Slavoj Žižek once argued to the effect that capitalism can only truly be actualized in a communist state like China. In Ascension (2020), nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar, American filmmaker Jessica Kingdon travels to the country that she has roots in to test this hypothesis, as it were. Amassing footage from factories, markets, corporate offices, training seminars, recycling plants, business conferences and theme parks, Kingdon builds an experimental documentary that seeks to illustrate the march of the free market, Chinese style.

The film opens in a literal labour market where head-hunters from various companies recruit blue collar workers like hawkers selling wares. They announce the nature of the job (standing/sitting), wages offered, allowances and other curious requirements: no tattoos, no prison record, perfect vision, no metal implants in the body and maximum allowed height. Once the quorum is achieved, company buses ferry the new recruits to their respective dormitories and workplaces.

Shortly after this, we see vignettes of Taylorized labour from the food, textile and packaging industries: workers sort roasted ducks, jeans pants, plastic bottles or syringes, while elsewhere, they segregate incoming trash for recycling. The job is repetitive, but the procession of commodities on conveyor belts makes for alluring patterns. Soundbites present employees’ complaints with their bosses and their pay.

This section also contains the most extraordinary find of the film: a nearly all-woman shop floor that manufactures life-size sex dolls. The women are absorbed in work, either designing the dolls or instructing trainees on finer details. Their precision and skill make them look like gynaecologists or coroners; they measure the size of nipples, craft private parts, glaze the skin and fill cavities. They handle chemicals and high-temperature tools without gloves, and this scene of women exposing their real bodies to hazard in order to produce fantasy bodies makes for some uncanny images.

Half-an-hour into the film, the attention turns to the service industry, where neophytes in different domains are put through arduous, even inhuman training regimes. This is evident in the episode set in a company that supplies security personnel. Indistinguishable from an army boot camp, the firm’s induction programme humiliates recruits for their mistakes, makes them slap each other until they are sore and has them perform dangerous car stunts. But equally rigorous are the preparatory classes in the field of hospitality, where candidates are instructed on how many teeth to show when smiling or how high to raise the arms when going for a hug.

How is capitalism à la chinoise different from capitalism elsewhere? For one, it is complicated by forces external to the market, but not inimical to it. Ascension traces how the Chinese state’s emphasis on civic virtues combines with free market values to inculcate an economic morale in the citizens. Trainees pledge their “loyalty” to the company: “I will behave myself!  I will follow orders!” they declare marching. The Chinese dream — hard work guarantees success — is only the American dream in garb, but when laced with a dose of wounded nationalism, it can become a moral imperative.

Ascension, however, has greater ambitions and makes forays into the informal economy of freelancers and influencers — the subject of Shengze Zhu’s fine documentary Present.Perfect (2019). Streaming their lessons or everyday life simultaneously on different online portals using multiple smartphones, these young entrepreneurs use the same predatory language of their corporate counterparts: “knowledge that is monetized is useless” avows one personal branding guru; “influence or be influenced,” states another.

The film trains its guns finally on the consumers themselves: hordes of young college goers enjoying theme park rides, kiddies on a day out at the water world, gamers sealed to their seats playing Dota in internet cafes. We accompany an affluent family that at an upscale restaurant, served by the waiters we have just seen in training. They discuss European table manners, cutlery design, ski resorts and the trade war with US. It would seem that the elites are in some kind of self-training too, modifying their manners to imitate old world bourgeoisie.

Ascension contains some on-screen text and snatches of conversations between factory workers. But there are no voiceovers or talking head interviews with authorities to guide us through its narrative. It is indeed admirable that the film expects the audience to do the intellectual labour of accessing its meaning. But this comes at the cost of rigour.

Ascension is characterized by the bloat that often accompanies an overabundance of research material. Like American documentarian Lauren Greenfield, Kingdon has enviable access to scores of factory floors, corporate training programs and consumer forums — access whose details she does not care to reveal. Her film seems gripped by the anxiety of leaving anything out from the wealth of footage that must have come from this outing.

The result is a highly unwieldy film that goes everywhere and nowhere in particular. It isn’t that Ascension has no discursive framework, but that its material is so wide-ranging and scattershot that the film’s argument is generalized and its focus spread thin. Kingdon jumps not just across industries, factories, work sites and job descriptions, but also across economic activities and modes of being. The film’s vignettes are all connected by the single fact that the participants in them are embedded in the capitalist machinery. But then, who isn’t? Filmmakers perhaps. That Ascension is produced by MTV, a network known for shaping late-capitalist visual culture, is an irony that the film lets pass by.

It is to Kingdon’s credit that the film does not devolve into a freak show like Greenfield’s Generation Wealth (2018) or Sascha Schoeberl’s Mirror, Mirror on the Wall (2020), although the shot here of an automatic piano playing the Addams Family theme doesn’t exactly feel out of place. The filmmaker is also able to capture workers during their “down time”, breaking for lunch, taking a nap or watching videos at work.

These embellishments aside, the dominant note of Ascension, amplified by a nervous-making score, will only serve to reinforce the viewer’s prejudices: factories are dehumanizing places, the rich are fake and shallow, the service industry is a put-on, and the planet is drowning in our greed and glut. The film’s formal gambit, which has precedents in non-narrative works such as Godfrey Reggio Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992), means that we barely get to know the opinions of the participants themselves on work, money and good living.

The concern that Ascension exhibits about the malaise of our times is obviously justified. But its diagnosis lacks the discipline and precision needed to advance the debate. There is a shot of a caged ostrich late in the film, sandwiched between sequences about video gamers and theme park visitors. Its purpose or emotional logic is unclear, and like much else in the film, it is washed away in the excess on display. Kingdon’s film needed just what its subjects do: a little bit of minimalism and abstinence.

 

[First published at News9]