For anyone seeking to argue the case, there is no shortage of data points that can be used to chart the course of America’s putative decline.
Start with the decay in the country’s politics. This November, voters will be faced with a choice between the present incumbent and a twice-impeached former president who, unlike any of his predecessors, is seriously embattled in courts on both civil and criminal grounds. Many view Joe Biden as too old to govern a country with a plethora of superpower-sized problems. As recent primaries have shown, he even faces revolt from some in the Democratic base for his unwillingness to rein in Israel, a longtime ally and client, over the huge and climbing death toll from its continuing offensive and the specter of starvation in Gaza.
Today, the United States seeks to navigate a green transition, but it can’t build either solar panels or electric vehicles that can compete with foreign goods without stiff protection. It wants to be a leader in making advanced microprocessors again, but it seems no one can imagine how to do so without gigantic subsidies. It wants to sustain its military preeminence, but despite spending more money on the military than the next 10 countries combined, it is falling far behind China in the rate at which it builds ships and some other advanced weapons systems.
Despite such a pessimistic start, this is not a column written to bewail America’s decline. In fact, there may be as many boosterish signs about the durability of U.S. power as there are pessimistic ones. The United States’ share of global GDP has remained fairly constant for most of this century and is presently a little shy of 25 percent, a remarkable number for a country with less than 5 percent of the world’s population. America’s universities, which have puzzlingly become a battleground of fierce culture wars at home, remain the envy of the world. And because of immigration, another source of perennial domestic contestation, most of it ugly and irrational, the United States will face far less demographic pressure—whether from aging or population decline in the remainder of this century—than any of its competitors.
In recent weeks, I have been impressed with something even more remarkable than any of these hallmarks of U.S. strength, and the evidence has come from an unusual source for a gauge of power, washing over me from a distance of 10 feet at nighttime in the semi-darkness of my living room: a large-screen smart TV.
What has emanated from this ubiquitous vehicle to strike me so powerfully is evidence of a novel—and I am tempted to say awesome—cultural product and a categorically new expression of soft power. To be more explicit, I am talking about two new television series, Shogun and 3 Body Problem, both of which do something of unaccustomed scale and ambition: They adopt epic stories that are rooted in Asia, as opposed to customary Western history and culture, and to a degree that is extremely rare in American entertainment, they labor to preserve period details and linguistic authenticity.
If there are similar examples of, say, European productions of period epics rooted in non-Western cultures for mass audiences that have preserved this much space for non-Western characters and non-Western languages, I am not familiar with them. And I would venture to say the same thing about Chinese, Japanese, Indian, or any other major non-Western film and television industries. If they have attempted anything that reaches this far beyond the present and outside of their own zone of cultural comfort and familiarity with a comparable sense of devotion to cultural detail, I am not aware of them.
Before I get slammed here, let me say that I am well aware that Shogun was drawn from a 1975 novel published by James Clavell, an Australian-born British author. Some may feel this invalidates everything I’ve just said. But this version of Shogun, unlike a previous miniseries that was originally broadcast on NBC in 1980, has given center stage to Japanese actors and writers whose expertise lies in the period drama of their country, and it has done so with extraordinary attention to authenticity. I say this as a decent speaker of Japanese who lived in that country for five years as a reporter. American television audiences supposedly have little appetite for content with subtitles, but I’ve sat rapt, even while trying to match the scrolling written English with the spoken dialogue, most of which is rendered in an exquisitely formal (and complicated) style of courtly locution that dates back 400 years.
This column is more of a cultural commentary than TV review or even critic’s piece, but I should also come clean right here about some of the things that separate these two exemplars of the American entertainment industry’s ambition and of the country’s capacity for soft power, which seems to be expanding and not just enduring. Unlike Shogun, whose original text, a novel, was written by a Westerner, 3 Body Problem is drawn from a recent work of Chinese fiction—science fiction, to be specific. I do not find its rendition on Netflix to be nearly as captivating as its Japanese historical fiction counterpart, Shogun, for reasons I’ll soon explain.
3 Body Problem, however, opens with one of the most powerful dramatizations that I have ever seen of China’s Cultural Revolution, a 10-year period of officially sanctioned quasi-anarchy that Mao Zedong and his most obsequious cronies unleashed on the country between 1966 and 1976. The opening scenes, which depict the terrifying public hazing, or “struggle session,” against an advanced physicist whose theoretical work doesn’t conform with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought, were entirely filmed in Chinese, on a set, and with Chinese crowds, that drips with authenticity. I say this as someone who also speaks Chinese and has written books on the history of that country (as well as that of Japan). The portrayal of punishing ideological crusades against Chinese scientists who worked in the pursuit of pure knowledge, instead of servilely bolstering the regime, feels as if it is right out of the pages of The Most Wanted Man in China: My Journey From Scientist to Enemy of the State, the powerful memoir of Fang Lizhi, who was once his country’s leading astrophysicist before being forced into exile.
The fiercely hostile online reaction of some people in China toward 3 Body Problem’s opening scenes reminds me of the famous quip by the writer La Rochefoucauld. “Hypocrisy,” he said, “is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” These popular criticisms derive from people who are likely finding alternative ways of streaming 3 Body Problem because for political reasons it has not been, and probably can never be, released in China. That isn’t because the Netflix miniseries gets anything wrong but, rather, because it gets this Chinese scene right. The best response, of course, would be for China to produce its own realistic dramatizations and accurate documentaries about this crucial recent period in history, in which an estimated 2 million people were killed, but of course official censorship could never tolerate this.
As one commentator on Chinese social media said in response to the angry hubbub there about Netflix’s supposed misappropriation of a Chinese story: “That era was an enormous scar, an absurd joke. If we don’t face our history squarely, how can we hope to have a future?”
For me, the biggest problem with the Netflix miniseries, in addition to some of its flat characters and lifeless dialogue, is the massive casting cop-out that it takes. It is a failure that’s deeply and troublingly traditional in the Western entertainment business and one that undermines any credit due for adopting a non-Western story. In his original fiction, Liu Cixin, the author of The Three-Body Problem, wrote the characters as Chinese. For what I assume to be commercial reasons, Netflix seems to have decided that Western audiences couldn’t abide watching Chinese characters for episode after episode, so it contrived to set most of the story in London and tell it through a Western cast.
Compare that to the design choices made by the creators of Shogun. This series, too, includes a Western character who occupies a prominent role. That is in keeping with the original source material, Clavell’s nearly 50-year-old novel. Unlike the original production of Shogun, though, the current FX version has largely relegated this character to the middle background, so much so that one sometimes wonders if he is necessary at all. If my experience as a hungry viewer is at all reflective of broader audience reactions, Shogun’s storytelling answers the question tentatively posed by the makers of 3 Body Problem, who ultimately chickened out: Can Western audiences be carried along by non-Western actors who dominate the leading roles?
If the American entertainment industry can overcome this lingering racial timidity and provincialism, the sky would seem to be the limit. There are new audiences to be won on every continent with authentically told stories about dramatic periods in history that have little or no need for Westerners front and center.
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