Gongfu Creatives and the Bureau of Better Entertainment

Resident satirist Rupert Pupkin tells us why the latest box office smash will be very much a fairytale…
Lines are already forming to see the maiden production of DreamWorks Animation SKG’s new joint China media venture, and the script hasn’t even been approved yet by the creative geniuses up at the bureau of better entertainment.

Quite sure it’ll be an uplifting and educational blockbuster, smashing box office records and whatever hopes one might have had for a slick, satirical movie-going experience with cross-generational, cross-cultural and cross-dressing appeal.

DreamWorks holds a 45 percent stake in the JV, which means that they will have total creative control over all catering services and equipment rentals. An intelligent script, maybe about an abandoned baby girl who is taken home at night and miraculously transformed into a feminist superhero, or a paean to a revolutionary panda that single handedly extracts fossil fuels from the depths of the South China Sea. That is perhaps what we can expect.
Or maybe the heroic feat of a family of model farmers who scrape together enough dough to send their only son to basketball camp, so that he’ll become the next Jeremy Lin.

When every exquisite cultural product - be it a cartoon, talent show or novel - requires the imprimatur of the guardians of goodness, cultural consumers are in for a lot of wonderful pablum - the kind of wholesome entertainment that will win awards created for the sole purpose of awarding awards to the otherwise un-awardable.

Now don’t get me wrong, China does indeed have some great stories to tell, which, in the right hands, would make excellent films. And many movies made in China (but not shown here), or made by Chinese filmmakers abroad, have wide appeal and garner box office recognition.

It is however the official stamp of approval that is the kiss of death for mainland movies, and therefore it is reasonable that there be checks on the excesses of culture producers. But creative people, official thinking goes, are not capable of exercising proper control over their creative instincts and they create stuff that offends and spoofs and disturbs and disrupts and provokes.

Art should serve the people, especially art intended to hold us in the thrall of socialist core values, and distract us from the reality that we’re being infantilised and abused by entertainment rather than challenged and enlightened by it. The DreamWorks JV has an obligation to history to produce a winner, so striking a balance between the demands of control, commerce and comedy will certainly pose a creative challenge. Indeed, the progeny of this queer joint venture between Steven Spielberg and the people who brought you documentaries on the life of Lei Feng, may feature a lovely phoenix who fears containment, but it certainly won’t include anything remotely original or daring.

So directors will serve audiences pastries and not wasabi, which would awaken them to the fact that, if you remove the infrastructure and the Internet, the Bentleys and the bistros, you’re sitting in a place as freewheeling, inspiring and passionate as a medieval church.

The bureau of better entertainment is inhabited by people very much behind with the times; the typical middle school student is more switched-on and understands better the rhythm of contemporary life than its ideological script advisers.

So, in the battle to win the culture war and end the dominance of Hollywood, the plan is to enlist the help of the enemy to generate cultural products that will have global appeal and spread the glory of Chinese culture around the globe? Well, if that isn’t the height of hypocrisy. Might make for a good movie though.