Phenomenal TV series "The Name of the People". The show was broadcast by Hunan Satellite TV's "Golden Eagle Exclusive Broadcasting Theater" in the spring of 2017. The ratings for a single episode broke seven or even eight, setting a record for ratings in the past ten years, and Douban scores as high as 8.3. In all fairness, most of the actors’ acting skills in this play are remarkable, and the sharpness of real politics is also commendable. However, in terms of class discourse, this play leaves many rifts that may be unintentional, showing our current situation. The dilemma of the main melody film and television narrative.
First of all, it is worth noting that the text portrays the image of the workers at the bottom, which has been very different from the image of workers in the previous Chinese film and television works. In Chinese film and television works after 1949, workers as the leading class represent advanced productivity and advanced culture. Their image is generally positive, sunny, determined, sincere and enthusiastic, and full of "heroicity." Even in some film and television works in recent years, the images of some laid-off workers are involved-for example, in the movie "The piano of steel" (2011) and the TV series "The Great Craftsman" (2007), although there is more sadness and Desolate, but still simple and open-minded, so it can still be said to be "heroic".
However, in "The Name of the People", we see that Wang Wenge, as the representative of the workers of the Dafeng Factory, shows more vulgarity, impulsivity, lack of rationality, and lack of modern consciousness (including his name, which has such a Negative implications mean). He led the workers to protect the factory's rights, but he was always to no avail. From the overall point of view, he always played the role of making things worse because he didn't trust the government. Here, we can see that the workers who have been positively expressed have largely become "unstable" and "disharmonious" factors. Their spontaneous behavior from the perspective of their own class interests is not only no longer "advanced", but From the perspective of the dynamics of drama, it has even become the resistance and "baggage" of the "heroes and protagonists". This change is obviously quite meaningful.
Of course, Wang Wenge is just a small character in "The Name of the People", and the other two prominent figures who really occupy the core of the text are the anti-corruption director Hou Liangping and the police chief Qi Tongwei. These two characters aroused widespread and enthusiastic audience debate during the broadcast of the TV series. It is worth pondering that from the media opinion, Hou Liangping, as a positive character and an absolute hero, has a much lower "audience degree" than Qi Tongwei as a negative character. What exactly is this for?
I think that apart from the problem of screenwriting strategy and the gap in acting skills, it is more that the background of the two images played a role in the communication effect. To put it simply, Hou Liangping's "personal design" shows the class background, which inadvertently slides into a sense of privilege and psychological superiority, which makes him appear "hypocritical" and "artificial" to many viewers; On the other hand, Qi Tongwei’s low-level experience of “personal design”, especially the process in which he had fought against the oppression of the powerful and was eventually forced to compromise, which was gradually revealed as the plot progressed, may be stimulated on a larger scale. The empathy and resonance of the audience.
In addition, if you take a closer look, the two characters Hou Liangping and Qi Tongwei actually involve two different heroic narrative orientations. Hou Liangping's character spectrum is relatively simple and easy to understand. He is a typical traditional hero who "resists against tangible evil". He has a strong Chrisma, and what he demands is deterministic justice and victory. In contrast, Qi Tongwei’s character spectrum is much more complicated. On the one hand, in terms of his core dramatic actions, he is of course an “evil perpetrator”; on the other hand, in terms of his class culture, he is intentional. Inadvertently was given a color of "resisting the invisible absurdity".
is exactly this kind of color, which makes him inadvertently become an "anti-hero" who is easier to connect with the current low-level perspective. In the play, Qi Tongwei’s most resounding motto in life is "Victory over the half son", which has a clear cultural meaning of "resisting the invisible absurdity". In the social and cultural logic of the transition from modern to postmodern, such a behavior and its meaning are often regarded as "heroic". What it seeks is not deterministic justice or victory in the traditional sense, but a procedural, paradoxical, and even self-destructive posture of resistance.
looks at galleries of film and television characters in the contemporary world, which are beyond the framework of the mainstream of society, but deeply embedded in the psychological expectations of audienceThe image of "anti-hero" has been around for a long time, such as the "male and female thieves" in "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967), which is regarded as the "first work" of the new Hollywood movie. In recent years, due to the transformation of social and cultural logic, heroes and even "anti-heroes" with the color of "resisting the invisible absurdity" have appeared more frequently in the field of Chinese film and television art, and they are often related to the realistically referent class. Cultural mingling-how to deal with the above-mentioned complexity is worthy of our more attention and thinking.
is the movie "The Great Cause of the Founding of the Army" as a gift for the 90th anniversary of the founding of the army. As the third part of the "Trilogy of the Founding of the People's Republic", it was painted at the end of July 2017, and together with the previous "The Founding of a Country" (2009) and "The Founding of the Party" (2011), it reminds us to pay attention to the traditional left-wing red How the narrative can achieve effective communication with contemporary young people.
In fact, through the mass media in recent years, it is not difficult for us to find that under the new reality, the state has shown that the "post-80s", "post-90s" and even "post-00s" who are gradually entering the core field of society are The ideological call for more and more intense appeals. In a nutshell, in the news field, this kind of appeal is mainly manifested in the initiative to set various media agendas and construct the discourse of the role of "youth" in line with the needs of the new situation; in the field of film and television art, it is mainly manifested in the active rhetorical strategy innovation. The left-wing red narrative is "youthful" packaging that meets the tastes of young people. The relevant strategies in the latter aspect of
mainly include: 1. In terms of character image, "grafting" the typical personality characteristics and even speech and behavior of the current young people to the protagonist, so that the young audience can more easily develop a sense of identity and substitution with the protagonist; 2 , In terms of style and plot, either "love replaces revolution" or "game represents revolution" in order to cater to the aesthetic preferences of the younger generation who have read romance novels and grew up playing video games. These strategies seem to be quite effective on the surface, but in fact, I think they are nothing more than a kind of "backdoor listing" achieved by revolutionary history in the context of consumerism through "stars" and "entertainment". The effective dissemination of the dominant ideology itself is difficult to produce realistic subjects that meet national expectations.
For example, we can see that whether in "The Founding of a Country" or "The Founding of a Party", the narrative itself is highly fragmented, and it is difficult to sort out clear historical clues, let alone grasp the solid historical logic, which is enough to attract What the audience walks into the theater is actually the dizzying stars and stars in the text, and the spectacle and interest of "counting the stars" that it brings.
Therefore, if an audience who is not very familiar with modern Chinese history can leave an impression after watching the film, I am afraid it is just a few lace scenes that have nothing to do with history. And the more you watch the movie in groups, the more the "star counting" effect brings about the decay of historical seriousness and the diffusion of historical value, and the collective carnival effect caused by too many stars on the big screen It tends to make young audiences farther away rather than into history.
Of course, it should be admitted that from "The Founding of the Country" to "The Founding of the Party" and then to "The Founding of the Army", these trilogy have gradually improved in the degree of completion of the historical narrative. "The Founding of a Country" basically does not have a core protagonist and core events; "The Founding of a Party" has the young Mao Zedong played by Liu Ye as the core figure, although its relationship with the major historical events of the text is too loose to bear. The narrative function of connecting the great history; and in "The Founding of the Army", the integration between star actors and historical narratives has been significantly improved. The completion of several large narrative paragraphs is relatively high, and the main characters are also more complete. Fresh and full. However, as to how to deal with the relationship between the left-wing red narrative and the aesthetic taste of contemporary young people, I think "The Great Cause of Army Building" still has not been well resolved.
After the film was released, some events in the field of public opinion, including disputes over the acting and role of the "Little Fresh Meat" actors in the film, the scoring function of the film on Douban and the closure of the comment page, etc., all showed The tension and conflict between the two parties cannot be underestimated.
Therefore, in the context of post-Fordism and increasingly mobile Internet, can "heroes" surpass "stars"/"celebrities", or whether a fully starized and consumerized "hero" can complete the dominant consciousness The task of morphological construction is the key to serious thinking about the current development of the main theme of film and television.
In other words, the so-called "hero" generally refers to a person who has outstanding talents or has made outstanding contributions, and usually plays the role of a model of behavior and morality in the community; and the so-called "hero narrative" is generally based on telling The growth experience and glorious deeds of heroes are the core, and the narrative process is aimed at establishing heroic images and spreading community values and beliefs. Looking at it diachronically, heroic narratives have been the most mainstream narrative paradigm in Chinese film and television art for a long period of history.
First of all, before the 1980s, whether it is the narrative of martial arts heroes in the context of traditional market culture, or the narrative of revolutionary heroes in the context of left-wing red culture, they have received widespread attention in a specific historical context. Agitation. Then from the 1980s to the beginning of the 21st century, the heroic narrative had a relatively low ebb on the surface: at that time, influenced by the transformation of literary concepts, many film and television works began to jump out of the barriers of the grand heroic narrative and turned to To create a more ordinary, more grounded "person" image. But in fact, even in these two decades, the idealistic or romantic tone that heroic narrative relies on is still the value background of most mainstream film and television works—especially the typical theme film and television drama.
From this, it is not difficult to see that heroic narratives in the traditional sense are actually destined to be closely related to "grand narratives" and "classical narratives". What they advocate and rely on is a logical and orderly narrative. , A world where good and evil are rewarded, and beauty and ugliness are different. Therefore, in the last ten years, with the decline of "grand narrative" and "classical narrative", the bleakness of heroic narrative is almost inevitable. Simply put, under the multilateral transformation of economy, politics, and technology, an era that is more fragmented, more diversified, more fluid, and therefore more variable, has suddenly come, and a flat, light, and The cultural logic of narcissism and carnival has also quickly become popular. This is also the underlying reason for the popularity of variety entertainment shows and the downturn of classic melodramas in the field of Chinese film and television art in the past ten years.
But at the same time, compared with ten years ago, the context of our era has undergone tremendous changes. These changes, on the one hand, make the dominant ideological construction tasks carried by the main melody film and television relative to the widespread variety show trend, but it is easier to show the advantages of directing the deep level of reality, so it can be strategically transformed into the value concentration of the text to satisfy The current audience's long-standing "meaning hunger"; on the other hand, it also makes the returning hero narrative have to face some new difficulties and new challenges. At present, what we should see is that these new challenges have not been well dealt with under the achievements.
In such a grand occasion, we should also see that "Wolf Warriors 2" actually shows a very typical embarrassment of an internationally oriented, new national identity imagination-different from the previous "victim imagination" "This new embarrassment is based on the "leader's imagination" as the main axis. It is a way of defining national identity that has gradually become popular among the people under the framework of the "rise of great powers" that has become more and more intense in recent years.
and its embarrassment mainly lies in the fact that it uses the image rhetoric of nationalism and nationalism to write our main theme heroic narrative into a modern version of social Darwinism to a large extent. Because it does not jump out of the old dualistic expression model of "strong/weak", "savior/saved", "advanced/backward", and "modern/pre-modern", there is no new value creation. , It just puts itself from the disadvantage to the advantage.
From the perspective of modernity, China's heroic narrative has gradually formed two internal tensions of humanism and nationalism/nationalism since the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. With the continuous transformation of China's historical context for more than a hundred years, these two dimensions sometimes support each other and sometimes are at odds with each other, making heroic narratives show different value spectrums.
In recent years, as the world enters a new round of integration, new contradictions are being highlighted, and new rules are brewing. We will also call this the "post-globalization era" for the time being-then in such an era In the beginning, how China should express itself, imagine itself, and define itself through popular culture has actually become a more sensitive and critical issue. Simply put, in order to complete the reconstruction of the national identity in the context of the new era through the way of heroic narrative-by imagining a hero and its deeds-we must jump out of the old discourse framework and create new ones Image, put forward new value. weThe heroic narrative of the main theme must show such courage and pattern.
From this perspective, when we look at "Wolf Warrior 2", it is not difficult to find that the text is embarrassing. For example, Leng Feng insisted on having a hand-to-hand battle with the white villain, which was unnecessary from the perspective of plot logic. Another example is the conspicuous display of the text on high-tech military equipment and voyages to other countries. The slogan with obvious violent tendency like "Zhu", etc. And I think the most direct one is that Leng Feng, the protagonist played by Wu Jing, directly arranged a black boy with a role in the play, and this little boy actually kept calling Leng Feng "daddy" or "godfather". Of course, this can be explained in terms of plot, but what about culture? The sense of superiority and condescending inside is self-evident.
Or we can put ourselves in a different position and think about it. If it is a young boy with an East Asian face in a mainstream European and American movie, or simply a Chinese descent, and then let him call a blond savior man Dad, we as How will the Chinese audience feel?
Taken together, "Wolf Warrior 2" tries hard to show the equality between China and African countries and the friendship between the Chinese and the African people, but many rhetorical strategies are still not implicitly or smartly revealed. A sense of superiority and condescending. So, today, does our heroic narrative have the ability to surpass the self-imagination and self-expression of postcolonialism? This is actually a question that is particularly worthy of deep consideration by our main theme film and television creators.
