Author: Han Siqi
"Love is expressed through money. If you don't have money, you have to learn to compromise. It doesn't matter how much you want me to compromise."
The above line comes from Netflix's new Korean drama " Ladies ", This kind of feeling that seems to have strayed into the "Little Times" channel - "Love without material is a piece of sand that will be scattered without the wind" is real. Although it is a "spectacle" presentation of poverty, it also makes the audience cry out for reality.
The popular password of the young ladies: poverty, or a sense of poverty
If one day you are lucky enough to have a huge amount of wealth, how will you spend it? Can you really afford this price?
This is the entry point of the story of "Little Ladies": three impoverished sisters unexpectedly received a fortune of 2 billion, and while they were hesitating whether to take it for themselves, they also fell into the conspiracy and power war of the chaebol family , with the development of the plot, they also slowly unravel the life subject of money.
is a familiar Korean drama routine. Just as some drama fans accurately summed up the various senses of sight in "Little Ladies": "Korean counterparts are really terrible, the core is " squid game ", the packaging is " deadly woman ", the story is In "Anna" and "Eve", various types are together in perfect harmony, and it can make you feel like a new story." The personalities of the three
sisters are very different: the eldest sister
is a small accountant in a large company, a marginal person, capable of mediocre. I used to expect to achieve a class jump by getting married, but unfortunately my dream of getting rid of poverty was broken, but I made a good friend who left a secret legacy for myself. The second sister
is a journalist with a sense of justice. She has ideals and patience, but is severely addicted to alcohol. Smart enough, at the age of 17, he played stocks to make millions, but he was reluctant to reach the wealth that could be reached with his hands because of his knot. The third sister of
is an art genius. She has entered the top art high school in the country with her talent for "doing questions". But she would rather be a "gunman" for the daughter of a privileged family than put up with her "blood-sucking" sisters.
In domestic dramas, not to mention the widely criticized "suspended poor people living in hardcover model houses", even in realistic female-themed dramas such as "Other Country" and " Twenty Not Confused ", the camera is mostly aimed at anxiety. The middle class, their pain is a dark cloud with a golden edge, a soft landing with a backup, and a life with an eternal retreat. Therefore, this year's Korean dramas from "Anna" to "Little Ladies" can be screened on social networks, first of all because they see real poverty on the screen.
Of course, "Little Ladies" also suffered from the controversy that "exquisite poverty" is not real enough: "I have been poor for half my life, but put 2.5 million won on the bedside table while sleeping; , wrapped in a winter coat worth 7,600 yuan from LEMAIRE and sat down to negotiate." But "Little Ladies" is not so much a 1-to-1 restoration of "poverty" as it is a sense of "poverty" to win.
Just as "reality" and "reality" are two concepts, so are "poverty" and "poverty". "Little Ladies" let the audience put "screenwriters really understand poverty" on Weibo's hot search because of the metaphors and fillings in a lot of details, which are very life-like and down-to-earth. The "sense of poverty" and "sense of deprivation" conceptualized by
are embodied as symbols such as winter clothes, windows, ice cream, etc., which constitute a solid sense of reality in the world of the Three Sisters. The cramped "window" in
's house is difficult to close normally once opened. Even if it is turned on, what you see is not a "scenery", and the cost of living in a metropolis will be measured in the "light" in the room.
"Winter clothes are easy to tell if a person is poor or not". Because the fashion completion of summer clothes depends on the figure, while winter clothes depend on the crispness of the material of the clothes.
's second sister from a poor family will be easily identified by her colleagues because she is "too tolerant" and has no capital and confidence to turn her face. This disparity between the rich and the poor, the unequal distribution of resources, and the emotions that resonate with the times are the real passwords of "Little Ladies".
A Korean drama with a one-way sharp turn: the emotional outlet of the times
"Little Ladies" achieved a "high opening" after the broadcast, although there are Park Chan-wook 's imperial beauty finger and the screenwriter's aesthetic bonus, but the more important thing is to step on it Mood points of the times. The audience's expectation for "Little Ladies" is a cool drama, or a high-energy suspense: watch "poor girls turn into noble assassins, harvest wealth and resources", a fake high-class person with one punch, be a real spoiler. The backside of
cool dramas is the need for the mood of the times, while the producers of Korean dramas are keenly aware of the changes in the water temperature of the times: the "talent first" that was once regarded as a secular religion around the world has become suspicious, and "talent = talent + hard work" becomes suspicious. The promise to control the fate of life is breaking down. Family background, social environment, and opportunities have emerged from the hidden reefs of the past, forming an increasingly solid and hard-to-break class solidification, which also erodes people's confidence.
So, in the Korean drama "My Liberation Diary", Meizhen monologues, "I don't know where the problem started, but I'm just tired, all interpersonal relationships are like work, every moment of sobriety , are working." Burnout is not just physical.
In the Korean drama "Anna", there is no mention of inheriting wealth, but the senior sister who inherits poverty collapses, "I really live very hard, the stock debt owed by my father 5 years ago has not been repaid, and no one can Make sure you work hard and you'll be rewarded equally."
In "Little Ladies", the three sisters are not healed by the family as in the literary classic "Little Women", but follow the wounds and mental flaws created by poverty, all the way to imperfection. In the era of classical authors, "Little Women" wrote "poor and strong will", and in this era, the Korean drama "Little Women" made "people poor and short-minded".
Therefore, the story of "Little Ladies" is not very related to "Little Women". Although it borrows the structure of three sisters living together to stay warm, this story is not essentially a growth bible written for little ladies— - Be humble, love yourself, love your neighbor, not vain, but the ultimate drama of cruelty and spectacle.
's Korean dramas in the past two years have obviously given up the spectacle of "love" - pure love, aesthetics, romance, satisfying and even leading women's various fantasies about love and life - but a sharp turn, Instead, he turned to the explosive new password of "hate": class solidification, gender dilemma, the gap between the rich and the poor, and the layers of poverty-causing conditions were nested and finally fell on the bottom-level identity of "poor women". The dimension of
's gender-superimposed stratum makes such a narrative full of "hate points": upper-class women are not women, and lower-class women are not people. At this time, the story routine of the weaker's counterattack and the all-out counter-attack was welcomed by the audience, and people wanted to see that the Korean dramas that belonged to cool dramas began.
Of course, this transformation is not the essential change of Korean drama . After all, the one-dimensional reversal is still one-dimensional: love or hate, both use emotional experience to capture the audience.
"Walk low": let real women meet unreal men
"If the first two episodes of this drama are the beginning of a qualified suspense story, the third or fourth episodes are the bad things of the three sisters, and the fifth or sixth episodes directly become Mary Sue. I'm in love." This is a spit from the audience who follow the drama with true feelings. It's a pity that
, despite a good start, "going low" is almost the direction that "Little Ladies" can expect. The problem lies in the fact that the female characters in the play are so illogical and unpopular that they are explained by screenwriter Zheng Ruijing as: "I want to show the shortcomings and shortcomings of female characters. So far, the characteristics of female characters have It's the 'ideal woman that men love', but women know that we are not beautiful, kind, amazing beings, we want to be loved with our flaws and inadequacies exposed."
But the audience didn't pay for this beautiful sentence: The real, the imperfect is worth loving. But the people who love them and the male characters in the play are shaped according to Romance's inertia: the characters are painted with fluorescent agents and highlights, mysterious and tall, and save everything. The real story logic suddenly encounters a daydream, and the consistency of the story goes wrong. The real women's predicament, with its cold and rough realistic texture, encounters the popular constructive love mythology. When real women meet unreal men, the story of "Little Ladies" is in two directions. Pulled, and finally rendered as positioning blur. The suspense is not enough to burn the brain, the social topic is not enough to the end, and the Mary Sue is not beautiful enough, and several values dissolve each other.
What's more, the controversy about the "intellectualization" of the plot of "Little Ladies" is probably not because the characters are not perfect or lovable, but because the plot is illogical. The crises encountered by the protagonist group are almost all achieved in the form of "giving people's heads", giving up their chips and advantages to create crises and conflicts. It can only be said that the logic is still very "Korean drama"-in trouble Do notMake decisions, make accidents, cut off the natural flow of the story, and complete the escalation of contradictions and transitions.
"Little Ladies" is a "Korean drama" for success and a "Korean drama" for defeat. (Han Siqi)
Source: Beijing Youth Daily
