Zhao’s Oscars pose problem for Beijing
Sunday night, the Chinese director Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for best director and her film Nomadland was chosen as best picture. This is a special event, for Ms. Zhao is just the second woman to win best director. The first was Kathryn Bigelow, who won in 2009 for The Hurt Locker, and while Bigelow remains an important and unique figure, it probably wasn’t the most felicitous choice the Academy ever made. If you appreciate Bigelow as an auteur of action films, you probably wish she would have won for Point Break (1991), an equally preposterous movie that still has a strong popular following as a weird emblem of its time.
I typed “auteur” there and had a moment of confusion, suddenly realizing I don’t have any idea what the proper French feminine form of this chunk of critical vocabulary might be. It turns out that there is no “official” one, although francophones sometimes go with “auteure.” It’s a little reminder that Hollywood, for all its sermonizing against sexism, remains one of the most epically sexist institutions on the face of the planet. Female directors are almost never given the chance to have the kind of career Bigelow built — a series of movies with fairly capacious budgets that bear her personal stamp.
Like her or not, she’s a brand. As are Sofia Coppola and the late Penny Marshall. But if you look for rock-solid classic hit movies directed by women, from Desperately Seeking Susan to Fast Times at Ridgemont High to Wayne’s World, you often find that the directrices’ careers mysteriously petered out or that they strayed into making sitcom episodes.
It is not really a mystery. Hollywood movies are basically construction sites full of male union labour. If a man directs a good, profitable movie, he earns himself a little slack for the next one. If a woman does this, it will be attributed to the performances or the screenplay or the soundtrack or absolutely anything else that can be identified. And meanwhile, she’s likely to be plunged into a vortex of rumour, mistreatment and backbiting. I’m a spectacularly bad feminist and even I can’t help being conscious of the pattern.
The sad part is that many of the female directors who get multiple chances to develop a style and an oeuvre have family or romantic connections to Hollywood power, like Bigelow, Coppola, and Marshall. Chloé Zhao is truly an outsider — a kid from Chinese mainland wealth who has a posh Western education and a taste for (small-w) western landscape. She has the opportunity to be a female Alexander Payne or Terrence Malick, and there ought already to be plenty of people who fit that description.
Naturally Hollywood has put her to work directing an expensive wad of Marvel Cinematic Universe bubble gum. One can only hope she has taken this assignment on the “Do one for them, one for yourself” principle that actors are sometimes said to observe. But meanwhile, Ms. Zhao has created a bizarre problem for the communist Chinese state of which she remains a citizen.
By rights they ought to be erupting with pleasure at the spectacle of a mainlander achieving such a thing — being, really, the first to achieve such a thing — against the formidable odds. Never mind the sexism: Hollywood would always prefer to give its trade awards to its own familiar creatures. But word of Chloé Zhao’s victory was immediately suppressed on Chinese news and social media. As a 31-year-old Chinese expat, nearly a decade ago, Zhao gave an interview and mentioned what everybody knows about being a young person in a communist country. She had grown up in an environment of pervasive lying, and when she received a liberal Western education she was able to better understand the world, including her own experience.
She hasn’t sounded off about this since, and most mainlanders trying to make a life outside China don’t. But ultranationalist gremlins on Chinese social media began grumbling about the old interview immediately when she received her statuette. At the same moment, others were starry-eyed at hearing her quote a Chinese classic — in a Beijing accent — to an audience of zillions. This seems more like “nationalism” of the traditional variety, but communism has a way of making enemies of even the friendliest expatriates. Even if they are loyal to the system in principle, they so rarely choose to go home.
Nomadland is about Americans who have fallen or dropped out of the workaday world into a precarious alternative culture of intentional homelessness. So as far as the subject matter goes there isn’t one tiny little logical reason it shouldn’t be capable of being shown to Chinese audiences, in communist China, as a work of high art made by a Chinese genius.
But maybe the director’s politics aren’t the real problem. Chinese state media have been gorging themselves on the recent spate of hate crimes against Asian-americans. It is relatively easy for them to persuade their own citizens that the streets of American cities are awash in Chinese gore: Lord knows there are enough Americans who seem to believe it. But the picture of an America vibrating with hatred toward Asians doesn’t really fit with the vision of the mothership of American culture giving the highest honour in its gift to someone named Zhao.