Red Carpet, page 34
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If the Monkey King continues to prevail over Dwayne Johnson in the estimation of Kenyan boys like Lucky, it may have as much to do with the mythical creature’s natural draw as with the support of politicians like Ezekiel Mutua, the head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board. Only months after taking the job in 2015, Mutua appointed himself the “moral policeman” of his country. He has a pencil-thin mustache and a sermonizing delivery that turns his fifteenth-floor office in Nairobi into a street preacher’s platform. A large oil painting of him hangs above his desk, not far from a giant monitor displaying the surveillance footage from closed-circuit cameras placed throughout the board’s offices. A personal photographer took no fewer than one hundred photos during my ninety-minute interview with him. This is a man who knows the power of an image.
“If you want to change a nation, change it through stories,” he told me.
Or by banning them. Mutua has removed dozens of movies, shows, music videos, and commercials from Kenyan screens since taking office. He’s implemented a system that requires approval of scripts before a Kenyan movie can begin production that draws inspiration from China’s process. As the official in charge of what stories come into his country, Mutua has dozens of counterparts across Africa and other continents weighing whether to mix their usual diet of Western entertainment with these new Chinese options.
Mutua was less concerned with whether movies were entertaining and more with what they represented. What opinions, outlook, priorities were they transporting to Kenyans? “Western ideas go with the Western good,” Woodrow Wilson had said, and for Mutua, that was the problem.
“We don’t want to keep imbibing Western culture, homosexual films, violent films, as a way of life,” he said.
China is a different story. “I never have to worry about bad content, obscenity, whatever. They have taken care of that, naturally.”
The Chinese ideas coming in with the movies have convinced Mutua that China offers not just safer entertainment but an alternative to the form of governance America has been trying to export for decades. On the week I visited, that brand was tarnished.
“I mean, look at the way you are treating this guy on TV,” Mutua said, gesturing to footage of an impeached President Trump on CNN. “In the name of democracy, then nobody respects anyone. A child can say anything to their father, any guy in the street can insult the president and get away with it ‘in the name of freedom.’ You get to a point where we can’t manage that kind of system. The system that is manageable is that, ‘I may not be one hundred percent right, but I’m the one in the office.’”
Hollywood, the industry that is supposed to sell American democracy better than any government ever could, has only worsened things for people like Mutua. Disney’s Black Panther, which imagined a thriving African country ruled by a superhero king, is the only recent Hollywood release he can think of that doesn’t fall into the typical storytelling traps of portraying the continent as a lawless land of disease and despots. When nonfiction stories of black people in the U.S. reach Kenya on the news, they are often about men and women fighting for equality in a nation said to be the freest on earth.
In 2019 the Kenyan high court upheld a colonial-era ban on gay sex, punishable by up to fourteen years in prison, and nothing animates Mutua like ridding Kenya of movies with gay themes or characters. By his logic, Kenya will thrive only if it can grow its population and promote nuclear, heterosexual families. “Strong families contribute to strong communities contribute to strong nations. That, China has done very well,” he said. Even as he wants Kenyans to build their own Kenya, he is willing to encourage yet another superpower to come to his country and dictate what his people see and think. “As long as it has the positive social values,” he said.
Mutua banned children’s animated shows Hey Arnold! and Loud House, since they were “laced with retrogressive and bizarre messages” that could turn kids gay. He called for the arrest of Kenyan singers who’d been featured in the video of Macklemore’s same-sex anthem “Same Love.” In 2018 he ruled that the Kenyan film Rafiki, about a romance between two Kenyan women, would never show in Kenyan theaters. Like Farewell My Concubine more than two decades earlier, the movie had been celebrated at the Cannes Film Festival, but it would not screen in its home country after Mutua claimed it carried a “clear intent to promote lesbianism in Kenya.” He warned that anyone found with a copy of the movie could be arrested, giving interviews far and wide to create his own “kill the chicken” moment.
On the afternoon we met, Mutua was feeling proud. He has just come from a meeting to review the hundreds of films submitted to the board over the last seven months. When he took the job, it seemed they had problematic scripts every day, and Mutua banned fifteen commercials in his first two weeks alone. But since he banned Rafiki, no other script with gay themes or characters has even been submitted for review, he boasted. At this meeting where his team reviewed some one thousand projects, not a single production was flagged. The filmmakers were doing his work for him.
“There’s great compliance,” he said.
As Mutua told me about his efficacy, I thought of Will, a twenty-two-year-old Kenyan I’d met on my first day in the country at the Karen Blixen Museum, the farm once owned by the Danish author that has become one of Nairobi’s top tourist attractions thanks to the 1985 dramatization of her life, Out of Africa. We met at a place sustained by the immortalizing effect of cinema, but Will grew up in a country where only certain images could be shown. When he was younger, he told me, he had a crush on a boy at school who he thought was gay like him. When he shared his feelings, the boy told everyone. The principal called an assembly to warn students there was a homosexual among them, telling the boys to stop wearing baggy trousers to avoid arousing him. Will nonchalantly told me of the several times he tried to kill himself, including the time his sister insisted she join. (“If you’re going to kill yourself, I’m going to kill myself too.”) They put poison in their porridge but still woke up the next day. Now he lives in Nairobi, where he’s studying foreign languages, and he’s out to himself, some family members, and a few friends.
He relies on piracy websites to access films like Call Me by Your Name, which he’s watched five times. He asked me if I worried about my safety at work, and I reflexively answered that being a journalist can be dangerous, depending on what you cover and where you report. He’d meant: When you go to the office, do you worry that you’ll be attacked if your colleagues find out that you’re gay? Eventually he wants to run his own business, because then no one can fire him for his sexuality. When we said goodbye, he hurriedly stuck his hand out. A hug would have set off alarms.
The images on-screen condition young people like Will to value their lives in a certain way. Mutua controls what Kenyans like Will can see, and he thinks Chinese movies censored by Chinese officials are the more acceptable option for Will and his family. It is a mission that extends beyond the movie theater.
“They aren’t making movies just to have fun. It is something that they’re doing to change ideology,” he said. “That helps me to say, ‘Huh, I can also do it in Kenya.’”
epilogue
Sequel
On October 17, 2020, Zhang Jing, a thirty-year-old manufacturing employee in Qingdao, participated in a historic event: she bought a ticket to a movie. Zhang sat three rows from the back in one of six auditoriums at a nearby cinema, located inside a mall in the northeast city of Weifang, for a 12:50 p.m. screening of the animated film Jiang Ziya. The ticket cost 32 yuan, or about $4.80. Since going to the cinema of her own volition for the first time at age nineteen—all of the movies she attended growing up were propaganda features organized by her school—Zhang had gone to about five films a year.
Though they did not know it at the time, she and the others in her auditorium spent 32 yuan that contributed to a decades-long inevitability for their country. That weekend, Chinese ticket sales for the year reached $1.998 billion, surpassing the $1.937 billion sold in North America. China had the number one box office in the world.
There was, of course, a significant asterisk on the accomplishment. Even though analysts had projected that the Chinese box office would surpass North America’s within a few years, the trend had been accelerated by the COVID-19 outbreak. At the time of China’s ascendance to number one, Chinese theaters were open, while most American theaters had been closed for months. The reranking was nonetheless a seismic shift in global entertainment, the first time the U.S. had been unseated since its rise in the early twentieth century, and one that remained in place as the year ended. The practices and strategies Hollywood had honed over the past twenty-five years of business with China would only further bake themselves into the American entertainment business now.
Few expected North America ever to catch up once its theaters reopened. This assumption was confirmed four months after Zhang’s outing, when the Lunar New Year release Detective Chinatown 3 opened to a record-setting $397 million, the largest opening gross in world history, besting Avengers: Endgame by $40 million and allowing another American record to fall. For the entertainment industry, the COVID-19 outbreak appeared to have given China an opening to overtake its main film-market competitor—an echo of the American cinema industry’s ascendance during World War I, when bombs shut down European production and moviegoing.
The movie Zhang went to see, Jiang Ziya, spoke to the moment. An animated retelling of a character from Investiture of the Gods, the classic collection of Chinese myths that was inspiring Fengshen Trilogy, it told the story of a military adviser who defies the orders of the heavenly realm to assist mortals, a decision that goes against his fate and fellow man. The movie featured every form of classic conflict: man versus man, when Jiang Ziya must battle his foes; man versus nature, when he must trek across the tundra; man versus self, when he must overcome his urge to stick to his destiny and avoid causing trouble. But a larger conflict pervaded this movie about a hero fighting his birthright, one many young Chinese people might relate to: man versus myth, when Jiang Ziya decides to defy the expectations set for him by custom and culture. It seemed like a theme that would resonate for moviegoers like Zhang, who have grown up in a culture where much can feel preordained even as they see drastic change around them. Chinese audiences have seen their country go from a dark part of the globe to an emerging superpower built on surveillance and control. Young moviegoers were turning to the screen for help figuring out where they fit into it all.
For Zhang, Jiang Ziya also offered a matinee refreshingly spent with a distinctly Chinese hero, one who is unafraid to use strategy and deception to win. She’s annoyed by the tendency in Marvel movies to depict heroes like Thor as unimpeachable, when she thought it was his power-hungry and conniving brother, Loki, who should be in charge. In explaining this to me, she quoted Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.”
She went back to the cinema the next weekend to see The Sacrifice, a Wu Jing film about the Korean War. She watched the story of Chinese soldiers who try to repair a bridge that is repeatedly destroyed by American forces. Years of propaganda movies as a kid had helped Zhang realize that The Sacrifice was in theaters because “movies are a tool for the promotion of ideology,” and the government wanted to fan the flames of tensions between the United States and China, she said. But The Sacrifice could help other Chinese moviegoers who, unlike her, haven’t yet learned to be a bit skeptical of Western entertainment.
“Chinese children used to fully accept American culture,” she said. “Now China is waking up, so Chinese people think with their own mind.”
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COVID-19 was a onetime, cataclysmic event, but it also pushed both entertainment industries more quickly in the direction they were already headed—away from each other. For starters, with Hollywood delaying most of its major 2020 and 2021 releases from their theatrical debuts, Chinese audiences’ growing preference for Chinese films became even more apparent. Chinese streaming services had once proven a lucrative outlet for Hollywood studios, which could license an entire annual slate for more than $80 million. But around 2018, viewer interest in such films fell in favor of Chinese TV dramas. The few postpandemic Western movies that were released in China, such as Wonder Woman 1984 and F9, attracted a fraction of the theatrical audiences that were expected. Studio balance sheets continued to plan for nine-figure windfalls out of China, but Chinese audiences were not providing them. The previous several years had dug a hole into the accounting ledgers that became impossible to fill.
While China was cementing its status as the biggest theatrical market, Hollywood was focused on going smaller—and getting people to tune in at home. Executives in Los Angeles directed efforts to the competitive arena of streaming, hoping to draw business away from Netflix. Every major studio but one launched a streaming service between late 2019 and the end of 2020, and their movies became never-ending collections of “content” that filled each platform’s library, convinced users to subscribe, and ultimately boosted the share price of the parent company. Netflix, which had started as a DVD-by-mail company, had a considerable head start and released more original movies per year than all of the Hollywood studios combined. The few number of movies still treated to the wide theatrical release now had to convince filmgoers they were better than anything they could find streaming on the couch. The one hundred years of Hollywood dominance, marked by big-screen palaces and stars exalted as gods, felt as though it was being replaced by a shrunken model that treated movies as interchangeable feedstock for streaming services.
Netflix had expanded to dozens of countries around the world; by early 2021, only about a third of its subscribers were in the U.S. The list of countries where Netflix did not operate was short and included Syria, North Korea—and China. The company had tried for years to break into the Chinese market, especially as streaming shows and movies became increasingly popular in the country. Netflix founder Reed Hastings met with authorities to try to convince them to let his company compete alongside streaming services run by Chinese firms like Alibaba. But China wanted its homegrown industry to flourish without foreign competition. Netflix could get into China only by licensing its most popular shows to Chinese platforms, which turned House of Cards—not exactly the most flattering depiction of American politics—into the top-performing American show in the country. Anything more ambitious was unlikely to happen.
Since it sees no future in the market, Netflix has been one of the few entertainment companies operating with little concern about alienating the country’s leadership. It regularly signs deals to stream Chinese blockbusters like The Wandering Earth, targeting the considerable Chinese diaspora around the world. But its failure in China has also led to the company’s green-lighting documentaries about topics otherwise off limits, such as the protests in Hong Kong calling for independence, or even movies like Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, which featured a subplot on corruption in Xi Jinping’s family. Netflix’s failure in China has given it a freedom few others in Hollywood enjoy, even as it censors movies and shows for countries where it does operate, such as Saudi Arabia.
As Disney gained traction with its flagship streaming service, Disney+, during the pandemic, share prices climbed as investors valued the company as they would a tech firm, where present-day losses are forgiven in exchange for the promise of continued growth and future profit. Major releases on the Disney slate started premiering on Disney+, skipping the theatrical release. A future of movies streamed at home was very bad news for one of China’s most high-profile forays into American entertainment: AMC Theatres. Wanda’s investment in the company had initially looked like a moneymaker after AMC went public. But Chairman Wang Jianlin’s aspirations to be the biggest movie theater operator in the world stretched AMC past its limit, setting it up for a complete financial meltdown when the pandemic hit. Wanda had pushed AMC to acquire smaller circuits like Carmike Cinemas, deals that gave it bragging rights when it grew to become the number one theater chain in the world. But that distinction also saddled its balance sheet with sticky-floored ghost auditoriums in lousy markets. That became clear when the pandemic closed all theaters and AMC had just barely enough cash to survive. All of its employees were furloughed, including its CEO. While China’s box office soared past the U.S. that October, AMC looked like it would end 2020 in bankruptcy proceedings. But then a Reddit community of online traders, many of them nostalgic for the moviegoing of their youth, drove AMC shares to record highs, soaring 470 percent in the early months of 2021. Wanda steadily sold its stake in the chain while the market manipulation allowed it to cash in on the craze, escaping the investment with unexpected riches thanks to a fluke in the American economic system. Besides, Wanda still had theaters in the bigger market, China.
A streaming-first Hollywood not only signals a possible end to the traditional American theatrical experience, but also places more power in the hands of the companies that will likely supplant Paramount and Sony as the most recognized names in entertainment. As tech giants like Apple have moved into film and TV production to support their own at-home services, they have not brought with them a liberalization in storytelling but instead contributed to a risk-averse landscape where certain topics pertaining to China cannot be broached.
“The two things we will never do are hard-core nudity and China,” Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president in charge of its entertainment strategy, has told creative partners in Hollywood. In China, the company has a maze of supply chains, factories that make the iPhone, and a customer base of Apple users it cannot risk losing by dabbling in themes that might offend or alienate a Chinese audience. To compete with companies as dominant as Netflix, Apple, and Disney, smaller studios will merge and bulk up, further enveloping Hollywood in a morass of complexly connected conglomerates that put multiple holdings at risk if they anger China, which not only is the biggest box office in the world but will soon be the biggest economy in the world.
