6 - The Goddess: Reflections on Melodrama East and West

Summary

In China, as in Japan and India, film represents a radical discontinuity in traditional culture. But film represents a radical discontinuity in Western, and specifically American, culture as well. Even in the West, and even in America, all films, no matter how “traditional” their cultural sources, were motivated by, and motivated, radically new ideas and forms of life. In America, these ideas and forms of life, however new, had sources within America's own cultural traditions. My belief is that the same was true in China: Chinese film was “Western,” but it was also Chinese in its forms and its sources. Nor is it possible to make a sharp distinction between what is Chinese and what is Western, what is “inside” or “outside” the Chinese cultural tradition, just as it is not possible to draw such a line in the case of the West, or of America.

The transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau is a central source of popular American movie genres. Their roots in American transcendentalism are essential to what makes American films American. But transcendentalism in America, a late American flowering of European Romanticism, also is a reflection of, and a reflection on, the great impact of the introduction to the West of Asian religion, philosophy, and art. That is, Hollywood romantic comedies and melodramas have “Eastern” as well as “Western” sources. They mark American culture's ongoing conversation with itself, which is also a conversation sometimes brutal with China (and with the rest of Asia as well).