The science of trouble

After the February shooting at Northern Illinois University that killed five people and another at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge — both happening a little over a year after the Virginia Tech shooting that left 33 people dead — what could be more topical than a movie about a campus shooting?

You might remember a story about a bright Mainland Chinese PhD physicist who, because his dissertation didn’t receive a prestigious award, went berserk and shot six people, killing five, before he killed himself. The 1991 Lu Gang shooting at the University of Iowa is the basis for the film “Dark Matter,” directed by Chen Shi-Zheng and starring Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn.

At the 2007 Sundance festival, this sensitively crafted movie won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, an award for feature films focusing on science or technology as a theme or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character. The film’s public opening, however, was delayed in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, according to Chen.

Chen was a student at NYU when the Lu Gang incident occurred. Speaking at a special preview screening at Caltech, Chen explained that he was intrigued by some reactions to the shooting. Afterwards, the Chinese press in America issued an apology, in Chinese, to Americans about the incident. But then he noticed a computer screen saver that read “Long Live Gang Lu.” For some people, the shooter was a hero.

“I wasn’t interested in making a documentary. I wanted to use my experience to make a story,” said Chen. The story, written by Billy Shebar, is about Liu Xing (played by Ye Liu), an astronomy student who goes to a fictional university to research under a prominent cosmologist, Jacob Reiser (Quinn). There, Liu befriends a patron (Streep) of the university who has an interest in the Chinese culture.

According to Chen, Chinese who left China in the 1980s often had a naiveté about what America is or what America was. “The expectation of America was so high, so how do you deal with the gap between your expectations and the reality here?” said Chen. In the movie, Liu isn’t a loner like Lu Gang. He has friends, but eventually he is left alone. He also meets the exasperating yet highly successful Lawrence (Lloyd Suh), who he considers sort of as a rival.

“Lawrence is the guy you always hated in school,” said Chen. “I knew someone like that. He refused to speak Chinese to me as if he was ashamed to be Chinese. He was trying to eliminate the past or trying to erase the past. It was very disturbing.”

In the movie, Reiser initially likes the modest and hard-working Liu, but there’s also a suggestion that the professor almost uses the Chinese graduate students as research slaves — working them long hours without intending to share any credit. Liu then ventures a theory that contradicts beliefs his mentor, one related to dark matter.

Yet not all the experiences of Chinese students are negative. Chen includes a segment where the Chinese students attend Bible study so they can get free food and rides to the grocery store. He recalled similar incidents from his own life where Christianity meant free lunch and free furniture for pragmatic Chinese students.

Part of the film was actually shot in China, portraying the impression that Liu’s family had of his life in America via letters that didn’t always tell the truth.

While doing research for the film there, Chen was able to visit the real-life Gang Lu’s sister, who told him that her brother had “no social skill” and didn’t stray far from the library.

In astrophysics and cosmology, dark matter is understood as something we can’t see but we know is there because of the gravitational effect it has on visible matter. Liu’s descent into depression comes slowly and is largely sympathetic because of actor Ye Liu’s portrayal of him as wide-eyed and earnest. International audiences may be familiar with his work in the 2002 Golden Globe-nominated “Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress” or 2003’s World War II drama “Purple Butterfly.”

At the Caltech screening, there seemed to be a lot of sympathy for Liu and his troubled relationship with his PhD committee, but perhaps anyone who has been under a graduate committee’s thumb can sympathize with such a plight. Chen’s movie is a sensitive perspective on how new immigrants perceive America and how failed dreams can lead
to tragedy.

“Dark Matter” is showing at the Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 in Pasadena.