In Jia Zhangke's Still Life, there is a quintessential "spiritual punk" character—the dock worker nicknamed "Xiao Ma Ge" (Little Brother Mark). He's a punk in the literal sense too, with his dyed yellow hair.
I feel this character is profoundly important. He is a psychological archetype for an entire generation. In the film, he represents the ironic side of jianghu—the underworld code—with all his drama. But what makes the film remarkable is that through this "inversion," it ultimately returns to the "upright." The "upright" here means that in the end, his fate and all his drama fuse together, becoming authentic lived experience, becoming the history of an era. On the other hand, as a foil, he throws Han Sanming's jianghu into sharp relief, allowing us to finally see the real jianghu.
Xiao Ma Ge is probably a dropout teenager from Fengjie. When Sanming arrives at the small inn, Ma Ge is inside watching a movie. He asks Sanming for a cigarette, then lights it with newspaper—imitating Chow Yun-fat lighting cigarettes with hundred-dollar bills. If you know Hong Kong cinema, you'll immediately recognize the double parody and irony. In Hong Kong films, Tony Leung Ka-fai once imitated Chow Yun-fat's move and then hastily patted out the flame because he didn't have enough cash. So from his very first appearance, Xiao Ma Ge is framed in irony—this yellow-haired kid dressed like Chow Yun-fat in a crisp white shirt, everyone on the dock calling him "Xiao Ma Ge." It's all drama, all "inverted." This kind of irony often produces a purely comical figure, but Xiao Ma Ge is not so simple a counter-character. Then, in the film's timeline, "Xiao Ma Ge" follows Binbin around the docks, "settling scores"—meaning brawling. Then he gets stuffed into a woven sack and dumped by the river, only his head sticking out, rescued by Han Sanming. At a tavern (a very jianghu tavern—square tables, Shanxi Fenjiu liquor), over drinks, Xiao Ma Ge says: "Today's society isn't right for us—we're too nostalgic." He asks Sanming to call his phone so we hear his ringtone: "Wandering, drifting." This is still shot in reverse—ironic. But the irony doesn't make you laugh out loud; it makes you smile in recognition. Plenty of people born in the '70s and '80s did exactly this—learning from Hong Kong movies to make their way in the world. As the audience, we understand perfectly well that within the parodic form there lies a real jianghu—real survival struggles, greenwood ethics, brotherhood, love and hatred. And precisely because there's a real jianghu underneath, the parody isn't quite parody anymore, isn't quite hilarious.
I too walked the streets with my brothers, our swagger about as convincing as Jordan Chan singing "Superstar of a Chaotic World." Back then we had no idea that the grown-ups—the bigger people—saw us as idiots. But when we look back on our youth, because there was something genuine in it, there was actually nothing idiotic about it at all. Don't adults mimic the evening news when they take notes, applaud, give speeches, and raise a toast?
In the end, Xiao Ma Ge takes his brothers to handle some business, and gets beaten to death, buried under a pile of bricks. Han Sanming digs him out. Lays him on a bed board, covers him with a floral quilt, lights cigarettes as an offering, then carries him onto a boat for a river burial—the little boat drifts from here on out; what remains of this life is entrusted to the rivers and seas. The details are intensely dramatic—using cigarettes as incense sticks, for instance, which is fitting yet unmistakably parodic (also mimicking Hong Kong gangster films). The technique is inverted, the method dramatic, so why does it feel so right? Because all that drama has fused with the character's fate. The inverted contains the upright, and therefore the upright is real, and stands firm. Within an era, we truly do unfold our lives through imitating the era's idioms—especially all those dramatic imitations. Deep inside many of us from this generation lives a yellow-haired kid, because the world first revealed itself to us in exactly this way.
When we walked the jianghu, we had to light cigarettes, had to wander and drift, had to say "all men within the four seas are brothers," had to clink glasses with ferocity and bare our livers and gallbladders to each other (I personally never did this, but plenty did). When we first started doing these things, they were ironic, parodic, superficial. Later, they merged with our fates, became upright, became woven into our destinies, became history. When Han Sanming lights three cigarettes for Xiao Ma Ge and sees him off one last time, you cannot say he is not Xiao Ma Ge—at that moment, he is. And we have witnessed the entire process of the inverted becoming the upright. This process is the truth of art. On Han Sanming's side, he has his own jianghu with his fellow workers—a jianghu that's also built on sharing cigarettes and drinking. When they first meet, they ask: "How's the scenery along the way?" Is that dramatic or what? That's the "inversion." But by the end of the film, they walk together toward the Yangtze, toward Kuimen Gate, toward Hukou Falls, toward the ten-yuan and fifty-yuan bills—those landscapes are the pictures on their renminbi—walking toward their coal-mining fate, a fate in which they may well be buried in a mine shaft. At that point, is all that drama "upright" or not? Do you dare say their jianghu is not a real jianghu? And why speak the truth through inversion? Because sometimes genuine things can't be filmed straight. Film them straight, and they calcify; calcified, they become objectified. Han Sanming said in an interview that the goal was to depict "vulnerable groups." I deeply respect Sanming, but this framing unsettles me, because "vulnerable groups" objectifies the very life you're trying to portray. Objectification leads to conceptualization, which lacks real lived experience and can't penetrate as deeply.
In the film, we see "Xiao Ma Ge," we see Han Sanming—they are Xiao Ma Ge, they are Han Sanming. We see the epic within them; they themselves are a magnificent epic. They just happen to be "vulnerable groups"—but first, they are themselves. "Xiao Ma Ge" says: "There are no good people in Fengjie." But Jia Zhangke's Still Life reveals so many people, because these people carry something real within them, and so they truly are the good people of the Three Gorges. Watching this film, we can't help but feel a retrospective dread: if Jia Zhangke had not captured "Xiao Ma Ge," a part of an entire generation's spiritual world might have been lost forever.