从反向忠诚到双向契约 — 中国犬类电影中儒家“忠”伦理的现代转型

Abstract

This paper theorizes a modern transformation of Confucian zhong(忠) ethics in Chinese dog films, arguing that the long-standing paradigm of “dog’s loyalty to humans” is being inverted and reconstituted as a bidirectional ethical contract. Catalyzed by recent public controversies around pet rights, spectacularized violence, and governance-by-efficiency, the study situates cinema within a broader crisis where instrumental rationality and media logics commodify animal life. Building on Baudrillard’s notion of hyper-real violence, Weber’s critique of instrumental rationality, Foucault’s biopolitics, Agamben’s “bare life,” Haraway’s “companion species,” and Deleuze & Guattari’s deterritorialization, the paper develops a three-stage model—hierarchical discipline → reverse deconstruction → symbiotic contract—to map this ethical shift. Methodologically, the analysis combines film semiotics and gaze theory with close readings of representative works across three decades. Classical “loyalty cinema” (e.g., King of the Dogs; the 2023 Chinese remake of Hachiko) encodes canine bodies through vertical compositions, sacrificial spectacle, and ritual repetition that naturalize Confucian hierarchy and de-subjectivize animals. These visual grammars—low-angle heroization, slow-motion martyrdom, and geometric symmetry around urban infrastructures—convert living beings into moral icons while occluding their lived distress. The turning point emerges in films such as Old Dog(2011) and Black Dog(2024), where market valuation, enclosure, and demolition landscapes expose animals as “bare life” under capital and policy regimes. Here, narrative extremity (e.g., the father’s lethal refusal to commodify his Tibetan mastiff) functions as a negative ethics that dismantles the exchangeability of life. Concurrently, innovations in cinematography instantiate a “horizontal gaze”: eye-level framings, tactile close-ups of fur, breath, and wounds, and balanced two-shots of humans and dogs redistribute visual power. In Black Dog, reciprocal acts—shared injury, mutual protection, voluntary separation and return—recode loyalty from unilateral obedience to recognition of autonomous needs and habitats. Popular and family dramas (Loyal Dog’s Wandering, Blood Wolf Dog, Goodbye, Li Cola, Silent Love) extend this tendency through everyday scenes of mobility, caregiving, and co-navigation, where leash tension, bodily rhythms, and parallel montage render the dog a co-agent rather than an affective prop. The paper’s principal contribution is to articulate “reverse loyalty” as a transitional logic that enables a Confucian ethical renewal: zhongis no longer a symbol shoring up hierarchical order but an ecologically inflected commitment to the dignity and flourishing (shengsheng) of life across species. This reframing provincializes Western posthumanism by grounding animal ethics in East Asian moral vocabularies while dialoguing with global theory. It further proposes that visual democratization—rather than doctrinal argument—operates as cinema’s material engine of ethical change. The conclusion outlines future directions for comparative East Asian studies and for integrating visual ethnography with animal action research. Ultimately, contemporary Chinese dog films transform the screen into a laboratory where hierarchical fidelity gives way to reciprocal covenant, and where the Confucian tradition regenerates itself in the ruins of modernization.