In its turn, this naturally presupposes them to cooperate with each other, especially when it comes to facing the weather-induced hardships (such as the lack of water). The reason for this is apparent – those people who reside in the rural areas are utterly dependent on agriculture, as the mean of ensuring their physical survival. Apparently, the notion of ‘tradition’ is closely related to the notion of a ‘rural living’ (Zhang 465).
Given the fact that Liu’s clientele consisted of predominantly elderly individuals and the fact that his life-story implies that, before coming to live in Beijing, he was a rural-dweller, we are able to gain an in-depth insight into what can be considered the actual cause of people’s traditional-mindedness, as it can be seen in Shower. What is especially peculiar about how the film depicts Liu’s bathhouse, is that there appears to be the strongly defined atmosphere of an interpersonal intimacy between visitors – these people give each other massages and feel at ease while discussing a variety of different family-issues, as if they were close relatives. This simply could not be otherwise – the very ‘activity’ of spending long hours in the hot bathtub, while chatting with mind-likes, naturally enables one to lessen the acuteness of its life-impending unconscious anxieties. The reason for this is quite apparent – as this scene implies, people used to come to visit Liu’s bathhouse not only to cleanse their bodies but also to be able to socialize with one another (Shower 00.05.19).Īllegorically speaking, Liu’s bathhouse appears to have been helping its regular attendees to ‘purify’ their souls. The consequential scene, in which we get to observe the functioning of the family-operated bathhouse (ran by Old Liu) in Beijing, could not be more discursively incompatible with the earlier mentioned one. It is understood, of course, that the above-mentioned scene was meant to stress out what Zhang Yang believed to be the most distinctive aspect of ‘modernity’ – the fact that it causes people to grow increasingly alienated from what accounts for their sense of self-identity – hence, making them nothing short of ‘robots’, incapable of appreciating life to its fullest. Throughout the procedure, this man’s facial expression remains utterly unemotional, as if he was not much of a human, but rather a car at the auto-wash facility (Shower 00.01.33). In the first of them, we get to see a young Chinese man stepping into something that can be well described as an ‘automated shower booth’, where he is being thoroughly washed and ‘dried’, within a matter of five minutes. The idea that the film Shower is indeed about exposing the inconsistency between the ‘traditional ways’ of China, on one hand, and the process of this country becoming progressively affiliated with the ways of modernity, on the other, can be inferred from watching the film’s two initial scenes. ‘modernity’, and expounding on what can be considered this motif’s discursive significance. In my paper, I will aim to substantiate the validity of this suggestion at length, while outlining the specifics of how some of the film’s major characters relate to the motif of ‘tradition’ vs.
In its turn, this caused the Chinese society to become especially sensitive to what accounts for the dichotomy between ‘tradition’, on one hand, and ‘modernity’, on the other (Young and Deng 1441) – the idea that is being explored throughout the film’s entirety.