Jenn Thảo Nguyễn

When discussing animal imagery in Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, an abundance of references come to mind: Dahai’s tiger quilt, San’er’s interaction with three oxen on the back of a truck, a snake crossing Xiao Yu’s path, and Lian Rong presenting Xiao Hui with the plastic bag of goldfish. The proliferation of such imagery raises inquisitions into the ripe symbolism and significance that animals play in Jia’s filmic world. Though the tiger quilt has been identified as a reference to a Chinese television serial, Jia’s employment of the tiger as a mere wrap for Dahai’s shotgun points to the facade of such majestic performance of bravery, concealing a propensity for destruction that may altogether be void of meaning and perhaps a product of chaos, endemic of a dysfunction in society. Dahai’s subsequent use of his weapon to end the life of an abusive horse owner is an invocation of the liberated, abused animal he sees in himself — one tormented and exploited by the unequal system of reform.

San’er’s interaction with the three oxen on the back of the truck presents an equally fascinating use of imagery. The three oxen can be interpreted as significant both in Jia’s choice of the animal — which is the second animal in the Chinese zodiac, known for patience and diligence — and in his decision to invoke the numerology of thirds. The film opens with San’er murdering three young troublemakers blocking his path, followed by him lighting three cigarettes as an offering to the ghosts of his killings, and eventually, a medium close-up of the three oxen locked in the back of the truck en route to their next destination. The repeated use of thirds in San’er’s storyline alludes to a connection that each appearance may have with the others, perhaps denoting the possibility of a cycle in which the three murdered troublemakers — whose ghosts are appeased by San’er’s cigarettes — have reincarnated into the group of oxen, whose placement on the back of the truck points to a transitory state of both the animals and the spirits.

Animal imagery is again interpreted differently in Xiao Yu’s storyline, where she not only runs from her attackers into a truck filled with a young girl surrounded by snakes, but more strikingly has her walking path crossed by a snake that appears visibly to the audience as a product of CGI. What struck me here was Jia’s alternate use of visual effects to render the snake’s presence in the latter scene — a stark contrast to the realism portrayed by his previous employment of real-life snakes in the truck scene. This comparison might be interpreted by viewers as a formal use of technological exhibitionism, a call perhaps to the growing artificiality of reform society and an allusion to signs of China’s increased modernism. The surrealism imbued by the CGI snake might also indicate a netherworld synchronicity with Xiao Yu’s character — that perhaps something within her altered after the encounter with her attackers, something that can only be visualized through the CGI snake as a an externalization of her disconnection from reality and disillusionment with the world she inhabits.

In the final storyline of Xiao Hui, a particularly significant scene of animal imagery lies in Lian Rong’s meditation to Xiao Hui of her intention to free the goldfish she purchased in the plastic bag. Lian Rong is the first character we meet who directly addresses the animal presented in the film, and one who self-identifies not only as a Buddhist but also as an “illicit trader” — someone who must “do good deeds to be forgiven in their next life”. The importance of this use of the goldfish, and the intention to set it free, is twofold. The first is its clear indication of Lian Rong’s belief in reincarnation, perhaps harkening back to San’er’s episode, and the negotiation one makes for the hardship of this life as a means to move through it. Lian Rong thus must do what she can to believe that there is the possibility of a better life after her current one. The second interpretation of this scene can also be read as the farce of this idealism — even that of religious ideology — as, according to the goldfish, their freedom from captivity in the plastic bag has very little to do with their own beliefs or agency, but rather exists still in the hands of a self-interested other. The dual tension of reality and idealism presented by this scene, positions viewers to compare the captured beautiful goldfish with the character of Lian Rong, and to question whether her ideals and hardship will indeed be rewarded at all, in this life or the next.

All such invocations of animal imagery in A Touch of Sin share within them Jia’s intentional dialectic of promised reality and lived experience, inviting the audience to observe through his characters and symbolism the tension between the polarities that define his post-socialist realist aesthetic.