The Intertextual Construction of Emerging Consumer Culture in China as Observed in the Movie Ermo

Summary

The rapid development of consumer culture in China is chronicled and caricatured in particularly revealing ways in the movie Ermo. It concerns the story of a rural Chinese woman, Ermo, who undergoes a metamorphosis in seeking to make enough money to buy a television set. Since popular culture texts, such as movies, often serve to mirror a culture back to itself, we conducted a discourse analysis of this film. We found that cultural intertextuality, that is the hybridizing construction of global and local meanings, was central. This intertextu-ality had two emergent themes: (1) longstanding versus postmodern narratives and (2) a Sinicization or Chinese indigenization of meanings. Managerial and research implications are drawn which direct marketing efforts toward the needs of Chinese consumers embodied in their indi-genized and particular local expression of new postmodern lifestyles.