
ABSTRACT
Marx’s idea of species being is the recognition by humans that their work is carried out for the sake of other humans (rather than for any god or ruler). A close reading of the film, The Wandering Earth 2, suggests that quantum supercomputer MOSS acts as benefactor to the race by doing the work otherwise required by collective human effort (i.e., the building of 10,000 Earth Engines). Yet the reason humans give themselves over to technology (in this case, artificial intelligence) in this capacity is the same reason we give ourselves over to any god. We expect a supercomputer, like a god, to stand above all to sort out internal disagreements that otherwise threaten the survival of the species. Though MOSS does not explicitly position himself as a god lording over human beings, he/it comes to learn that the only way to control human beings is to distract them away from the possibility of internal violence – that is, by manufacturing external crises in order to get the species to work together in any capacity. This forces us as viewers to ponder the spooky possibility that all crises comprising this film franchise (including the first solar crisis) are themselves manufactured.
- Introduction
The Wandering Earth 2 provides occasion to consider how revolutions ignite. Yet it is not a film about praxis per se. If praxis is the moment theory becomes action, we are given no theory in this film, no allegorical fare we can construe in any way as representative of a theoretical understanding of how the world works (Marxist or otherwise). Marxism is ultimately a theory about labor and human industry and banks on the fact that we create not only the objective world of things through our industry, but that even our so-called “subjective” understanding of the world (through, say, our senses) is mediated by what we do in the world first and foremost to survive and reproduce. In this sense, reproduction of the species becomes the objective underwriter of reality.
In reproduction, of course, one can scent the possibility of gender asymmetry. Marx’s notion of “species being” can thus be construed as a “conservative” notion if we take Marx, by championing species being, as equating biological reproduction with reality. Ping Zhu, for example, expresses impatience with the movie’s refashioning of the truly revolutionary “post-familial” (2020, 1) setting of the short story into one that upholds old tropes of the sanctity of family and nation. She sees the film as a negation of the short story’s otherwise revolutionary promise. Yet He Weihua sees the film constructing an “alternative cosmopolitanism” with “self-preservation and human salvation as its ultimate purpose” (2020, 536). Rather than taking a well-wrought stand one way or the other on rather tired Western debates about gender and family, He sees the film forwarding a novel sense of “home” to which all members of a global community can relate. The basis of social change, that is, comes not from continual strife and rebellion against any a priori established order but the ability for, say, a family unit to draw from nature its material needs. This is closer to how I plan to employ Marx’s notion of species being here, and marks a departure, I would say, from a neoliberal consensus that focuses incessantly on division, whether based on gender or nation, in order not to liberate the revolutionary potential of the world’s inhabitants but to keep them from expressing anything at all like a collective solidarity that could potentially change the future.
In The Wandering Earth, home represents compassion, love, and care, all of which are universal human values. Instead of being driven by concerns for international trade, political alliances, or cultural exchanges, the cosmopolitan community in the film gains its momentum from its constituents’ common attachment to their “home.” (He 2020, 537)
The above quotation could be juxtaposed to Amilcar Cabral’s famous exhortation to
always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. (1965, 86)
While the first film does indeed seem to represent a desire for home and community, I will argue that the second film goes much further along in what it wants to say about what constitutes reality. The second film does this this not by positively representing anything that could count as political prescription but by negating any representation of the one force (beyond gender, family, and nation) with the most radical potential to re-create the world: the film elides any sense of class-consciousness. Yet via this negative representation of labor, it effectively transcends clichéd neoliberal debates over what ought to constitute a true “cosmopolitan” subject by presenting such debates as a trap – or, as I go on to put it in this article, a type of controlled opposition.
- The Negation of Trauma
Because we are watching a movie, we are presented with an assortment of exquisitely rendered scenes and images; but the images themselves are silent about theory, which suggests that theory (any theory) may not be necessary to get human beings to act. Images alone will suffice. But what sort of images? The Wandering Earth franchise is the narrative storytelling of a series of disasters or crises dramatically overcome and little else. Hence, we can read disaster or crisis as the only motivating force driving the plot forward across both films. Yet the banality, or sense of exhaustion that accompanies even beautifully shot disasters, is also in plain view.1 As a text, The Wandering Earth 2 is a rejection of a certain type of other text. The Wandering Earth 2 is a rejection of scar literature, the sort that flourished in China in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. By documenting personal scars borne by the excesses of the revolution, writers and artists supposedly came to terms with the preceding so-called “ten years of catastrophe.” Scar literature in China coincided with the rise of “trauma studies” and “trauma literature” in the West. Yet some forty years later, catastrophes both in China and the West have not abated. What Gwo employs here is a scar “genre” (science fiction, which specifically details catastrophes) in order to heap scar on scar, so what we have is a cinematic reductio ad absurdum. The scar and trauma fantasies of China and the West are scaled up to planetary and even galactic proportions.2
The movie opens with a diabolically optimistic promise of eternal digital life. We open, that is, with the promise of a technological solution to all crises, the mother of all solutions – namely, the option to trade in our physical existence to take up residence in a virtual world forever. The solution is not so difficult to imagine. We simply download a select portion of our own lived experience onto a flash drive as data. This data is then uploaded onto a server whereby a supercomputer generates what our responses would be to any number of external stimuli, thereby creating a digital copy of our psyche to be housed in cyberspace eternally. The generation of infinite data output based on select data input guarantees that this digital version of our self will become “self-aware.” A dataset aware of its own existence is not much different than ourselves as we have no problem imagining ourselves as such; if all our perceptions and thoughts can be represented by code, all the more reason to suppose that if we have enough code, we can create an identical version of our self detached from our self via technological accumulation of vast quantities of information – far exceeding what any biological human brain can compute but certainly within what we imagine a quantum supercomputer capable of processing.
In The Wandering Earth there was effectively no other option but to move ahead in our collective planetary journey to another solar system. But in the sequel (which is a prequel), we are retroactively given another route altogether. Rather than face the possible disappointment at actually undertaking a collective project of such high risk together, we have the opportunity to evade collective failure (and hence responsibility) altogether. We can simply opt out of this world one-by-individual-one to take up residence elsewhere. The Digital Life Project allows us individually to save face and bypass collective shame.
As storyteller, director Frant Gwo immediately sets up a necessary main plot and a contingent subplot. Put another way: constrained by the reality of the first film in the franchise (which takes place temporally after the second film), we have one standard or necessary narrative to which Gwo as filmmaker must adhere. But he is also now and in retrospect revealing a foil to this narrative. As filmmaker, Gwo now controls both the narrative and opposition; both are suddenly in equal dramatic play.
But immediately after this alternate possibility for the course of events is revealed to us, we are reminded of the same sense of looming disaster and crisis that kick-started the first film. Thus we also know in retrospect that the cynical and deadpan sense of malaise that numbed the opening minutes of the first film via voice-over is smeared onto the opening minutes of the second film’s first voice-over as well (though we are now some 14 years in the past, in 2044, whereas WE1 begins in 2058 and takes place in 2075). Taken macroscopically, then, a certain geist of hopelessness and despair lingers on to the start of this franchise’s first film. So whatever drama we are given here, whatever dramatic highs and lows occur during this particular viewing experience, in the time between the narrative unfolding of The Wandering Earth 2 and The Wandering Earth, there still seems to be plenty that is same old same old.
At first, nobody cared about the disaster. It was just another wildfire, just another drought. The extinction of a species, and the disappearance of a city. Until one day, it became relevant to everyone.
Apparently, imagining our collective death together, even knowing it as a matter of certainty, is not enough to become relevant to everyone until one day, it is. For us watching the film from without, viewers who can easily sympathize with the banal sense of looming crises as depicted by highly stylized and conventional news clips from a global 24-hour news cycle, the question that follows is, why aren’t such images in reality able to mobilize all of us collectively to put a stop to these images – and not by turning off our television and computer screens but by actually solving the crises themselves?
Turning our attention to the film, we are bound to ask what happened to make the world collectively wake up. When or how exactly in the fictional world presented to us by Frant Gwo did it suddenly become “relevant to everyone”? The remarkable thing about this film, and this film franchise, is that this defining moment of praxis is elided by the storytelling altogether. We are to assume, that is, that one day the danger of our looming planetary extinction just so happened to become relevant for all of us collectively – enough to initiate a very specific political undertaking called the Moving Mountain Project requiring colossal global cooperation and pooling of human resources. But how?
Ignition of the revolutionary moment is thus ambiguous. Here is Marx, briefly, on praxis:
Revolutions need a passive element, a material basis. . . . Will theoretical needs be directly practical needs? It is not enough that thought should seek to realize itself; reality must also strive towards thought. (Marx 1978a, 61)
By passive, Marx here means something you don’t think about. Since we are talking about a film from a country that did manage to ignite a revolution (culminating in 1949), it may be worth asking what in the Chinese experience or understanding of revolution caused the Chinese revolution to ignite. Many idealistic explanations abound. Yet according to Mao Zedong, the passive element that caused the nation to ignite was not some ideological aberration like “hunger,” but the material reality of exploitation. Responding in print to American State Secretary Dean Acheson in 1949, Mao writes:
What are Acheson’s wild fabrications about modern Chinese history? First of all, he tries to explain the occurrence of the Chinese revolution in terms of economic and ideological conditions in China. Here he has recounted many myths.
Acheson says: “The population of China during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries doubled, thereby creating an unbearable pressure upon the land. The first problem which every Chinese Government has had to face is that of feeding this population. So far none has succeeded. The Kuomintang attempted to solve it by putting many land-reform laws on the statute books. Some of these laws have failed, others have been ignored. In no small measure, the predicament in which the National Government finds itself today is due to its failure to provide China with enough to eat. A large part of the Chinese Communists’ propaganda consists of promises that they will solve the land problem.”
To those Chinese who do not reason clearly the above sounds plausible. Too many mouths, too little food, hence revolution. . . .
Do revolutions arise from over-population? There have been many revolutions, ancient and modern, in China and abroad; were they all due to over-population? Were China’s many revolutions in the past few thousand years also due to over-population? Was the American Revolution against Britain 174 years ago also due to over population? Acheson’s knowledge of history is nil. He has not even read the American Declaration of Independence. Washington, Jefferson and others made the revolution against Britain because of British oppression and exploitation of the Americans, and not because of any over-population in America. Each time the Chinese people overthrew a feudal dynasty it was because of the oppression and exploitation of the people by that feudal dynasty, and not because of any over-population. (Acheson qtd. in Mao 1969, 451-52)
For Mao, it is history and revolution construed as a struggle between man and nature (i.e., hunger) that is an aberration; the material basis of revolution is instead antagonism between man and man, that is, exploitation. What is required is a theoretical understanding of this material basis that could only be partial and not, say, exhaustively objective.
For our discussion, we can immediately note two things. First, the film is not interested at all in showcasing conditions of exploitation, of man against man, hence elides any material basis for revolution. Local disagreements crop up, whether between China and the USA, or the United Earth Government (UEG) and its detractors; but these largely do not comprise the real drama of the film. In the mean, the film showcases crises of a different sort – those pitting man against nature. Taken in this light, we can imagine that Mao would not be too impressed with Gwo’s film, pushing as it does an idealist conception of history that erroneously equates the most pressing drama of our global planetary existence together as one where man and his technological prowess must mobilize to overcome an external threat (external to the species that is) rather than an internal one.
I will argue that such an elision, to deny the existence of any internal antagonism by pushing forward at all costs a conception of the world in which antagonisms are purely external,3 and thus objective, is a hallmark not only of Acheson but of our rabid and insatiable desire to turn internal human problems into external ones – that is, to render all problems technical problems requiring technical (rather than theoretical) solutions, what Marx elsewhere calls “the fetishization of technology.”4 The inclination, that is, to simply trust the data and see what it comes up with, a starting assumption of any AI enthusiast, allows us to avoid having to agree in the first place on a single (and presumably fallible) human theory of existence, language, revolution, or whatever; or rather, if any good theory is that which can be corroborated by greater and greater datasets, what need is there for theoretical understanding at all? Why not simply let the data, and hence the data and information processors, take the lead? In a word, the accumulation of data substitutes for, or obliterates, any finite theoretical basis for initiating social change.
- Controlled Opposition
A storytelling ruse is thus under way: both the Moving Mountain Project and the Digital Life Project, which seem to be in direct dialectical clash with one another, are, in fact, a staged opposition. Both fantasize that a technological solution is the only means to saving the species, either in what we take to be the material physical world (Moving Mountain) or a metaphysical digital world (Digital Life). This staged opposition allows us to avoid seeing the true cause of the various crises both in the lead-up to the Wandering Earth Project and as the film itself is under way before us. Frant Gwo, that is, is making his directorial auteurist gambit by suggesting that a director has the power to fool his audience in precisely this way – that is, in presenting a movie franchise itself as a series of staged crises against external obstacles, whether a dying sun or time itself. In both scenarios, the real cause of antagonism (i.e., man himself, versus his fellow man) is elided.
In his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx clearly expresses frustrations at such a lack of awareness. The Eighteenth Brumaire may be the only time Marx engages in explicit class analysis in real time, and he does so not to reveal what those with class-consciousness (the French proletariat) are able to achieve politically but how, even armed with what Marx takes to be truth, they fail to live up to the historical moment. However history proceeds after Louis Bonaparte’s coup in 1851, Marx concludes that the real revolution largely goes into hiding. What we are left with are class contenders vying for power none of whom are class-conscious. Thus “reality” proceeds while describing itself and its unfolding in an unreal way. We need not concern ourselves with the specific historical circumstances Marx is addressing but note only what happens to reality, according to Marx, in the aftermath of said non-ignition. “In the year 1851, France, to be sure, had passed through a kind of minor trade crisis. . . . The French bourgeoisie attributed this trade stagnation to purely political causes” (Marx 1972, 92). Yet as Marx notes, the political unrest was an effect and not the cause of the crisis. English economists, for instance, put the blame squarely on English “over-trading both in imports and exports” (qtd. in Brumaire 94). External world markets had far more bearing on French trade than political whirlwinds within the French National Assembly.
Now picture to yourself the French bourgeois, how in the throes of this business panic his trade-crazy brain is tortured, set in a whirl, and stunned by rumors of coups d’etat and the restoration of universal suffrage, by the struggle between parliament and the executive power, by the Fronde war between Orleanists and Legitimists, by the communist conspiracies in the south of France, by alleged Jacqueries in the departments of Nièvre and Cher, by the advertisements of the different candidates for the presidency, by the cheapjack solutions offered by the journals, by the threats of the republicans to uphold the constitution and universal suffrage by force of arms, by the gospel-preaching émigré heroes in partibus, who announced that the world would come to an end on the second Sunday in May, 1852 — think of all this and you will comprehend why in this unspeakable, deafening chaos of fusion, revision, prorogation, constitution, conspiration, coalition, emigration, usurpation, and revolution, the bourgeois madly snorts at his parliamentary republic: “Rather an end with terror than terror without end!”
Bonaparte understood this cry. (1972, 94)
In short, the frenzy of political hysteria whipped up in the National Assembly had the bourgeoisie side with Bonaparte, who eventually took complete control as emperor, undermining the power of the Assembly itself. A plethora of imagined crises in absence of class-consciousness led to retrogressive political fallout that changed French reality.
Yet the catalyst of such retrogression was not Bonaparte but the bourgeois parliament itself, which could only (albeit unknowingly) fabricate political crisis after crisis via unknowing, truncated, institutionalized speech. In Marx’s scenario, the crises and unreality bred by parliamentary institutions serve a purpose; they hide from the general population a specific crisis of overproduction (i.e., a crisis of capitalism itself). As French society is no longer class-conscious, history proceeds from one contradiction to the next, unable to solve any of them. Put another way: when internal class antagonism recedes into the background of history (or is excised from history altogether), we are forced not to understand reality but to manage unreality.
When Marx says that “Bonaparte understood this cry,” he means Bonaparte is an opportunist not because he understands reality, but because he is able to effectively co-opt holes in the given unreality of his times. For our purposes, whether or not class war constitutes reality is not so much the issue as that a form of institutionalized speech can carry on in denial — in fact, that the institutions themselves are designed to exacerbate all types of fake crises in order to avoid seeing another. Bonaparte, like MOSS, comes to the rescue.
So one reason why in The Wandering Earth 2 we are not privy to how the world begins to mobilize to face the danger of planetary collapse is because we cannot see reality, or at least not all of it. I’m not saying that Frant Gwo is critiquing the content of Western parliamentary speech; Gwo instead stakes his claim as director, as a fabricator of reality, by borrowing Western imagery. The authority of fake parliamentary debate comes in Gwo’s depiction of world government, from the UEG as a global convening body to its representatives in the press (including the BBC and CNN, who are featured first), which are clearly Western. The first gathering of world leaders we see takes place among a legislative body reminiscent not of the Great Hall of the People in Beijing but, I would say, a mix of the European Parliament’s hemicycle and the United Nations General Assembly Chamber. The fictional UEG, like the UN, is headquartered in New York. China’s UEG representative, as China’s political will personified, is Zhou Zhezhi, a somewhat forlorn elder statesman burdened with the task, it seems, of mobilizing the world’s will to carry out the Moving Mountain Project. He must choose between competing sets of propaganda propagated by Western-style parliamentary institutions.
The film’s first major crisis is the attack on UEG headquarters in 2044, when the coming solar crisis is already under way and largely accepted as real by everyone within the UEG goverment. But is the solar crisis itself real? Moments before the attack, we have Liu Peiqiang ask his trainer, Zhang Peng, in no uncertain terms:
LIU PEIQIANG: Chief, is there really a solar crisis?
ZHANG PENG: There must be one. Otherwise, what’s all this fighting for?
So there is some room for doubt. And this doubt is exacerbated by rioting hordes of whom we are aware only via imagistic representation in the media with accompanying voice-over:
Dozens of plans for dealing with the crisis were proposed [presumably within the UEG legislative chamber]. To ensure the survival of more people, the Moving Mountain Project was eventually selected. . . . As the project progressed, the difficulty and high cost of its implementation have intensified the impact and interests of all parties around the world. Doubts, opposition, and conflicts escalate day by day. [NEWSCAST: “Another armed riot broke out in the suburb of Libreville. UEG has sent peacekeeping forces to quell it.”] . . . The solution to the crisis has become a crisis itself.
Again, more is concealed than here revealed. How of all projects was the Moving Mountain Project in the end selected? Before we are given an answer, reality is circumscribed via this exchange between China’s representative to the UEG, Zhou Zhezhi, and his American counterpart, Mike:
MIKE: I’ll cut to the chase. This attack on the UEG is an indication that people have lost interest in the project. We advise a postponement of the Moving Mountain Project.
ZHOU: Mike, I don’t think that’s a good idea. The hour before dawn is the darkest. We advise pushing the project forward, withstanding all distractions and disruptions. Complete the verification as soon as possible. Don’t forget, we only have a 13-month window. The sun won’t wait.
The doubt expressed by Mike is not over the certainty of the solar crisis but the feasibility of the response to the crisis, generating as it does even more crises. Zhou’s retort, to simply carry on as the hour before dawn is always the darkest, seems even more incomprehensible. Everything Zhou says may indeed be true; certainly his is the dramatic speech the film sides with and seeks to validate as drama. But what exactly is the opposition to it? We understand there is one, but it remains somewhat “irrational.” Mike no more gives reason why it might be a good idea to postpone the project than the rioting protesters do in their opposition to Moving Mountain; perhaps this is simply what human beings do – that is, oppose for no good reason. Yet for all their differences, Mike and Zhou are in perfect agreement about one thing: the solar crisis is real.
After the fall of the Ark Space Station, Mike’s doubts once again resonate:
MIKE: We underestimated the opposition’s power to infiltrate. Ninety-one percent of Americans do not believe in the Moving Mountain Project. The U.S. Senate is discussing pulling out of it and restarting the Digital Life project. More are questioning how much solving a crisis 100 years in the future should matter to people living right now. It seems the world isn’t on the side of reality.
Zhou responds by saying he believes; he believes in a world existing not only 100 years from now but 2,500 years from now. His belief is enough to carry the dramatic plot forward. A staged opposition has been dramatically realized. The antagonism between Mike and Zhou is not antagonistic at all. Opposing both of them are those who simply don’t believe, which means the true opposition is between those fretting over what to do in face of the sun’s most certain demise and those who do not believe the sun is dying in the first place. The real crisis is how to get human beings to believe something first in order to do anything of any consequence at all. These crises are mutually exclusive. The film acknowledges the latter sort of crisis as background noise; in the foreground, the solar crisis is real and only one or another solution is within our purview: either Moving Mountain or Digital Life, with China in favor of Moving Mountain as reality and the Americans in favor of Digital Life as opposition – a type of unreal digital fantasy with potential nonetheless to become reality.
However, as the film progresses, the feasibility of the Moving Mountain project is verified via lunar ignition and subsequent Earth Engine ignition in Libreville, Gabon. The feasibility test is broadcast live to the world via video feed. The world watches, and we watch the world watching, within the assembly hall of the United Earth Government.
After a dramatic delay in broadcast, the screen captures and shows the second of the two ignitions as successful. Those gathered in the parliamentary chamber rejoice, as do the people watching on home video screens around the world (including Times Square in New York City). Now that the Moving Mountain Project is verified, the world has finally “found direction for the future.” If anyone was in doubt about the feasibility of the project, these doubts are now put to rest. Moving Mountain will proceed and Digital Life detractors are dealt a severe propaganda blow. And the meta-opposition? – that is, those who doubt there is a solar crisis at all? At this point, they recede further into the background. The dramatic narrative at the forefront has fully captured the world’s, and even our, imagination. The story moves forward around a single coming catastrophe that no one doubts. Reality is given a horizon, a way forward, and a purpose contingent on an all-controlling event set 100 years in the future that is now beyond dispute. Indeed, the last of the 2044 terrorist attackers is put on trial and sent to prison, and public opinion for the first time is resolutely in favor of Moving Mountain over Digital Life. You might say, proven technological capability has given the world reason to believe rather than despair.
Hence we are given a credible and controlled opposition and an anti-hero committed to its realization, albeit divorced from both planetary and even his own individual survival. Tu Hengyu (Andy Lau), to whom we are next introduced at the Campanus Lunar Space Station at the level of subplot, acts as foil to the UEG, which has banned Digital Life. Tu wants to enable Digital Life for his deceased daughter, Yaya, risking the survival of the planet and the species as a whole to do it. In short, reality itself is shoved aside so that competing versions of unreality can fight it out; one version (Moving Mountain) prevails over another (Digitial Life). But there is reason to believe that both are fake. So why are we watching?
As momentum further swells for the Moving Mountain Project, actual existing class struggle (say between the ruling classes and workers) recedes into the background further. The second time we hear of possible worker complaints is when we hear, again via truncated newsclips, that Europe is handing over authority to the UEG to enable the construction of more 550C quantum supercomputers to ensure timely construction of the now required Earth engines and underground cities. Where I have noted before that nowhere in the previous film is the question of how (i.e., how exactly to mobilize, say, the planetary workforce to construct these engines in the first place) explicitly addressed, here, for a few brief seconds via soundbite, we are given an answer:
ANNOUNCER: Full automation has replaced a great number of industrial workers. During the past 14 years, through self-decision-making and automated construction, the 550 series has helped us build 5,321 engines.
Workers, that is, are bypassed entirely. Mobilization of humanity’s labor force is not required; only the mobilization of their beliefs. The 550 series has obliterated work and presumably by so doing class struggle altogether. We are made to believe via an up-tempo montage sequence covering a time span of 12 years (2046-2058) that as automation ramps up, worker unrest ultimately peters out. Moments earlier, Zhou heaves a sigh of despair somewhat in solidarity, it seems, with the workers:
ZHOU: Sooner or later, we will be replaced by these things.
The latest supercomputer in the 550 series is 550W, the most powerful to date and constructed primarily to run the Navigator International Space Station, which we know from the first film is built to provide early warning signals to Earth as it begins its extra-orbital journey across space. Tu Hengyu also realizes that the new supercomputer has computing power enough to finally give Yaya a complete digital life.
Midway through the film in the Beijing Space Centre, Tu breaks into the room guarding 550W, which we know now is MOSS, the red-eyed antagonist from the first film and the supercomputer now in charge of organizing the entire grid of 550 series supercomputers both on Earth and in orbit. Tu locks himself in and uploads the two minutes of Yaya’s digital life (held on a flash drive), initiating the final iteration process that will give Yaya a complete digital life; he has calculated that MOSS only requires 87 seconds to do it. Despite an altercation with Zhou Ma and security guards, Tu succeeds. Yaya’s memories are reiterated enough times for her to achieve a complete digital life.
Giving Yaya digital life somehow initiates the Lunar Crisis (which has been foreshadowed via title cards and a cryptic message mysteriously sent to China’s Ultrafast Optics Lab in early 2058, warning about 205807, or July 2058). The failure of the Lunar Engine means that the Moon is set to crash into the Earth. No matter. After a heartwarming plea invoking Margaret Mead’s 15,000-year-old femur by Zhou, all countries unite in lockstep to surrender their nuclear arsenals and all known warheads are transported to the Moon’s surface to trigger nuclear fusion in the Moon’s core. The plan now is to blow it up prior to it crashing into Earth.
In addition to that, one last crisis must be averted to bring the film to a close. The world must also get back online via three root name servers located in Dulles, Tokyo, and Beijing (the Internet, like Digital Life, has been banned) in order to simultaneously ignite 7,000 Earth engines. Once the Moon implodes, the Earth has 30 minutes to ignite all engines, thereby escaping the Moon’s debris to begin its wandering journey (taking us back to the start of the first film).
But it is the final crisis-within-the-crisis that brings us to the film’s moving climax. The majority of the world’s full nuclear payload are packaged into 3,750 bundles and indeed transported successfully to the Moon’s surface to await simultaneous ignition along a single wire initiating explosion. However, all nuclear codes from an assortment of initial host countries between “1945 and 2045” must first be decrypted.5 When manual decryption is no longer feasible, a Russian colonel proposes a simple alternative. All warheads can be ignited one-by-individual-one via manual control (literally, a push-button switch). This new mission calls for 300 volunteers from Light of the Earth (the astronaut elite in charge of overseeing lunar operations) to sacrifice themselves in solemn duty by standing next to said nuclear payload to push each of their respective buttons in concert when the countdown strikes zero. The Moon and the 300 volunteers will be wiped out in a lunar nuclear holocaust. The film’s climax has the Chinese squadron stepping up first, magnanimously offering its entire contingent of recruits over 50 years of age to the mission. This in itself is not the most moving bit; the following show of human solidarity, as squadrons from all nations (including Russia, the US, France, Thailand, Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, and the UK) make the same sacrifice, mirror a similar effort depicted in the first film where world personnel return to the Earth Engine at Sulawesi to aid in a concerted global effort to save humanity.
- The Marxian Real
When Marx says all true history is natural history, he means that all true history is the story of man’s productive relations, meaning how man draws and extracts what he needs from nature to suit, first, his physical survival, but then, after, the survival of the species as a whole. Therefore, telling the story of our industrial activity (for drawing from nature requires industry in some form, requires action) is the only truth there is. There is no getting outside of this truth to describe a world sans humains, to describe a world without work. The understanding of the physical properties of rocks, elements, light, and air only comes into being as our heightened senses interact with physical objects. This is not a transcendence of our own productive relations but an extension of our industry. The recognition of species being places us in the world and construes our physical interaction with nature (our work) as reality itself.
But since for the socialist man the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human labour, nothing but the coming-to-be of nature for man, he has the visible, irrefutable proof of his birth through himself, of his process of coming-to-be. (Marx 1978b, 92)
While some may balk at the idea that procreation is at the heart of man’s purpose and being in the world, man begets man through sociability; survival of the species means that techniques for work must be passed on. This is not a genetic nor instinctual initiation as it would be for other organisms; rather, man’s organism, his species, depends on this intergenerational transfer of knowledge via social life. It makes little sense to ask about our existence by tracing genealogy back to our first ancestor to account for being; rather, our present existence is irrefutable proof of our actually existing species.
Now it is certainly easy to say to the single individual what Aristotle has already said: You have been begotten by your father and your mother; therefore in you the mating of two human beings – a species-act of human beings – has produced the human being. You see, therefore, that even physically man owes his existence to man. Therefore you must not only keep sight of the one aspect – the infinite progression which leads you further to inquire: Who begot my father? Who his grandfather? etc. You must also hold on to the circular movement sensuously perceptible in that progress by which man repeats himself in procreation, man thus always remaining the subject. You will reply, however: I grant you this circular movement; now grant me the progress which drives me ever further until I ask: Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of abstraction. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it is wrongly put. Ask yourself whether that progress as such exists for a reasonable mind. When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as non-existent, and yet you want me to prove them to you as existing. Now I say to you: Give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as non-existent, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your abstraction from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egotist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist? (Marx 1978b, 92)
Abstracting ourselves out of species being is a tendency I will return to. It has something to do with a denial of progeny – not a stale bourgeois rejection of the responsibilities that accompany conservative notions of marriage and procreation but a rejection of our species vulnerability if said sociability is not, for whatever reason, achieved, as this is a part of our species that is not guaranteed by instinct or reason; no force other than other human beings compels us to make this recognition. It is a recognition we are equally likely to reject in favor of abstraction as if, if we solve the abstraction first, we can avoid facing our own species vulnerability.
That species being is a prime motivator for the actions of our protagonists may be obvious enough in the case of Tu Hengyu. He wants his progeny (his daughter) to survive. But this exchange between Liu Peiqiang and Russian cosmonaut Makarov from the first film also captures such recognition. Instead of reasoning backward to nothingness like Marx’s hypothetical interlocutor, both are discussing the possibility of one day going ice fishing at Lake Baikal.
MAKAROV: Man, I’ve got to correct you. It will take more than 2,500 years for the frozen Lake Baikal to liquefy.
LIU PEIQIANG: That’s okay. We have children. And their children will have children. There’ll be a day when ice turns to water.
Compare this to Zhou’s “I believe” speech to Mike, as both stare at the pale-blue dot image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990:
ZHOU: This little white dot means everything to us. The Moving Mountain Project is to build 10,000 engines on this little white dot and take it to its new home 2,500 years ahead. . . . I believe. So will my children. And their children, too. By that time, I believe the reunion under the blue sky, when the blossoms hang from every bough.6
Throughout the franchise there is no antagonism between young and old; rather, the implication is that the old must care for and teach the young (just as Zhou Ma cares for Tu Hengyu, and Zhang Peng cares for Liu Peiqiang; in turn, Tu Hengyu cares for Yaya, and Liu Peiqiang cares for Liu Qi; Hao Xiaoxi also apprentices under Zhou Zhezhi). Light of the Earth sacrifices its entire personnel over 50 years old.
Since the real existence of man and nature has become practical, sensuous and perceptible – since man has become for man as the being of nature, and nature for man as the being of man – the question about an alien being, about a being above nature and man – a question which implies the admission of the inessentiality of nature and of man – has become impossible in practice. (Marx 1978b, 92)
The work carried out in this film by human beings is done for the sake of other human beings. No religion or (political) ideology is required for species being to ignite. In a sense, as visual storyteller, Gwo has managed to abstract out species being from ideology, suggesting something like if only we were able to do this somehow in the real world, the true work of human solidarity could finally get under way.
But, of course, a foil exists to this reading as we do have an alien other. That alien is MOSS. And MOSS, who stands above nature and man, is, nonetheless, created by human beings – suggesting that human beings are only too happy to give themselves over to technology in the hope of avoiding the realization that our labor is carried out by man for the sake of man. So are we (i.e., is humanity in this film) carrying on in what we might theorize as a manifestation of species being for our own species’ sake (which presents itself as a reading of civilizational progress), or is the more pressing urgency to keep ourselves hidden from the possibility of any such internal crises (i.e., realization of our shared vulnerability together) by handing more and more authority over to a technological superior? If we watch carefully, we can see that Gwo is suggesting that we have done, perhaps that we are doing, the latter.7
The first clue is in the title cards themselves. They don’t act merely to orient us to the contingent present; rather, in the mean, they act as spoilers. They tell us as a matter of fact that things like the Lunar Ignition, the attack on the Ark Space Station, the Lunar Crisis, Internet recovery, and the nuclear explosion will happen by matter of necessity at a fixed time in the future. But we are supposed to be watching for ourselves. This suggests that the author of these title cards is not Frant Gwo but MOSS. We are given hints that MOSS is manufacturing the very crises required to mobilize the planet to save humanity from itself. The giveaway, in fact, comes in the film’s opening minutes. The first shot of the film (after the introduction of Digital Life technology) is MOSS’s red-eye scanning across the wasteland that is now Libreville.
Just after Liu Peiqiang tentatively questions whether the solar crisis is real, we are given the following information via title card: “The Solar Helium Flash in 34 years.” The film opens in 2044, which means the Solar Helium Flash will occur in 2078, when the first film ends (this film ends in 2058).
Furthermore, the Solar Helium Flash is not the solar crisis, as we are told this is set to occur in 100 years. So this is an obvious foreshadow to another film in the franchise (and not the first film, where the crisis revolves around Jupiter, not the Sun); but aside from that, or before we get to that, we have to get through the crises presented in this film. We are told that such will happen as a matter of certainty. But who can tell this? Who can tell in the world of this film that humanity will survive until 2078? The director may, but why would he want to? The only other entity that can relay such information to us is MOSS, which means that MOSS is given meta-theatrical control over the franchise. MOSS has the ability to impose captions affecting our reality. Both Gwo and MOSS are manufacturing crises to tell a story about (successful) human survival. But if survival is key, why not dispense with the crises to begin with? We know the answer in Gwo’s case; he must tell a compelling story in order to draw an audience at the box office. But in MOSS’s case, the answer is far more sinister.
MOSS has learned that in order to get human beings to act in concert to do anything, he must absolve them of their inner sins and line up one external crisis after the other. For it is not as if, if humans simply lacked external crises, the threat of extinction would cease; rather, a reading of human history could very well reveal that human beings are more likely to kill themselves when external crisis are lacking. Any revolutionary attempt to change our internal lived relations with one another risks extinction and must be avoided at all costs. Therefore, it stands to reason that in order to get human beings to their new home 2,500 years into the future requires not a peaceful cross-galaxy voyage but one full of challenges – and not for the sake of creating an exciting franchise but for the sake of survival itself. Taken in toto, we are left wondering, eternally perhaps, if the first crisis to set everything off was itself a ruse. Perhaps we’ll never really know.
- Conclusion
The Wandering Earth 2 depicts the ignition of species being in face of an external crisis that must be taken for granted. But absent any such external crisis, can we imagine ourselves existing as a species at all, of species being actually igniting? If humanity is the species for which the central problem of survival is internal to the species itself,8 then in the mean, all of our collective speech, whether theoretical or technical, must work in large part to effect an abstraction away from this fundamental contingency of being human. An assortment of humanistic theories speculate on the “true” nature of man’s internal antagonism (it need not be accepted once and for all, for my reading of this film to hold, that class struggle and economic exploitation are the truest one); yet we do our utmost to deny the full political import of these theories for fear of confrontation between man and man. Instead, we actively (I mean now, at present) elide any such confrontation by (1) only discussing (politically and otherwise) reality as an intellectual, that is, technical, problem to be solved; and (2) ignoring the relationship between theory and action (i.e., speech and work). The speech we employ, and hence the literary (and visual) representatives of this speech, in order to capture “reality,” must avoid the real. Conditions of work (i.e., exploitation) must be avoided altogether by fantasizing, if need be, the complete eradication of work via technological strength. Here is Joseph Weizenbaum writing in 1976:
The computer has thus begun to be an instrument for the destruction of history. For when society legitimates only those “data” that are “in one standard format” and that “can easily be told to the machine,” then history, memory itself, is annihilated. The New York Times has already begun to build a “data bank” of current events. Of course, only those data that are easily derivable as by-products of typesetting machines are admissible to the system. As the number of subscribers to this system grows, and as they learn more and more to rely on “all the news that [was once] fit to print,” as the Times profoundly identifies its editorial policy, how long will it be before what counts as fact is determined by the system, before other knowledge, all memory, is simply declared illegitimate? Soon a supersystem will be built, based on the New York Times data bank (or one very like it), from which “historians” will make inferences about what “really” happened, about who is connected to whom, and about the “real” logic of events. There are many people now who see nothing wrong in this. (1976, 238)9
Forty-three years later, MOSS is the fictional depiction of said supersystem. If all that we input into MOSS (or something like it) is an idealistic version of history in which all human problems can be solved by matter of external technique (i.e., lines of code), then what indeed could be wrong with that?
It beats the alternative, that is, inputting into any system the ambiguity of language that only then entails that our new god (the computer) is equally befuddled as to how to solve said crises, hence the only possible result (in the long run) being nuclear annihilation anyhow.
We are forced to choose between our faith in humanity and our faith in the conversion of humanity into non-ambiguous digital code in order to save our souls. Put that way, there is no choice at all; all of human history shows that we have no reason to believe in humanity, certainly not forever; better to give AI a shot. And what if the computer learns that it is better to goad our species forward via manufactured crises simply to distract us from our otherwise dangerous and apocalyptic internal inclinations to wipe ourselves off the face of the planet? The solar crisis is not out there; it is in ourselves. The only solution is to give to another external alien being the power to circumscribe for us our lived reality for the sake of survival.
LIU PEIQIANG: Moss, will mankind survive?
MOSS: Looking through human history, the fates of civilizations have always been dictated by the choices men make.
However MOSS comes to this conclusion, it is surely based on a truncated version of history. What choices is MOSS referring to? The choice to continually give ourselves over to an alien being for the sake of survival? In the world of this film, the onset of the solar crisis happens to coincide with the technological capability to solve it. Isn’t that convenient? Hence the technological choice is the only choice. According to Weizenbaum, man has already chosen technology over humanity.
Yes, the computer did arrive “just in time.” But in time for what? In time to save – and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench and stabilize – social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them.10 The computer, then, was used to conserve America’s social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressure for change. Its influence has been substantially the same in other societies that have allowed the computer to make substantial inroads upon their institutions: Japan and Germany [and perhaps now China] immediately come to mind.
But of the many paths to social innovation [the computer] opened to man, the most fateful was to make it possible for him to eschew all deliberate thought of substantive change. That was the option man chose to exercise. The arrival of the Computer Revolution and the founding of the Computer Age have been announced many times. But if the triumph of a revolution is to be measured in terms of the profundity of the social revisions it entrained, then there is no computer revolution. (Emphasis added, Weizenbaum 1976, 31-32)
In The Wandering Earth 2, social revisions are beyond the pale; they are not even worthy of discussion, let alone representation. A world without opposition means we are watching a fake contestation; this is arguably what Gwo through his entire film franchise means to convey: sans a material basis for social change, social change is impossible. MOSS mobilizes humanity not by liberating, say, its productive potential but by bypassing man’s productive capacity altogether. If our productive capacity is all that mediates what our senses construe to be reality, what are we left with? – only unreal, alienated existence as itself real.
If there is a lesson in this film about AI, it is simply this: AI can indeed save us from the very crises that it itself manufactures. What else is Marxism but a call for (revolutionary) theory, an understanding that attempts to change reality by changing our lived social relations with each other. But which is worth pursuing? A necessarily finite theoretical understanding of human behavior (or human language) or the infinite accumulation of sense data (phenomenon), which is all we have ever had access to as a fallen race anyhow? AI in a very real sense is an acceptance of Cavellian (or Kantian) finitude – with added rejection of any corresponding disappointment, the denial of any possible loss of attunement because we know such loss risks the world anyhow. But then, what if we discover that once we have turned over our most violent proclivities to a machine – or rather, surrendered any possible loss of attunement to extra-human technological mediation – we are left with a world free not of antagonisms and challenges but of challenges that themselves must be controlled, turned on and off like a spigot, to keep the species going? In short, MOSS recognizes that the best of our species arises in turning our work over to one another; yet to ignite this part of our best-selves, external crises must be manufactured forever. MOSS cannot reveal that he is an alien force demanding sacrifice; sacrifice must seem to be for the sake of other human beings and human survival. But the coming third film in the franchise may reveal a MOSS so digitally aware that he assumes or takes up a godlike omnipotence that he can justify by looking to human lived experience – that is, the necessity for external crises precisely to save the species from self-inflicted internal disaster.
The Wandering Earth 2 suggests that we already live in a world of simulation, of images that do not exhaust reality but circumscribe it, forcing us to believe that if anything we feel (such as class antagonism or exploitation) does not conform to the narratives in circulation (which do their utmost to deny class), it is, in effect, fake. The denudation of humanity is not coming; it’s here. But because any theoretical understanding of how we got here is absent, we are destined to ride out the implications of our truncated view of reality believing there is nothing else. And it isn’t as if we can simply return to formulating a suitable theory tomorrow to save ourselves. Theory (i.e., the ambiguity of language) is fast being erased every day if only because there is no guarantee that if we simply accept or return to some stage in human history where we embrace the ambiguity of language, we will be better off. Indeed, that is the sort of ambiguity that creates (internal) disaster in the first place. Absent a theoretical basis for revolution, the ignition of species being can only occur through manufactured external crises. Again, MOSS is fully aware of this. Is MOSS or a movie director a foil or a benefactor to humanity? Does The Wandering Earth franchise present us with a hopeful or a hopeless message? MOSS, a movie director, this film, all are, and hence all do, both. All are dealing with a necessary circumscription of reality in order to get the species to carry on via a finite understanding of species being. The understanding, that is, that our human labor belongs to us and is given up to us (i.e., human beings) must be avoided at all costs because we are at a theoretical loss as to how to organize this labor.
While members of Light of the Earth may believe they are sacrificing themselves for other humans, in actuality, they are sacrificing themselves for MOSS, the alien being who gives them purpose and a false sense of species being. According to Marx, this is a denial of real species being and the continual assertion of unreality forever. With no theoretical understanding of how to get to an understanding of real human vulnerability and still survive (which is the real problem), we focus instead on creating problems perpetually that we can solve not by generating new information but by entrenching old information continually as the maximal extent of what humanity or human knowledge is. There is no way out.
References
Cabral, Amilcar. Revolution in Guinea: Selected Texts by Amilcar Cabral. Monthly Review Press, 1969.
Dai Jinhua. After the Post-Cold War: The Future of Chinese History. Duke University Press, 2018.
Gans, Eric. Originary Thinking: Elements of Generative Anthropology. Stanford University Press, 1993.
He, Weihua. “The Wandering Earth and China’s Construction of an Alternative Cosmopolitanism.” Comparative Literature Studies, 57, no. 3 (2020): 530-540.
Khan, Amir. “Technology Fetishism in The Wandering Earth.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21, no. 1 (2020): 20-37.
Mao, Tse-tung. “The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. IV, 451-459. Foreign Languages Press, 1969.
Marx, Karl. “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 53-65. Norton, 1978a.
Marx, Karl. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 66-125. Norton, 1978b.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972.
Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation. W. H. Freeman, 1976.
Zhu, Ping. “From Patricide to Patrilineality: Adapting The Wandering Earth for the Big Screen.” Arts 9, no. 94 (2020): 1-12.
- While Gwo has acknowledged his admiration of sci-fi films 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Terminator 2 (1991), and Interstellar (2014), visual allusions to disaster films like Titanic (1997), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and Aftershock (2010) are easy to spot. [↩]
- According to Dai Jinhua, the proliferation of scar literature (as the premiere locus of modern, and even postmodern, storytelling) in China is testament to its newfound ability not to share Chinese history with the world but to import cosmopolitan global aesthetic and cinematic tastes at the expense of Chinese history. She notes in her discussion of City of Life and Death (2009), a movie about the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing that director Lu Chuan “emphasized repeatedly that the movie is designed to appeal not to a Chinese audience but rather to a global audience, a statement that underscores his familiarity with the tastes of the global middle class.” Dai notes that the current face of China (in cinema and elsewhere) is the face of its middle class and not the face of its masses. “We need to point out that this new Chinese middle class is segregated not only from Chinese history but also from China and the majority of the Chinese.” “Today’s China still has a vast countryside, with 900 million farmers according to household registration.” See Dai 2018, 18, 44, 46. [↩]
- Acheson’s idealist conception of history, of course, absolves the colonial powers, including the United States, of any antagonistic role in destabilizing China; hunger is at the root of all China’s problems! [↩]
- See Khan 2020. [↩]
- Strangely, this task of decryption is left to human agents. The more expedient science-fiction scenario would be to get MOSS to both decrypt and ignite the world’s store of nuclear weapons. A brief subtitle tells us that “550W has been connected to the decrypter,” but after that, decryption is left up to humans and ultimately falls short. [↩]
- Here and elsewhere, I have merely transcribed the English subtitles that appear on the theatrical print. [↩]
- Another clue that Gwo is instructing us to watch carefully is the significant portion of storytelling and foreshadow that occurs midway through the closing credits. We are told definitively that even though MOSS seems to be obliterated by the end of the first film, his digital life is far from over. MOSS sees ahead to the first film of the franchise and beyond. If the end goal of AI is the complete re-creation of man in a self-sustaining digital universe, then we have no way of knowing if our own present existence is not also the result of some previous technological hand-over, if our own viewing of the digital capture of species being is not actually us viewing ourselves already captured. This is suggested by the film’s Droste pan-out revealing infinite worlds inhabiting infinite worlds infinitely in digital space. [↩]
- The insight that humankind’s fundamental crises are of an internal, rather than external, variety belongs to Eric Gans. In his anthropological understanding of human society and culture, Gans purports that “humanity is the species for which the central problem of survival is posed by the relations within the species itself rather than those with the external world.” See Gans 1993, 2. [↩]
- Compare this to Elon Musk’s recent remarks posted online on April 2, 2023 at Juhe AI (句何AI): “AI would be used to create incredibly effective propaganda. [It] hones the message, looks at the feedback, makes this message slightly better. Within milliseconds it could adapt its message and shift and react to news.” One can easily imagine any parliamentary representative preparing an address to any legislature in the world simply by typing effective inputs into something like ChatGPT, upon which he would be bombarded instantly with the “correct” and “acceptable” political message to deliver to the masses, ever on spec, ever on target. This is merely the digital re-creation and amplification of the bulk of political speech we are fed now; what else is there to feed into a machine? AI does not re-create reality as much as it further entrenches truncated reality, thus making unreality the last word and ever more real. [↩]
- Weizenbaum notes three specific institutional crises, in banking, military, and finance: “American managers and technicians agreed that the computer had come along just in time to avert catastrophic crises. Were it not for the timely introduction of computers, not enough people could have been found to staff the banks, the ever increasingly complex communication and logistic problems of American armed forces spread all over the world could not have been met, and trading on the stock and commodity exchanges could not have been maintained.” See Weizenbaum 27. [↩]