Broken Harmony: New identities in the digital landscape

One of the films I remember most during the two years I have been a student at Oxy was one that I saw during my first semester of college. Somewhat by chance, I switched into a European politics class two weeks into the semester after frantically seeing which electives were still available so I didn't have to take calculus. There I was, the only first-year in a class of about ten students, all of whom were huddled in a circle on the third floor of Johnson Hall at 7:15 on a Monday night. The first half of the course focused on post-WWII European history, culminating with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the establishment of the modern European Union. To finish off this part of our class, we watched a German satirical film from 2003 titled Good Bye, Lenin!, which I was actually already familiar with. In high school, my AP US history teacher, who I must credit with teaching me the difference between a liberal and a leftist, recommended that I watch the film. She said it was one of her favorite movies of all time, and if there's any group of people that I trust with film recommendations, it's socialist history teachers.

I never actually ended up watching Good Bye, Lenin! until that day in my European politics class a year-and-a -half later. The film follows a family living in East Berlin in 1989, right before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November of that year. Directed by Wolfgang Becker, it follows a young man named Alex who cares for his mother Christiane, a staunch believer in the East German state. After seeing Alex take part in an anti-government protest, Christiane falls into a coma, only to wake up in a post-Berlin Wall reality. The rest of the film sees Alex and his sister desperately trying to pretend that they are still in East Berlin so that their mother will not suffer another shock. An otherwise comedic setup is broken up by a voyeuristic wonder, as Alex and his sister get to experience Western culture for the first time. Like a kid loose in a candy shop, Alex's introduction to the West is akin to a sugar rush. Dazzling lights blurred in a rush of ecstasy follow Alex as he takes parts in Western consumer culture: eating at fast food joints, watching satellite television, and even visiting a sex shop. For Alex, the fall of the Berlin Wall not only opens the outside world to him and his family, but acts as an extension of his own reality. The opening of East Germany and the fall of the Soviet Bloc serves as a new landscape to experience and express one's own wants and desires, something the characters of the film indulge themselves in.

I was reminded of Good Bye, Lenin! while watching this week's film, Broken Harmony, directed by Risa Morimoto. While a different type of film compared to Good Bye, Lenin!, Morimoto's documentary follows similar ideas of new landscapes in a globalizing and changing geopolitical climate. The documentary follows Hua Ze, a Chinese travel writer turned human rights activist and film maker. Throughout the film, the suppression of media and art deemed critical of the Chinese government is made apparent through Ze's experiences along with that of other artists in China, most notable being Ai Weiwei's criticisms of the government after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Living in the United States at the time of the documentary's filming, Ze talks about her struggles as a film maker exposing the suppression of free speech in China and the arrest of human rights lawyers such as Liu Xiaobo, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 while imprisoned in Jinzhou.

Despite the film's subject matter being tied to the struggles of human rights activists in an authoritarian landscape, there's a sense of optimism in film's like Broken Harmony. In interviews with Ze, the term "netizen" is used to describe those who operate digitally over the world wide web. Here, the term is used somewhat literally, describing Chinese netizens who often face scrutiny and censorship by the Chinese government when accessing online information. Yet, the idea of a netizen seems so much more given our current relationship with the digital realm. The film's footage is from 2010, now a decade old. Even just ten years ago, the role of the digital still felt new for its users. Even though consumer internet use has been around since the 1990s, its use as an landscape as opposed to simply a mode of expression has yet to be fully established, let alone understood. With early internet, the digital represented an extension of the analogue, serving as a new method of communication and consumerism. Even though digital art was around since the beginning of the internet-era, it remained separate from the established norms of art and expression. However, thirty years later, the internet is no longer just an extension of our day-to-day lives; often, the internet is the landscape where the foundations of our daily lives are built. The obvious examples would be social media and online shopping, which are now considered the standard means of socialization and shopping, more so than ever during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, widespread internet use makes it easy to ignore the ways in which the digital creates a new landscape of expression within itself. While some may argue that digital spaces are just extensions of their analogue counterparts, I believe that they are in fact separate.

The use of the term netizen throughout the film highlights this emergent concept. State censorship and suppression in the digital age may be the state catching up and bringing its methods of control into the 21st century. However, even thought the method of suppression is the same, the mode of interaction on behalf of citizens is not. Before the internet, state's can censor information by shutting down newspapers, banning films, and arresting journalists, film makers and artists to make an example of fear for others thinking of dissent. While all this is still possible in the digital age, what has change is how the people interact with such "subversive" media. While an artist may raise awareness though a film or criticize the government in a newspaper or zine, the work they produce remains static. If the state wanted to suppress it, they merely had to arrest its creator and criminalize the distribution and possession of their work. The digital age has upended this completely. Not only is it harder to suppress and censor information that can be shared hundreds of times beyond borders, but there is no longer a singular commodity that can be identified and, therefore, criminalized. Digital spaces are not static, but fluid landscapes that move at the pace of highly-interconnected global human interaction.

For the first time in history, we have a space and a means to communicate instantaneously across borders and culture. Such ease of communication not only makes creating and sharing art and information much easier, but allows for radical transformations within our language and how we contextualize our surroundings. The most prominent example I can think of is how we conceptualize gender, where in the past five years our language has adapted to include words inclusive of non-binary and gender queer people around the world. Now concepts like they/them pronouns are becoming the norm in everyday spaces, like schools and workspaces, something that would not have been possible without the internet. The changing of norms used to be a slow process, often relying on social movements gaining visibility through institutions of media and a gradual journey to societal acknowledgment and acceptance. Internet changes all of this, where we as netizens now drive the movements and gain visibility through other netizens. Gone are the days where movements had to rely on news broadcast and reporting to have their message heard, where even then the messages of the movement can easily be misconstrued against them.

Broken Harmony further demonstrates that this is no longer the case. Even in the United States, Ze is still able to publish and share information about China from her laptop in New York. Typing directly in Chinese, her messages are bound to not only reach a Chinese audience, but resonate with members of the global Chinese diaspora. Instead of hiding from government agents or defending herself on state media, Ze is free to write to an audience whose access to her work isn't prescribed; an audience whose interest stems from their status as a netizen in a global digital landscape, not bound by any singular border.

I see Good Bye, Lenin! and Broken Harmony as complimentary pieces of media. Both films follow people from countries that were seen as the foil to Western society during their respective times. Both take place at the dawn of a new era, where the fall of walls (both literal and metaphorical) has flooded these countries with commodities and imagery from an outside world once unattainable. Finally, both films ask the question of what does it mean to define oneself in the coming of this new age. For Alex, it was providing his mother solace in her last days before coming to terms with the new Germany he finds himself in. For Ze, I believe her journey is more nuanced. China's current political climate is not tied to division by a wall. In fact, if the end of the Cold War was meant to be some hypothetical "end of history" where capitalism and liberal democracy reign supreme for decades to come, then China shows that we are merely just in a new chapter of history. There is no wall to tear down, no new system to introduce. As the end of the film makes clear, China's rise to an economic superpower has put the West in a difficult position where they risk losing an important trading partner if they become too critical of its current human rights situation.

Yet, Ze's situation is ultimately not the same as the fictional Alex. Westernization has meant that those in the Global South as well as the former Soviet Bloc had an identity to adopt that was easy to recognize and commodify. The same cannot be said about digitalization. While associated with certain imagery, the internet is abstract and often absurd. Meme culture, tweets, Youtube videos, and any other digital platform might have their own methods of how users operate within them, but the content itself is diverse and impossible to define by any single image or idea. The digital art of Miao Ying, with all of its supposed quirks and randomness, is a perfect example of the abstract nature of digital landscapes. Like Ying's work, digital spaces often feel dreamlike. We are somehow able to grasp their rules and interact with them, but they never take the form of the physical. Somehow, we are still able to convey emotions and ideas through them by utilizing these spaces to their fullest potential, no longer confined by the physical limitations of the analogue. A newspaper or film may depict and communicate any set of images or ideas, but once produced they are ultimately static, only living on through the attention of its audience. In these digital spaces, we find ourselves in a realm as fluid as identity itself, where expression and communication simply have no bounds. It's a space where activists like Ze continue to write and advocate for a better China, where artists like Ying poke fun while making a statement, and where we find ourselves part of a community not prescribed to us but created by us. A realm where a new identity has emerged, yet will never become locked in stasis.