What Perfect Costs

Xin Chenxi is nine years old. Chen Xi is fifteen. Together they’re two of 26,000 students enrolled at the Shaolin Tagou martial arts school in China, a place that teaches discipline, order, and the conquest of one’s own will before it teaches anything else. Millions of people got to watch them without knowing any of this when they appeared in The New International Sound Pt. II, the GENER8ION and M.I.A. collaboration—thin sound, genuinely staggering visuals. They looked mythic on screen. Knowing where they came from makes it stranger.

Behind those images is Inigo Westmeier’s documentary Dragon Girls, which follows both girls and their classmates through the daily reality of Shaolin Tagou. They talk about their dreams, their homes, the distance between the two. They perform near-perfect sword forms. They fight their friends without pulling punches and show off their wounds with something between pride and resignation. It’s hard to watch and harder to look away from—which is usually a sign that something real is happening.

What the film shows, underneath the spectacle, is how these virtues get manufactured: through conditions that push children to their physical and psychological limits, that treat suffering as curriculum. China produces this kind of imagery constantly—the synchronized masses, the flawless formations—and we in the West consume it as aesthetic. The documentary makes that consumption uncomfortable in exactly the right way. You come away with a different understanding of the music video, a different understanding of China, and, if you’re paying attention, a slightly unsettled understanding of what you yourself have been willing to endure to be good at something.