Beijing Bicycle

Bristol, Lauren

English 495

Professor Wexler

12 May 2014

Beijing Bicycle Analysis

Wang Xiaoshuai’s Beijing Bicycle is a story of a young man named Guei trying to make his way to make a living in the big city while living in the country. He is hired as a bike messenger for a well known company and is given a brand new mountain bike to carry out his duties. When his bike gets stolen after a hard day at work, Guei gets laid off and sent back to the countryside. His boss offers him a chance to regain his position if he can find his bike. The remainder of the movie is Guei’s relentless quest to find his bike as he faces numerous obstacles that he is determined to overcome. Sounds like a great drama, right? Though the plot seems simple enough, this film has many scenes and struggle that are related and representative of Western capitalism and globalization.

 Guei really needed his job and was willing to do anything to keep it. His boss gave him another option to get his job back: If he would be able to get the bike back, he could keep his job. Though it may have seemed like his boss was doing him a solid, it caused Guei to put his life in danger, kept him from moving on to another job, led him to become reliant on his boss/ job, and drove him to desperation. This is similar to the loan process that was outlined in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story. The American people are desperate and don’t have enough money to survive, so the bank gives them a chance to restore their lives and financial situation by taking out loans. There is a heightened interest rate in this money taken out which requires Americans to struggle even more to pay back a sum larger than they borrowed:

…. Of course hidden in the dozens or hundreds of pages of fine print are tricky clauses that allow the bank to raise your interest rate to a number you didn't know about. Perhaps so high you can't repay your loan. But that's OK, because if you can't repay it, we'll just take your house. (Moore)

 This cycle also leaves Americans slaves to the banks they have borrowed from and drives them to desperation. In Randy Martin’s article “Where Did the Future Go?”, Martin elaborates on how people are made to feel backed into a corner financially:

… but less focus has been given to the implications of finance’s rule for the experience of daily life. One shift lies in how finance asks people to see their future or more specifically to see the future as already at hand. Given how much capitalism had once staked on the future, the political implications of that change merit careful attention, especially if we are to see finance more than novel means of domination… (Martin)

 Large political powers have made its people feel as though they must be financially stable now and making they feel as though they are lacking in financial security. This shift in mentality leads people to taking out these loans that they don’t need also describes the way in which Capitalism has seeped into our democratic system and has crippled us via loans and fluxuating interest rates.    

There is another scene in Beijing Bicycle when Guei is talking with his friend, Mathis, after he gets a job as a bike messenger and they have a simple meal consisting of rice and a scarce amount of meat. Mathis shows him a woman that he has been watching in a nearby window. She is young, beautiful and lives in a well furnished apartment. He proceeds to explain that she has everything that she could want, but she always looks so sad and dissatisfied. The audience then sees a series of frames in which the young woman has changed into a few different outfits in the same day. There is definitely class difference between Guei and his friend and the young woman in the window. The angle at which they are looking up at this woman is also significant: She is high above them and they have to look up at her from their slum of a home. 

 In a society run by capitalism, the rich political powers are on the top of the hierarchy pyramid and the poor common citizens are at the bottom, struggling to survive. It is almost impossible for the lower class to make it to the top of this pyramid, therefore the gap between them grows. In Capitalism: A Love Story, Randy Hacker and his family are evicted from their farm that has been in the family for decades. Frustrated with the ruthless injustice of the government, he makes a profound comment about this social gap, saying, “There’s gotta be some kind of rebellion between the people that’s got nothing and the people who have it all. I don’t understand. There’s no in between anymore. There’s the people who got it all and there’s the people who got nothing.”

Guei first gets his bike as a part of his job as a bike messenger and when he loses his bike, he loses his job. He scours the town, day after day searching for his bike in the hopes of bringing to his previous employer and getting his job back. Jian purchases the stole back at a shop with the financial help of his friends. Jian’s father can no longer afford to buy him the bike he promised him because he will be using said money to pay for Jian’s younger sister’s school tuition. He steals money that his father has saved for his younger sister’s tuition to buy the bike he wanted. When Guei gets his bike back and starts working at his old job, Jian and his friends hunt him down to reacquire the bike. Guei needs that bike so that he can have a living but the boys continuously try to take it from him because they want it.

This struggle can be representative of the struggle between working class and the political powers in America. In Capitalism: A Love Story, we are introduced to Randy Hacker’s wife, Donna, who equally as distraught as her husband about the foreclosure of their house and ultimately their lives. She is sitting on the porch of her family farm for the last time and cries about the circumstances under which her house is being wrongly taken from her, saying “ Why do you do this to the hard-working people?... We’re just middle class, hard-working people just trying to make a living. Just trying to survive.”  The Hackers need their house to live. It is not a desire or an accessory, but a necessity. The bank has overlooked their basic need for survival and repossessed it in the hopes of selling it to someone else and making a bigger profit off of this family’s misfortune.

 

 

 

Works Cited

Beijing Bicycle. Dir. Wang Xiaoshuai and Xiongping Jiao. Perf. Lin Cui. Arc Light Films, 2001.

Capitalism: A Love Story. [Traverse City, MI] Beverly Hills, CA: Front Street Productions, LLC;             Anchor Bay Entertainment, 2010.

Martin, Randy. "Where Did The Future Go?" (n.d.): n. pag. Web. Apr.-May 2014.