Bite my shiny metal river: Futurama’s Beast with a Billion Backs vs Up the Yangtze

I hesitated over this pairing, because if ever there is a movie mash-up to make one’s head explode, it is the union of Futurama* and Up the Yangtze. I’m not even sure I can approach this intersection without mental whiplash on a monumental scale.

On one end, we’ve got the straight-to-video snarkfest that is Futurama: Beast with a Billion Backs. This 90 minute film (episode? moviesode?) is the second installment of four direct-to-DVD movie-length stories, being released about six months apart. It’s a compromise between Groening and Fox, which apparently realized how monumentally stupid it was to cancel the series – though of course Fox is too stingy or risk-adverse to relaunch it. Hence, the cheaper route of the movies.

F:BWaBB doesn’t seek to make grand statements about the needs and desires of humanity (and robots). It just wants to make us laugh at the planet-sized interdimensional alien that wants Earth to love it, beginning with Fry. That’s all of Earth, by the way. No exceptions, no opting out. When the alien (voiced by David Cross) sinks its tentacles into the back of your neck, its gives you love and happiness, while simultaneously removing your free will. And isn’t that a fair trade? There’s a subplot involving Bender’s attempt to join the League of Robots and destroy all of humanity as well.

Naturally, there’s complications with the whole alien love thing, including the imminent destruction of the world, the underlying date-rape issue, the way that Fry’s friendship with Bender is sidelined, etc. Leela stands up as the voice in the wilderness, trying to stop the end of civilization. Of course, Leela has to save the day without being tentacled first.

I can’t really get into underlying themes, because we’re talking about freakin’ Futurama here. It’s brilliant and hilarious, sure, and Fox should be punched in the collective kidney for cancelling it, but it’s not quite deep. Which is not to say that the series as a whole (just like the Simpsons) doesn’t often serve up clever, incisive commentary. But its main goal is to be funny. And with this installment, it succeeds.

The day after all that, we went to the theater for Up the Yangtze. I was really tired that night, so I was perhaps more open than usual to the abstracted, dreamy tone the movie took. I’m pretty sure it was a documentary. Not positive. While it covers a vital issue in modern Chinese history – the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the subsequent flooding of the Yangtze river valley – the movie doesn’t feel like a documentary. Indeed, the odd jumps in time and the way the camera follows two characters/subjects seems more like a storybook or a movie-length meditation on how confusing it must be for the average Chinese person to live in a country where individual determination is nonexistent.

Up the Yangtze follows two main subjects. The first is an extremely poor teenage girl from the soon-to-be-flooded region who has to find work because her family cannot afford to send her to high school. She gets a job as a dishwasher on a luxury cruise boat sailing the Yangtze on “farewell tours” – allowing tourists to see the last glimpses of China’s legendary river before the dam covers the landscape. The other character is an upper middle class boy from an urban area (which will not be flooded) whose cockiness is at odds with the cruise boat’s traditionally minded management. There is also a narrator, who never identifies himself but who I assume is the filmmaker. His verbal contributions are rare and often jarring, more like a post-production suture than an integral part of the story.

The half-story/half-doc method is further scrambled by the many asides the audience gets from various people who are not the main subjects. Western tourists, native tour guides/propagandists, displaced citizens, and dam construction workers all offer their own perspective in brief, seemingly candid statements. However, since this is China, the audience cannot be sure whether those perspectives (except for the westerners’, natch) are honest, the result of careful government coaching, or a hybrid. I would have liked to learn from the filmmaker/narrator about any difficulties he might have encountered from the government while filming, but he is silent on the issue. And since the film was produced outside of China (by Zeitgeist Films, I believe), censorship can’t be the sole explanation.

Perhaps such questions are beside the point. The Three Gorges Dam is one of the most incredible public works projects happening in the world today. The United States’ interstate highway system is the nearest thing I can think of in terms of altering the physical and psychological landscape of a country to such a degree. In any case, the Dam is literally overwhelming, particularly in view of the way the monolithic national government handles it, imperiously displacing millions of people with little consideration for either their past or future, all for the sake of “China”. It’s a government where the needs of individuals are subsumed for the greater good, as defined by the Leaders. Guess that’s not as different from Futurama as I thought. Scary.


*I had some conflicting thoughts on whether Futurama counted as a ”movie.” Yes, it’s 90 minutes. Yes, it was released as a movie rather than a TV show. But… really? Discuss.