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It gestures toward the end of the working world we know and to the rise of the machines.
Each group will make sacrifices.
(Goodbye, middle class and new shoes for her kids.)
They are very obvious.
But their output is pathetic.
American workers, the Chinese managers observe, are pretty slow.
They have fat fingers.
The Chinese are slender, with excellent posture and ready smiles, while the Americans slump and frown.
Also, they complain.
When they have to spend ten minutes in a 200-degree room, they have the audacity to show fatigue.
(Our American counterparts are very afraid of the heat.)
They seem oddly averse to being seriously injured on the job.
They want to unionize.
Theyre far apartin all ways.
The company chairman, Cao Dewang, gazes on his American workers, his aged face rigid, grim.
Or, actually, How the Other Half Works.
To work is to live.
To live is to work.
Its an ode to transparency, to a transparent world.
The irony probably never occurred to them.
The Fujian-factory scenes might have been choreographed by the Fritz Lang ofMetropolis.
The movements of the workers are balletic.
Its a gorgeous vision.
The filmmakers triumph is to make us see both sides at once.
On camera, the Chinese put on brave faces.
It is what it is.
American Factoryisnt all black-and-white.
Cao and his ilk arent malevolent, exactly.
What Cao doesnt grasp is that Americans no longer have faith in a social contract.
The Americans invite the Chinese to barbecues and show them how to fire shotguns and pistols.
(Ordinary Chinese citizens cant own guns.)
But the unionizing movement is the dividing line.
These are union-averse communists who fire organizers willy-nilly.
Its kind of suspenseful when the day of the union vote arrives.
But kind of not.
Fuyao has spent a cool million schooling Americans in the horrors of collective bargaining.
In some ways, its most vivid aspect is How We Look to the Chinese, which is weak.
In their eyes, we give our children too much encouragement, too much self-esteem.
Donkeys like being touched in the direction their hair grows.
The movie is eye-opening a windshield on the new world.
