Unlike highly crafted poetry or drama in 'Literature' with a capital 'L', which has been valued for its 'ability to use the full resources of a language to provide an artistic correlative of the subtle varieties and fine differences of individual sentiment', popular culture, as John Fiske (1989: 120–121) keenly observes, has often been accused of 'being simplistic, of reducing everything to its most obvious points, of denying all the subtle complexity, all the dense texture of human sentiment and of social existence'. But it is my contention that the complexity of 'high' culture/art is conveniently used to establish and also to maintain its aesthetic and intellectual superiority to 'low' culture/art so as to naturalise the superior taste of a certain class or group. In this chapter, I shall argue that popular culture, whether in China or in the West, is always shot through with all kinds of contradictions, complexities and uncertainties that usually escape control. A 'popular' cinematic text, for example, may be profoundly rich in its allusions to and connections with an array of other 'texts' from both 'high' and 'low' cultures.

In other words, such texts often reveal class, ethnic and gender dynamics in a society and, because of their intertextuality, they often reject neat interpretations and refuse facile solutions in translation. This chapter takes Chinese 'commercial' film director Feng Xiaogang's transnationally produced film Da wan ( Big Shot's Funeral , 2002) as a major text and focuses on its deep structures, from which ideological, psychoanalytical, socio-semiotic, and cultural interpretations can be derived. Borrowing ideas and theories from cultural studies for this project, I, while reading Big Shot's Funeral as a polynuclear text, will select some specific examples from the film in the analysis of parody and intertextuality, which create different levels of difficulties for the translator when working cross-culturally.