Screening the In-Between: Intermediality and Digital Dystopianism in Contemporary Chinese Film and Fiction

This article uses Chinese popular narratives rooted in and circulated via the internet to investigate what effects it might have on texts that move through the internet in the process of adaptation or transformation from one cultural form to another. By juxtaposing the analysis of mainland Chinese films based on writings first published on the web, namely the 2012 films Caught in the Web (搜索 Sousuo), directed by Chen Kaige (陳凱歌), and Mystery (浮城謎事 Fucheng mishi), directed by Lou Ye (婁燁), with online fiction that expands the storyworlds of blockbuster films, such as the 2007 novel Infinite Horror (無限 恐怖 Wuxian kongbu) by zhttty, this article focuses on the discursive role intermediality plays in literature-to-film and film-to-literature adaptations. I show how all three works share a preoccupation with the “in-between,” a term closely related to intermediality. In these texts, the in-between is replete with struggles between different forms of agency facilitated and limited by digital media. The connotations that the internet carries as a form of intermediality are, however, dependent on the creators' own experiences and beliefs about the impact of digital media on contemporary society. In some cases, their work suggests the normative project of digital dystopianism, a predominantly negative outlook on the dangers digital technologies pose to morality and social institutions. In others, it points to a liberating creative agency that allows cultural producers to use the internet to forge new stories and meanings out of a global archive of popular culture.