Standing or lying flat should not be a problem. When this becomes a problem, it also means that there is still room for choice. Often it is people who have no choice but to jump out of the duality and build meaning, community, aesthetics, body, pride, and persistence in difficult and stressful situations.
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The documentary “Kill Matt, I Love You” directed by Li Yifan is not a romanticized description of the Kill Matt group. The video archaeology of meaning has given Luo Fuxings the power to give meaning to this story again. In the writings of Dr. Ou Ziqi, who has been concerned with the issue of migrant workers in China for a long time, we can see that this dialogue is still echoing and relaying in different time and space.
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This article was originally published on pages 8-10 of the 2021, Issue 32 of “Contemporary China Studies Letters” by the Center for Contemporary China Studies, Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. The author is Dr. Ou Ziqi. Thanks to the author, director and editor for permission to reproduce.
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For related articles, see:
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“Fixing the car is the life I want” – “Sanhe Great God” of self-precaritizing
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Self-employment: the livelihoods of urban proletarians in Tanzania
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and Knotted’s Labour Day Book List, Corona’s Riders and Precarious Labour.
Author / Ou Ziqi original text / “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter” 2021, 32: 8-10
Kill Matt re-entering the field of vision
Around 2008, a group of workers with vertical, bright, exaggerated hair and cartoon appearances appeared in industrial areas along the coast of China. They are Shamate, who rose rapidly through their unique aesthetic modeling; around 2013, Shamate culture was ridiculed and slaughtered on the Internet, and quickly disappeared from the eyes of the world. At the end of 2020, the world is still shrouded in the epidemic. The documentary “Kill Matt, I Love You” directed by Li Yifan was screened at the online film festival, and Kill Matt entered people’s field of vision again.
Escape the countryside and enter the factory
Most of the killers dropped out of school to work at a very young age, in order to “escape” the rural Midwest and to see the outside world. Director Li Yifan made this film centered on Killing Matt’s self-report by interviewing 78 Killing Matt. The prelude of the film does not directly discuss the style or culture of Kill Matt, but focuses on the identity of the worker. The movie screen is divided into three grids, and the straight-style killing Matt’s visual life world seems to exist for mobile phone viewing and dissemination. One of them is a worker’s self-report, and the other two are interspersed with job advertisements in industrial areas or side shots of workers waiting to enter the factory.
Leaving the countryside and entering the factory is entering another cage. In the factory, we are faced with strict control. It is difficult to go to the toilet, and it is even more difficult to ask for leave. I work endless overtime, and I can fall asleep while standing. Workers brought their mobile phones into the factory to take pictures of work scenes and live events. Director Li Yifan edited these scenes to become part of the film. Workers recounted the experience of work grief, accompanied by the sound of machines beating, and pictures of potions or paint dipping into their bodies. Rent a house in an industrial area, can’t find a way, and be deceived everywhere. Inside and outside the factory, there is fear, loneliness, depression and vulnerability. Kill Matt armed himself with hairstyles, because he looked like a “hedgehog” or bad boy, so he didn’t have to worry about being bullied.
Source: Director Li Yifan provided to “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter”“Thinking that hair can change a person”
Kill Matt’s strange hairstyle is to protect himself, but the special look is not only to intimidate other people, but also to attract attention. Stand up your hair and make yourself more unique, because “you are not normal, only people care about you, and others have topics to talk to you” . In the video, interviewee Li Xuesong said that in the hair salon, Kill Matt was very meticulous about the “angle, height, level, texture” of the hair to be blown, dyed, and permed, which would drive the salon owner crazy. Another killer said that in order to take care of the special blow-off, he sleeps with a fist on the pillow at night, and even uses a special pillow to protect the style. Killer Matt An Xiaohui said that girls have a special shape, and when they go to the skating rink, there will be boys holding hands; hair has become an extension of self, “I think this hair can change a person.” Playing with Matt made this group of workers feel especially free. “I have a personality, different from my parents and other people in the factory.”
“Playing and killing Matt is family”
Through killing Matt modeling, these workers not only have a sense of security and uniqueness, but also find family members who can rely on each other. Killing Matt felt that they were of the same mind and could talk to each other. Only Killing Matt could understand each other and experience the true affection. A virtual kinship relationship was established between Shamate, and a QQ group of Shamate family with tens of thousands of people was established, and they trusted each other. Director Li Yifan has to kill Matt’s “family” in order to find him. There are a total of 78 interviewees in the film, of which 76 interviewees agreed to be interviewed only through referrals from Luo Fuxing, the core figure in the killing of Matt. The director revealed in the discussion that there were only two respondents who their team “finished” themselves.
Director Li Yifan and the interviewee, source: Director Li Yifan provided to “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter”For Kill Matt, the Kill Matt family is sacred. Even at the moment of filming, many Kill Matt no longer play Kill Matt, but retain the pride and dedication to Kill Matt’s identity. The director said that if there is no family, even if you can still see people dressed like Kill Matt, it is only hair, and the real Kill Matt no longer exists.
If we say that the first half of “Kill Matt, I Love You” presents the process of Sha Matt’s self-identification and the formation of group glory; the second half of the film suddenly turns to the online world to humiliate Sha Matt in an all-round way. , attack, suppress. A group of people pretended and mocked Kill Matt through the short video of “self-destruction” killing Matt, and even sneaked into Kill Matt’s QQ group, obtained the administrator status, and kicked the members of Kill Matt. No one can tell exactly what happened, what Kill Matt did wrong, and who decided to wipe out their living space. The director said in the post-screening discussion that it was a “collective unconscious” formed after 2008 that determined this development. Under the collective unconscious of “gentrification and refinement”, it is inevitable to suppress and kill Matt culture.
sensitive body
Since the reform and opening up, China’s economy has relied on tens of millions of factory workers, construction workers, and laborers in the informal economy. Factory workers in coastal industrial areas have always been the focus of the Chinese research literature. From Pan Yi’s Made in China to Dying for an iPhone co-authored by Jenny Chan, Mark Seldon and Pan Yi, the formation of the new working class, labor system, urban and rural changes, and social inequality have long been the focus of academic circles. focus.
Compared with the factory workers on the production line, the killing Matt group is in a more non-mainstream and marginal position. As director Li Yifan said, at first he wasn’t sure if this group of people really existed. If he hadn’t met Luo Fuxing, he didn’t know how to find this group of people. Kill Matt and the rest of the class, even if they live close by, are isolated from each other. If it is said that young people who work from rural areas to cities are marginalized people in the city, killing Matt is the most bizarre existence in the marginalized. Director Li Yifan believes that the reason why these workers chose to be slaughter Matt is because their bodies are still sensitive, they have not been thoroughly disciplined, and they are not willing to compromise.
“I will never enter a factory in this life”
Therefore, director Li Yifan is very opposed to using the perspective of “subculture” to understand Kill Matt. Whether it is killing Matt’s loneliness and pain in the factory, choosing to be the price of leaving the factory, or even the struggle to turn to business through Kuaishou and Douyin videos. [2] For director Li Yifan, only by fully accepting the life experience of killing Matt and understanding their life logic can they truly see them. As Guo Jia argues, killing Matt is not “a ‘form of rebellion’ to escape the real situation”, but playing to kill Matt is “the pursuit of beauty required by a ‘complete person'”. 【3】
Workers on the assembly line, source: Director Li Yifan provided to “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter”Understanding the situation, suffering, and self-doubt of workers in the factory is fundamental to understanding Kill Matt. To become Killer Matt, these workers face a choice between entering the factory to make money or being free. Once you enter the factory, you have to cut your hair and become a “normal person” before you can interview. However, by having hair done, you can be different from other workers and become a different person.
Simply dyeing and perming your hair is not killing Matt. The director said that killing Matt is different. The hair must stand up. “There must be enough poverty and enough pressure to choose enough exaggeration.” “The hair is there.” If you want to go back to the factory, you have to cut your hair, “lost your self-esteem”, so killing Matt would rather starve and choose freedom. Without extremely brutal labor, there would be no extreme options. Killing Matt and the Foxconn migrant poet Xu Lizhi who fell from the building are responses to the same situation in different forms.
Only one standing mode is allowed
Before the recent discussion on “lying flat”, Luo Fuxing, known as the Godfather of Killing Matt, seemed to have seen the coming of the era of involution. As a factory worker, no matter how hard you try, you can’t buy a car, let alone a house; he said bluntly, “I have a chance to rise by playing Matt, but not as a general worker.”
However, when the original killing Matt returned to his hometown, his parents were already old. Director Li Yifan said that killing Matt “is not qualified to lie down”, so he can only go to work. Compared with the original killing of Matt, the situation of today’s workers seems to have no room for choice. Director Li Yifan said bluntly: ” When you are stipulated to have only one standing mode, other standing modes are illegal, so I just lie down today and don’t do it. ”
“Kill Matt, I Love You” poster. Source: Director Li Yifan provided to “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter”Note
【1】We would like to thank Director Li Yifan for providing the movie poster and stills of “Kill Matt, I Love You” for publication in “Contemporary China Studies Newsletter”.
[2] “Killing Matt as the Second Generation of Migrant Workers: A Conversation with Li Yifan, Director of “Killing Matt, I Love You”, “China Labour Bulletin”, February 19, 2021. Retrieved from https://ift.tt/ew58xSU Killing Matt as a second-generation migrant worker: A conversation with Li Yifan, director of “Killing Matt, I Love You”.
[3] Guo Jia, 2019, “Inquiring into the New Workers’ Culture: Beginning with the Cultural Action of the “New Workers’ Art Troupe” in Shaping the “New Working Class” (Part 2)”, “Human Thought Vol.11: Fifty as a Method” Age”, Human Publishing House.
About the Author
Ou Ziqi, Ph.D. in Anthropology, Columbia University, Assistant Professor, School of Innovation and International Studies, National Chengchi University. Research interests: migration and labor, urban and rural space, university social practice.
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