Jia Zhangke is known for his aesthetic of languid social realism, and much of Still Life captures characters slowly and silently wandering through postindustrial wastelands in search of absent partners. The pacing in his films performs an “act of resistance” against the “violence of speediness” present in the rapid urbanization of Chinese communism.350 The social realism in Still Life is memorably disrupted by two appearances of a UFO. In one scene, Shen sees a UFO fly across the Yangtze and over the mountains. In another, Shen speaks with archaeologist Wang Dongming, a friend of hers who is working in Fengjie at a heritage site before the flood covers it; their conversation frames a building in the background captured famously in 2007 by photographer Nadav Kander in an image titled Fengjie III (Monument to Progress and Prosperity), Chongqing Municipality, part of his award-winning series of images called Yangtze: The Long River (fig. 1.1). The building was originally constructed in 2003 as a monument to migration, was never completed, and was demolished in 2008. After their conversation, later that evening, the monument becomes a rocket ship that launches into the sky and out of frame.

Fig. 1.1

Nadav Kander, Fengjie III (Monument to Progress and Prosperity), Chungqing Municipality, 2007.

As a formal disruption of the social realist narrative, the “UFO moments” in Still Life draw attention to the transition between the stories of Han and Shen; these surreal interruptions also emphasize how extraordinary the urbanization of China is to most of its citizens. The monument-turned-spaceship is a Brutalist structure in the shape of the Chinese character 華 (huá), which translates as “prosper.” Industrial capitalist prosperity, the harbinger of destruction for most in this case, flies away from the characters of Still Life, leaving only the debris of the world they knew. The metaphor of the UFO also renders the unparalleled and continuing capitalist expansion. While the Three Gorges Dam might seem like an engineering megastructure of unsurpassable scale and impact, with a reservoir containing 42 billion tons of water and capable of slowing the rotation of the earth,351 the scale of global infrastructural assemblages is now both planetary and extraterrestrial. Concomitant with a second concrete revolution on earth is a call for investment in “space infrastructure” such as telecommunications, broadcasting, off-planet habitation, and resource extraction, in addition to obvious military ambitions.352 Jeff Bezos announced his intention to develop Blue Origin, an infrastructure for entrepreneurs interested in outer space. Against the capitalist current, in 2019 a group of scientists proposed leaving at least 85 percent of the solar system as “space wilderness,” to protect it from capitalist expansion in the form of extractive industries.353 But notable scientists such as theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson have advocated for years that humanity should colonize space. What better metaphor is there for the colonization of space than a Brutalist monument in the shape of the Chinese symbol for prosperity transforming into a spaceship and launching into the night sky? After all, infrastructural brutalism on earth already extends to spaces remote from human habitation. Dioxins, polyvinyl biphenyls (PCBs), and other organochlorines have made the Arctic, for example, one of the most toxic places on Earth. Such drifting horrors are also beginning to amalgamate in ways detrimental to life: for example, scientists fear that channels of water opening in the Arctic ice, increased in volume by warming temperatures, may contribute to the presence of more mercury in Arctic food chains.354 The Arctic ice also contains trillions of microplastic particles, in some cases as much as 2,000 times the density of pollutants in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which can be ingested by marine animals.355 Microplastic debris was discovered in the Southern Hemisphere as far south as Punta Arenas, Chile,356 near the southernmost tip of the Patagonia region. Punta Arenas is now a hub for the Chilean oil industry. The hydropolitical story that opened this chapter, a historiography of water depicted by Chilean director Patricio Guzmán in The Pearl Button, traced the riparian flows from Indigenous cosmology to the horrors of colonialism and dictatorship in the Patagonian peninsula. Infrastructural brutalism promises a return to the stars, most likely (and tragically) out of necessity.