions of viewers within days (Whitler). As O’ Flynn notes, “the connectivity of the web has fostered a paradigm shift in the mobilization of global communities of interest, able to act and react instantly and en masse to shared interests” (180).The drama IP model certainly adds a new dimension to the already complicated relationships between theater and film. As Knopf sug gests, the economic, aesthetic, cultural, and technological interactions between the two media should be considered for us to see the com plexity of this relationship, “which extends far beyond the initial questions of how to transfer a story from one medium to another” (2). In “Film and Theatre,” Susan Sontag acknowledges that there is at least a kernel of truth in the claim that cinema must seek to eman cipate itself from theatrical models by “advancing from theatrical sta sis to cinematic fluidity, from theatrical artificiality to cinematic naturalness and immediacy” (24). This entails acquiring its own non theatrical grammar, and thereby forgoing stylized and exaggerated acting, fixed theatrical distance, and distancing from the audience’s emotions. However, she also considers this view to be too simplistic.She therefore calls for a new notion of the relationship between film and theater, and her call has been met by scholars who have endeav ored to develop an alternative conception of this relationship. In his insightful introduction to Theatre and Film: A Comparative Anthology,Knopf proposes that both media “are constantly changing in terms of technology, style, economics, and their influence on each other” (5).Instead of viewing theater and film to be engaged in an inherently antagonistic, mutually exclusive relationship, Knopf proposes a more nuanced view by stating that the economic competition and techno logical developments of the two media result in their being polarized at some times but drawn together at others, like two magnets whose ends either meet or repel (8).However, Knopf is mistaken to suggest that they are drawn together only artistically, “while economically they push each other further apart in an effort to carve out their own niche and audience” (8). In the case of drama IP films, the business model promotes a more symbiotic economic relationship between the two media through the intermingling of high art and popular art, to the mutual benefit of both markets.For almost a century, Chinese drama has provided inspiration and raw materials for the cinema. As Bazin observes:The usual reason for wanting to make a film out of a contemporary play is its commercial success in the theater. In the course of its successful run, the text, as tried out, has become crystallized so to speak as to its essentials and it is this text that the film audience’ will be looking for. So here we are, by way of a more or less honor able detour, back at our respect for the written text. (83)The film adaptation of drama IPs can be viewed as paying respect to the written text, especially as there has been a chronic lack of excel lent original film scripts and stories in the contemporary film indus try. Moreover, since there is limited scope for a play to appeal to the masses, a successful film adaptation can indirectly increase the market for theatrical drama, as demonstrated by the practice of MahuaFunAge. Tian Qinxin, a well-established Chinese theater maker, has been attempting to make “urban farce appeal to the young city dwellers,” and she raised such questions as “Why must huaju (spoken drama) stay small? Why can’t it be popular [?]” (qtd. in Chou 169).Tian can probably find the answer to her question with this drama IP franchise in which theater and cinema form a symbiotic relationship.However, this symbiotic relationship is not always balanced since the cinematic side of the production is often rendered more derivative and less autonomous in the process. The drama IP adaptations have certain features in common. On the one hand, they are modelled on the original stage plays about storytelling, plot, and characters. The camera remains content to capture the original play. And on the other, the adaptations focus more on comedic and sentimental effects, making the social critique of the original plays less overbearing, and thus more entertaining to a mass cinema audience. Like the transme dia adaptions of the other cultural products, this is also deemed to be a kind of “adaptation marketing,” an opportunistic adaptation which sets out to multiply, in transmedial fashion, the principal work (Gau dreault and Marion 329).In the case of Mr. Donkey, contra certain critics of the film version, it is not necessarily true that its adaptors were ignorant of the differ ent grammar of cinema and theater. It is more likely that their adap tation strategy was guided by the IP business model this article outlines and therefore predicated upon deliberately subordinating the grammar of cinema to that of theater. Hereby the question of fidelity arises. In contemporary adaptation studies, fidelity criticism has no longer held sway. As Hutcheon claims, “the success of an adaptation in the age of transmedia, can no longer be determined in relation to its proximity to original. But on popularity, persistence, extent of dissemination, or artistic values” (xxvi). However, in the IP business model, the issue of “fidelity” emerges again in the context of fan cul ture. This faithful adaptation is by no means “bravely uncinematic” but rather pragmatically uncinematic. In consequence, these dramaIP films tend to be derivative and beholden to the prior plays, thus rendering the relationship between theater and film largely unbalanced.
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PublishedFeb 1, 2022
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