My friend developed two pictures for me. The diagrams were of woodcut door gods she had made with her son Toupee, one of Toupee himself in a tiger’s hat, and one of Ultraman. Ha, I had fun looking at it and felt a clue activated in my brain.
What is a door? It is the entrance to our home, our space, and the boundary that separates our space from the outside world. Why is there a need for a god at this boundary and entrance, and who defines the god of the door? To whom and for what? Think about those videos of welded doors you swiped on WeChat at the beginning of the epidemic, and isn’t this something more worth thinking about.
In addition to the door gods, other gods are also problematic. This matter, in the end, I think is a question of whether we have, or need, gods in our daily lives?
Kids do have their own gods, like Ultraman. Pins a bunch of Ultraman. Another kid I know, Coke, also has a card booklet of the Ultraman family at home. By a booklet it looked a lot like the stamp books I used to collect stamps in when I was a kid. Coke also had a weapon, and by putting different Ultraman cards in it, the weapon would have different effects.
There are many explanations as to why they are so obsessed with Ultraman. How I look at these Ultramen is kind of like the gods descending from Olympus. These gods are very powerful and can harness nature and light and electricity. Kids can mimic this and invite the gods to come on board whenever they want.
There were gods in ancient life. There were door gods in front of homes, and the gods were Qin Shubao and Yuchi Jingde, two founding generals of the Tang Dynasty. Today, they could probably be replaced by Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao. In addition to the door god, there is also the Zao Wang, as told in the comedy of Master Hou Baolin. I’ve seen Hong Kong movies in which the police station would display the God of Guan, but I haven’t paid attention to whether or not I should display that at home.
What about modern life, there are definitely places that have it. Just a couple days ago, a student from Fujian forwarded an article about how superstitious the people of southern Fujian are. It took Quanzhou as an example, talking about how people in Quanzhou worshiped gods in their homes, how there were various shrines and temples in their neighborhoods, and how some of the old trees still had the God of Wealth on them. They still have gods in their lives to this day.
Whether there is a God right or wrong, or whether it is good or not, is not really up for discussion. I’ve learned all the opium theories in school. But, also the other day I ghosted some clues to the Foucaultable Conspiracy Theory. Let’s take a look at these photos of an old workers’ movie theater.
Is this clearly the Temple of Athens.
Perhaps we can think about this in a different way. We define God as something that everyone agrees on, that we need to engage in rituals to honor, some kind of symbol, person or thing. At the same time we accept that life, civilized life, needs to be supported by ideology, rituals, and group participation. Rituals and group participation seem to act as amplifiers and memory anchors. For example, who doesn’t remember the big Arirang show?
In this way, we can interpret the workers’ cinema of the past as a space for ordinary believers to engage in collective ideology-related activities. In other words, even for atheism, as long as it involves the transformation of society and the popularization of ideology, in order for people to believe in a set of abstract ideology, but also to believe in it in their lives, they need to have similar places, workers’ cinemas, workers’ cultural centers, bulletin boards and banners in the streets, and so on. These are places where collective life is lived and where a certain sense of sacredness is transmitted and popularized.
Of course, places like institutions and schools are even more so.
If you look at it this way, at least in the past before the fall of the workers’ movie theater, God also exists in our lives. Moreover, the specific distinction, according to the scene division product logic, these gods can be divided into three categories: one category is the family gods, and family rituals linked to the breaking of the fifth day of the year to eat dumplings, post a blessing or something, can be considered in this system. The second category is the community, community type, such as going to the neighboring temples to enter the incense, regularly go to punch cards and so on. The third category is the ones sent down from above. The first category of gods and the second category of gods are considered folk gods and gods of life. The third category of God, huh, can not be said can not be said.
Well, having given God’s approximate its definition and categorization, it’s time to freshen up the history.
The history of the Workers’ Cinema is the history of the God of the new urban life after ’49. In that era, the first type of family gods and community gods were replaced. In the Age of Extremes, all the rituals of people’s lives had to follow that great God. Early invitations and late reports. All family life was developed with rituals tied to ideology. One had to memorize a section of the Holybook (Little Red Book) even to buy groceries.
And then, after ’78, this sacred system got weaker and weaker, or at least retired from the family, from the neighborhood. Yes, that point is actually quite important. Because, as they retreated, there was room for Ultraman. But here’s the problem. Also receding is the society of acquaintances, the neighborhood. It used to be that unions were responsible for hosting evangelism in workers’ movie theaters. Then commercial housing came, and neighborhoods were gentrified. Capital came, all kinds of elements were disguised commercialization, such as temple fairs, it seems to be the revival of traditional culture, in fact, I think it is unhealthy ingredients distribution center, impulse spending distribution center.
The mall is an interesting thing, it looks like every store in it is temple-like, ceremonial, with the sophistication and opulence of a Catholic church, with all kinds of artifacts on the walls and missionaries in their own denominational dress code coming over to serve the customers. But, but but, this consumer relationship is a very clear and fixed buyer-seller relationship. Because business needs to pursue a few things, standardization, data and efficiency. These things are just the opposite of ritual and the sanctity of non-standardization. So what the mall is doing is deconstructing the sacred.
Businessmen are God lovers, just like Bazaar used to be in front of the temple, now whenever there is a festival, they go on the marketing calendar. Businessmen need God to help improve their performance. So it seems that the remarkable thing about Double Eleven is that it is a festival invented by businessmen, not copied.
When it comes to double-dipping it’s all about technology. Technology is further standardizing and datamining our life scenes and life behaviors. In the past, when you went to a restaurant or store to order food and buy something, there was at least an exchange of handing over and finding money. Now these can be dissolved. Now when you go to the supermarket to buy something, the payment process is code scanning, code scanning and code scanning. The conversation that may happen is just two sentences: do you have a membership card, do you want a bag? Takeaway is even better, when you order you look at the data, price, evaluation. Takeaway delivery over shouting, is your cell phone tail number.
Machine and technology also mean the same thing. Modern life is man-machine accompanied by food, clothing and shelter; every room is inseparable from a machine; the house itself is the machine. If we want to talk about the degree of spirituality, these machines are much more reliable than the worship of God and Buddha. Is it true that with technology and machines, people don’t need God anymore? I don’t know. It’s kind of a Matrix thing.
Anyway, the interesting phenomenon that we can see is that in the new phase, what power, capital and technology have in common is that none of them welcome God at both the familial, community level. Capital and technology are dissolving God. They also do seem to be more powerful than God in a way.
In the past, power gave a relatively complete set of alternatives, and then, power actually backed off. Power can engage in grander national ones, like the Olympics. But without communal living, without spaces like workers’ movie theaters, power can no longer effectively install clerics in everyday life. But one thing power can still do is control the power of other traditional gods to enter into life. For example, we can see people in communities in Japan carrying out the Inari Omikami from shrines and parading them through the streets; here, it’s harder.
And so the void appeared. People are hungry for God. Two days ago a bunch of Christmas Eve on the circle of friends. Some people said it was foreign worship. I think this completely misses the essence of the problem. The essence of the problem is the contradiction between the increasing hunger and thirst of the general public for God in their lives and the serious lack of supply of one type of God and two types of God. There are actually not a lot of three types of gods, and the grand narratives and ceremonies of world-class celebrations are abundant and sufficient. However, who will still sing Beijing welcomes you?
And what happens when people desire God and don’t have the ability, the will, or the opportunity to invent their own gods?
Check out these photos I asked my friends to take.
And look at the blessed words.
I don’t know how this aesthetic developed, all I can say is that it’s ugly. It needs to be changed. It is a twisted substitute for what we want, but can’t fuck with.
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