22 January 2010
Please Vote For Me (2007)
Please Vote For Me is a relatively unpretentious documentary by Weijun Chen about a school class in China holding a democratic election to appoint a new student to the class monitor position. The film’s narrative structure is of particular interest in how it withholds the notion (or perhaps I missed it) that Luo Lei, one of three 8-year-old’s nominated for the position, was the previous year’s school monitor. The other two students, Cheng Cheng and Xiaofei are “in it to win it”, and given I didn’t know they were up against incumbency, the most cunning of the three appeared to be Cheng Cheng who is positively Machiavellian in his manipulations of the students and their environment, all in a cuttthroat attempt to come out on top.
In the debates, Cheng Cheng reduces Xiaofei to an inarticulate mess with his heckling which is absolutely devastating to watch. Eugene had the insight that both the mother of Xiaofei (she is a school administrator who is present during many of the scenes in the school) and the teacher of the class were both exceptionally absent during this belittling: it just goes on and on, and Xiaofei’s mother essentially tells the little girl to suck it up while the teacher doesn’t intervene at all. It really points to how rigidly patriarchic (at least through the lens of this particular election) the Chinese government is. Equally interesting is how both men (Xiaofei’s mother is a divorcee), who should be role models, almost immediately corrupt the process the boys are attempting to participate in. Luo Lei’s father, upon hearing that Luo Lei fears a landslide to Cheng Cheng who appears to rouse a populist spirit in the class, immediately suggests that he use his position as police chief to get the children a free ride on the city’s monorail. Cheng Cheng’s step father encourages the boy’s manipulations, and gives him advice on how to cut down his opponents during the debates. (Cheng Cheng’s scenes at home, are quite delightful as he wears nothing but underwear, and runs about excitedly announcing his plans as Class Monitor to his parents, or fretting about the way Luo Fei has stolen the election, in spite of being a particularly cruel class monitor – he apparently ‘beats’ the students, and while the severity of this is never directly addressed, when Cheng Cheng addresses the class during the debate and asks who of the electorate has been beaten by Luo Fei, nearly everyone raises a hand).
I’m not particularly sure this has much to say about Democracy, so much as it has to say about China and students perceptions there of. Many reviews on IMDB suggest that it’s a telling portrayal of an innately corruptive process, but that seems to suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of perception, similarly to how an American simply cannot believe in Communism as a working system of government because of “mankind’s” (really American’s) born selfishness. These are cultured conditions that we cannot easily separate ourselves from, which is not to suggest that the Chinese (or any form of communism anywhere) government is not corrupt – a look at the recent attempts to hack into dissident’s email accounts would suggest otherwise – but rather an refactoring of our position. If we see Please Vote For Me as a dissertation on the corruption of Democracy and not just process, then we would have to see our government as closer to that of China’s than our own. Luo Fei’s father no less suggested the trip to the monorail to affect the democratic process, but to get his boy what he was entitled to as the previous year’s class monitor. Given his position as policeman, this sense of entitlement within a strict, patriarchal system makes a whole lot more sense than him being a Rovian mastermind of democratic juggling, which isn’t to say the former interpretation isn’t at all present: of course it is. And by that same logic, one has to see this same kind of disgusting populist manipulation in our own political system as less a by-product of Democracy than process, entitlement and power.
you forgot to tag this as
although i did not at first, i was really rooting for the fat kid in the underwear (cheng cheng) toward the end. i found luo lei to be grossly unqualified to be a public figure, someone who ruled primarly by force and pork barrel spending (the monorail class trip). he sort of reminded me of dub-yah bush—in that his father seemed to be driving his campaign, while he had very few ideas of his own. his own inability to articulate thoughts and think for himself also made luo seem like a puppet in his father’s need to extend his power into a third grade classroom. cheng cheng, despite the machialian tendencies, appeared to have a good balance of intelligence, conscience, and flaws. i particularly relished the scene when he shoos his mother into another room because he’s embarrassed to practice his speech in front of her—not because he was in his toony underwear, but simply because he didn’t feel like the speech was ready to be judged.