Written and Directed by Chuan Lu
Review Copyright © 2006 Aaron M. Renn
Conclusion: Worth Seeing
Warning: Contains SPOILERS
Kekexili: Mountain Patrol is the sophomore effort of Chinese director Chuan Lu. This film is, in effect, a Western shot in the steppes of Tibet. Only instead of trying to save the ranch, the heroes are trying to preserve the Tibetan antelope in the face of poachers. Shot documentary style, this film is a fictional narrative set against a backdrop of actual events.
The wool of the Tibetan antelope is highly prized in the western fashion world, with the result that the population had fallen from near one million to only ten thousand in the 90's due to the all too familiar problem of overhunting. While killing the antelope was technically illegal, poaching continued rampant as the Chinese government failed to make even nominal efforts to enforce the law. As the antelope population plummeted, local citizens formed an unofficial militia to combat the poachers. Their efforts to stop the poachers eventually succeeded in embarrassing the Chinese government into taking action, with the result that much of the area was declared nature preserve. A enforcement unit was assigned to crack down on poaching, after which the militia disbanded. While poaching continues, it is at a much reduced level, with the result that the antelope herds have made a substantial recovery.
The fictional narrative takes place in the mid-90's during the time the militia was on its own and had not yet received widespread publicity. The film opens with the cold-blooded killing of one of the militiamen by a group of poachers. This did attract attention and Ga Yu, a Beijing based reporter, comes to interview Ri Tai, a former army captain and leader of the milita. At first suspicious, Ri Tai relents and allows Ga Yu to accompany his patrol as they become a de facto posse tracking down the killer of their comrade.
What makes a documentary-style film in Tibet a Western? This one has many of the classic themes: a bleak, empty landscape; a lack of official law and order leaving rough justice in the hands of the citizenry; good guys vs. bad guys, but with a blurring of the lines between the two; lots of silence; and a clean narrative of justice and revenge after a wrongful killing.
The Western as a genre is fertile grounds for examining many of the critical questions of justice that face us today. The key questions of this one are to what extent frontier justice can be morally justified for a righteous cause, and the related notion of when citizens are justified in stepping in when the government abdicates its responsibility to enforce the law or provide justice.
It is probably useful to contrast frontier justice with what I will call city justice:
| Frontier Justice | City Justice |
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Kekexili is a clear example of frontier justice in action. The Tibetan plane is largely beyond direct government control in the area of base law enforcement. A group of citizens arranged around a charismatic leader is formed to fill the gap. They are trying to enforce the law, but the ideal of saving the antelope is clearly their primary moral concern, not compliance with the law as such. Thus the important thing is to stop poaching, not providing the poachers with due process. Still, since this is a _moral_ code, the militia does not wantonly commit crimes in the name of saving the animals. They will, however, do things that even they themselves would regard as dishonorable if forced by circumstances beyond their control to do so (more on that soon). And as there is no official government presence in the film, clearly the group is accountable to no one but Ri Tai, who is solely responsible for keeping his troops in line.
The interesting part comes in where Ri Tai and the militia are forced to compromise their ethics in pursuit of the greater good. Examples abound, including:
It is important to note that despite this, the militia tries their best to behave morally. They feed their prisoners to the extent that their own food permits. In general, they only fine and release people they catch with pelts, after siezing the contraband of course, as they do not have the powers of arrest. They show some sympathy to low level participants in the antelope skin trade as people who were desperate due to economic considerations. (One presumes they would not be so nice to the poacher leadership, or the gunmen who killed their comrade).
This seems straightforward and standard. So why spend so much time discussing it? A good question.
First, on closer review it is clear that few of the moral compromises made by the militia are in fact necessitated by circumstance. Indeed, only one - selling the siezed pelts to raise money to pay a doctor for treatment of a comrade who had been shot - seems like a true moral dilemma. There was no reason to beat the prisoners, for example, other than expediency. The militia had been chasing the leaders of the poachers for, in the words of Ri Tia himself, years. Other than a particular anger at their death of their comrade, there is no reason why capture couldn't wait until next week or next year for that matter. After all, most of these lower level people were captured in random sweeps or at impromtu checkpoints. Eventually, the leaders might be so similarly caught in the net.
The release of the prisoners into the Tibetan wasteland with no food, water, or shelter was particularly uncalled for. The leader of the group released, a sort of minor subchieftan in the greater poaching clan, repeatedly warned Ri Tai that they would die. In fact, several of them do end up dying. There was no need to continue the pursuit at this time. Prudence almost demanded that they call it off. Already depleted of some manpower, they were running low on food and gasoline and would have to abandon the chase shortly in any case. Still, Ahab-like, Ri Tai pushes on even though he has clearly crossed the line into doing something he should not have. (And of course at the end, he, like Ahab, ends up with his comeuppance).
When I saw this film, the word that kept popping into my head over and over again was Iraq. This situation is at least a rough parallel to what has been going on over there.* It's a lawless terrain with bands of terrorists killing, not antelope, but people. And the abuses of prisoners - beatings and other such things - to obtain information is well documented.
I saw this film as part of the Talk Cinema series where a film is shown, a critic gives his take on it, then the audience asks questions and makes comments. Given all the publicity about beating prisoners in the news recently, I expect this topic to be front and center. Especially as not only did the militia beat prisoners, they also released several of their enemy into the cold to die of exposure - to be blunt, killing them. Much to my surprise, neither the critic or any audience member once raised this issue. There were really only three "moral dilemma" topics discussed:
This, perhaps, should not have been surprising. This screening was in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood, one of the bluest of blue neighborhoods. Animal rights and Tibet are at the top of the political agenda here. It is natural those would be the things of highest important to the group. Still, it is illustrative to wonder how it is that such good liberals could completely gloss over and ignore the abuses that took place in the name of their causes in this film.
Consider, had identical scenes taken place in the deserts of Iraq, with US soldiers and Al-Qaida members, what would the audience reaction have been? Had the citizen's militia with assault rifles out to save the antelope in the face of government indifference instead been the unarmed Minutemen group of US citizens attempting to stop illegal Mexican migration in the face of US government indifference, what would the reaction have been?
This is not per se a criticism of them. I think it points out an important thing about all of us. We all, whether we like to admit it or not, to at least some level sympathize with the idea that the ends justify the means. Criticism of methods is really, at its core, often just a smoke screen to cover up the fact that we are really arguing not abound means but ends. What do you think about saving the antelope versus the invasion of Iraq? How do you feel about Mexican immigration? How do you feel about the state of the Palestinians? These are really the key questions because whether or not you (or, let's get real, me) agree with any particular action, or to bring this back to the genre of the Western, agree with the imposition of frontier justice, depends to a great deal on the key objects of our own moral code.
It is not that any of us believe that a good end justifies any means. But we are certainly willing to cut some corners in the name of the greater good. It is doubtful, in fact, whether we can achieve all of the good things that we want without compromising some of our principles. Charles Coleman was right. We do live in an imperfect world where if we set perfection as our target, we'll sometimes never obtain or preserve the things most precious to us. Or, as Machiavelli put it, "A man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil. Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity."
The problem with this is, as Kekexili richly illustrates, that in a situation with frontier justice, it is ultimately the moral fiber of the leader who must check the impulse to do wrong in order to achieve a greater good and to restrict it only those cases of true necessity. It would take a philosopher king to pull this off. Such a person can't exists, or is such a rare species as to make impractical to count on such men. Ri Tai certainly is not one. He eventually becomes so consumed in his pursuit of the poachers and the killer of his comrade that he becomes a killer himself. Eventually he became, through the practice of small evils, able to commit a greater one, and ultimately destroys both himself, and by rights should have doomed his cause. (The plot of Kekexili has been praised for avoiding the good-guy-triumphs-at-the-end stereotype. But in fact, it does fall prey to it at a meta-level. The militia, far from being destroyed by the devastating loss of personnel, including their leader, ultimately come out on top as the government cavalry rides in to clamp down on poaching, saving the antelope, etc., etc.)
This is the human dilemma. Don't compromise your ethics and see the antelope hunted to extinction. Do compromise them and end up at Abu Ghraib. There are real, tough choices that have to be made. To pretend that the answers are simplistic, that we can always have it all, is naive to an extreme. This is the real debate we need to have with ourselves. To really understand our own capacity for trading off ends for means and what the implications of that choice, one way or the other, are.
Kekexili can be a little more than a mirror. Watch it and see yourself, that is, your own values, reflected back. But I'd urge people to take a deeper look and examine their own values in a more critical light. It is often said that good cinema can really make you think. Kekexili has that potential. But given the experience I had with the audience I saw it with, I don't expect that potential to come to fruition in many cases.
There are other questions raised by this film, or rather not raised by it, nor considered by the Talk Cinema audience. Why, precisely, were the Tibetan antelope being hunted to extinction? It is easy to say market demand combined with government apathy. But the demand for beef, poultry, and pork vastly exceeds the demand for antelope wool, yet we've got no shortage of cows, chickens, or pigs. Someone did draw the comparison between the antelope and the American buffalo. Indeed, the comparison is apt. Why did the buffalo die while cattle thrived? That is left as an exercise for the reader. (Hint: see "The Tragedy of the Commons").
We're also indirectly asked to ponder why the landscape of Tibet is so bleak. One of the poachers says he was forced into poaching because his previous method of earning a living as a shepherd was wiped out when the herds disappeared. Why did that happen? The film doesn't tell us, but given the environmental horror zone we discovered in Eastern Europe as the legacy of communist rule, I know where I'd place my bets.
This bleak landscape is, much like the desert southwest of so many Westerns, beautiful in many ways. Kekexili in fact won cinematography awards for the way it captured this in glorious Cinemascope. (Thank you Sony, for putting up the funds for this). The film was apparently shot on location, and with great difficulty, but despite the general gorgeous appearance of the landscape, I couldn't shake the feeling that big chunks of this had been filmed on a soundstage. The perfectly still backgrounds with swirling dust clouds and snow in the fore looked for all the world like actors parading in front of a matte background and snow machine. Regardless of the reality, that was the effect.
The harsh landscape is a perfect metaphor for the hard men who populate it and the hard lives they lead. For all that this film is nominally about saving the antelope, remarkably few of them appear in the film. The real subject is the people who inhabit it and the moral choices they make in reaction to the situation in which they find themselves.
I've said a lot about the morally ambiguous "good guys" who populate the film, less so about the bad guys. Perhaps that's because I'm less satisfied with them. Chuan Lu does a great job of softening the edge on the lower ranking members of the poaching gang, who pretty much are, as they claim, doing what they do out of some necessity. None of them has gotten rich off this. They also show a certain kindness towards Ri Tai's militia, joking with them and even helping treat one of their wounded. Ri Tai has rounded them up and fined them several times previously, and they clearly believe he will be at least somewhat restrained in their treatment. It is only when they are turned loose into the wilderness at serious risk of death that the relationship finally ruptures.
The poaching leadership is where the moral ambiguity really breaks down. The opening scene of the film sets the tone. First we observe a militiaman taken prisoner. Then a gruesome slaughter and skinning of several antelope, hunted down by machine gun I might add, followed by the cold blooded, execution style slaying of the prisoner. How could these people ever be humanized after this opening? They can't. This scene more than anything numbs our moral senses to what comes later when the militia posse is chasing them down. Absent this scene, and a similar cold blooded killing at the end, perhaps the abuses perpetrated by the militia would not have passed unremarked by the audience. I personally felt this was the weakest part of the film and it would have been significantly improved by removing or altering these portions.
But overall Kekexili is a well-executed film that is worth seeing - and one that we should take advantage of to prompt us to reflect on our own moral values and view of ends and means.
[* There will be those who object that there is no parallel between these two situations. In general, we all engage in this type of hair splitting to argue that cases that don't fit with with our worldview are somehow different. For example, when the political right desires to ban flag burning or pornography, or the left to ban what it terms hate speech, both sides would argue that there is no hypocrisy in both claiming to desire free speech while banning certain expressions of it. Both sides believe that the other's pet concern is somehow different from their own.
Still, while I'd defend the rough parallel between the two, there is something different about Iraq: it isn't pure frontier justice. US soldiers aren't a posse comitatus, they're agents of the state who are accountable ultimately to higher ups. In short, we're trying to apply the rules and principles of city justice in a frontier world. We're trying to establish city justice where none existed before. This is a difficult prospect to say the least. Whether city justice itself is capable of producing city justice is a claim that is by no means obvious. Back to the Western, one should perhaps re-watch "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" to see a film maker's take on this issue. ]
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