Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities

9 Blind Massage Sense and sensuality Chris Berry How can we analyse the depiction of blindness in the 2014 film, Blind Massage (Tuina 推拿)? This chapter approaches the task from various angles, to demon- strate how the film understands blindness through the lenses of sense and sensuality. First, the chapter focuses on representation to examine how the film depicts the social conditions of blind people in China. In the context of ongoing global debates about whether and how to integrate people with disabilities into mainstream society, this analysis shows that prevalent cultural understandings of blindness in China lead to social segregation, even in efforts to support the blind through education and employment possibilities. Second, it adopts an auteurist approach to account for both the narrative emphasis on the sexual desires and entanglements that result from the social segregation of the blind as depicted in the film, and for the use of camerawork, lighting, and more to communicate the atmosphere and character subjectivity associated with these feverish passions. It argues these characteristics are part of a pattern in the work of Lou Ye 娄烨, form- ing a focus on obsession that is also his own obsession and his signature. Finally, however, a crucial feature of the film is its effort to make the audience feel what the film believes it is like to be blind. Here, the chapter draws on the phenom- enological turn in cinema studies to argue that the film attempts to give the audience an embodied experience. However, it achieves this embodied experience in a complex and anti-mimetic manner, and not simply by obscuring vision or making the screen black. In this way, Blind Massage becomes an investigation of cinema and the senses at the same time as it communicates an understanding of what the experience of blindness is. Representing the blind As Gayatri Spivak once famously pointed out, representation has two meanings: to depict and to act as an agent (Spivak 1988: 275–9). In her article, Spivak works hard to hold the two meanings apart. However, when someone depicts or ‘repre- sents’ someone else, they are also in some sense acting as their agent, taking some control over the way in which someone different from them is shown and known to others. Lou Ye is not blind, and so this is his position as the director of Blind Massage. I am not blind or Chinese, so I cannot judge whether his effort to depict Blind Massage 147 the experience of blind people in China accords with their own experiences. (And, of course, we must recognise that different blind people have different experiences.) However, we can note the other sense of representation and examine how the film depicts blindness as a social condition. Blind Massage begins with the adolescent Xiao Ma 小马, who has been visu- ally impaired since a car accident that also killed his mother. When Xiao Ma learns he has been deceived and will not recover his eyesight, he smashes a bowl and slashes the artery in his neck in a suicide attempt. After he recovers, we see him in a school for the blind before he gets a job in a blind massage centre special- ising in an ancient therapeutic form of massage known as tuina (Pritchard 2015: 3–5), which is also the Chinese title of the film. The film then becomes an ensem- ble piece, following the stories of different characters in the massage centre. The opening sequence depicting how Xiao Ma’s life leads him to the blind massage centre raises questions about the social conditions of blind people in China. First, Xiao Ma is depicted as being educated in a special school for the blind. This indicates that blindness is recognised by the state and that special pro- visions are in place to support the blind. The fate of the son of the former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping 邓小平, Deng Pufang 邓朴方, who became a paraplegic a result of his encounter with the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), raised the profile of people with disabilities Salisbury( 1989). It also enabled Deng Pufang to work to amalgamate various welfare associations and establish the China Disabled Persons Federation, of which he became presi- dent, in 1988 (China Disabled Persons Federation 2016a; see also Kohrmann 2003). The current 2008 Law on the Protection of Persons with Disabilities cov- ers areas including education and employment (China Disabled Persons Federa- tion 2016b). Blind Massage is set around the turn of the century, which, we are told in the film, was a golden age for blind massage centres. According to a 1988 report, only 6% of blind children in China were entering education (Deng et al. 2001: 294). This pattern of low enrolment was found across the special needs categories, but by 1996 the rate of participation in education had been increased to 60% for all categories (Deng et al. 2001: 291). It was addressed partly by a learning in regular classrooms movement (Deng et al. 2001: 291–2), and partly by rapid expansion of special schools, including special schools for the blind, from 292 in 1980 to 1,437 in 1998 (Deng et al. 2001: 294). This situation suggests a combination of strate- gies, some of which would enhance mainstreaming and others of which might lead to social segregation but provide more specialised support. Xiao Ma is also depicted as receiving vocational training in the school. This is reported to be an important element of special needs education in China, motivat- ing more parents to send children to school (Deng et al. 2001: 295). However, the range of vocational options is consistently reported as being limited to massage and, although less frequently mentioned, music (see for example Cheng and Zhou 2015). What these professions share is an emphasis on the senses other than sight – either touch or hearing, in these cases. This suggests a cultural belief in China – as in many other places – that loss of one sense can lead to enhancement 148 Chris Berry of the other senses. This belief also informs the film, which, as explored further, places great emphasis on touch and hearing, as well as smell. The combination of special schools and a very limited vocational range contrib- utes to the social isolation we see in the film, where the blind masseurs live and work together in the blind massage centre. This isolation may be in a mutually reinforcing relationship with social prejudice (e.g. Palmer 2014). In the film, a recurring theme is prejudice against having blind people in your family, presuma- bly for fear that the condition might be hereditary. One of the clinic directors, Sha Fuming 沙复明, is an outgoing man and a good dancer. But when his girlfriend’s mother meets him, she refuses to allow her daughter to have further contact with him. This prejudice extends to a sort of hierarchy among the blind: we discover that partially sighted Xiao Kong 小孔 has run away with a fully blind character we only ever know as ‘Dr Wang’ 王大夫 and they have come to the massage centre together, partly because her parents oppose their relationship. An obsession with obsession Beginning Blind Massage with Xiao Ma’s childhood is a part of a restructuring of the narrative of the original novel, which was written by Bi Feiyu 毕飞宇 (Bi Feiyu 2008, 2016) and won the prestigious Mao Dun literary prize in China in 2011, along with other literary awards (Mao Dun Prize no date). The novel opens with Dr Wang and Xiao Kong in Shenzhen, a location which we barely see in the film, and it ends with a chapter about Dr Wang and then an epilogue in a restaurant. Not only does Lou Ye begin his film with Xiao Ma, but he also adds a final scene with Xiao Ma, who has unexpectedly recovered some of his sight after being hit on the head in a fight. Xiao Ma has left the segregated space of the massage centre and set up his own massage service elsewhere with the local sex worker, called Man 蛮 (‘Mann’ in the English subtitles), who he fell in love with while at the massage centre. By beginning with Xiao Ma, the film moves us into the confined space of the main setting – the massage centre – more quickly. It also raises issues of broader social engagement with the blind through the depiction of Xiao Ma’s education and employment training, which we might not get by start- ing with Dr Wang. Despite the social issues raised in this beginning, the fictional narrative of the film is less focused on its characters’ engagement with such problems than it is with their sexual attractions. The focus on Xiao Ma is also part of this effect, emphasising his coming of age and various attractions over Dr Wang’s attraction to Xiao Kong, which is more stable and less disruptive than Xiao Ma’s passions. The social isolation of the blind masseurs is compounded by the fact that they not only work but also live together in the massage centre. When Xiao Ma arrives at the clinic, we are introduced to Sha Fuming, and Dr Wang and Xiao Kong turn up soon after. Xiao Kong immediately becomes the focus of male attention in the hothouse atmosphere of the massage centre, not only from Xiao Ma but also from Xu Taihe 徐泰和, who is already involved with another masseuse, Jin Yan 金嫣. Meanwhile, when Sha Fuming overhears his patients extolling the beauty of a Blind Massage 149 third masseuse, Du Hong 都红, he starts to become obsessed with her.

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