Becoming Mermaid: The Entangled Wastewater and Trans-corporeal Plasticity in Suzhou River (2000)

The mermaid in the film Suzhou River is changed from an unspoiled fairytale character to a toxic life due to waste pollution in contemporary China. This paper explores the alternative time frame in which wastewater may exist by extending the female doubling theme into a trans-corporeal plasticization process from an eco-materialist perspective. The plasticized representation of women’s bodies has resulted in unauthorized and open readings of an old tale, with boundaries being dissolved and dismantled, particularly in the context of the “becoming” model that transcends traditional human concepts in the Anthropocene. Understanding this film as “eco-cinema”, I focus on the subtle interweaving of the human waste and water, especially how mermaid can be interpreted as a kind of urban excrement, rather than an untouched fairytale figure. First of all, the magical shapeshifting properties of the mermaid reveal a sense of “plastic universalism” within post-socialist Chinese society. Secondly, I argue for the invisible overlap of the spectre of plastic garbage with the mermaid pushes viewers to question the authenticity of human time. The destructive mobility of these waste materials helps understand how people are severed from their environment that holds memories. Lastly, this paper contend that Suzhou River presents multiple interpretations of the plastic specter, moving from plastic hauntology to plastic as kinship, in which plastic serves as a symptom of post-socialist capitalist China’s consumer psychology as well as a temporal record of environmental harm that is normally invisible.