TV series " Black Earth Silent " focuses its lens on the Northeast, a land that is passionate and unrestrained but also cold and solemn, and shows the complexity and tenacity of human nature in the tide of the times. The series returns to the core of the suspense drama, "solving the case", and puts great effort into the narrative form and character duel; it takes root in the black soil, fully promotes Northeastern aesthetics, and reproduces the realist tragedy and hope of this land.
However, from the perspective of genre development, "Black Soil Silence" has not gotten rid of the "either/or" curse of Northeastern-themed dramas in recent years. It has failed to break the pattern of being either a funny comedy or a depressing crime. After watching it, it always feels like deja vu. In the future, more stylized and personalized expression may be one of the directions for breakthrough.
Spider web narrative and character arcs
In the winter of 2005, Lanhe, a small county in Northeast China, coincided with the critical moment of county withdrawal and zoning. A bizarre murder case broke the tranquility of the small town, and frozen the development of the entire Lanhe River like an ice and snow domain. A murder occurred at Hongqiao Group, a well-known local enterprise. Overnight, group chairman Yan Hongqiao, security guard Zhao Jianguo, and female secretary Chen Xiaoming were killed. The suspect Yang Si (played by Hu Jun) was arrested on the way to escape, but the criminal police captain Guan Yu (played by Chen Jianbin) discovered many doubts during the interrogation process. Various characters and tangled relationships appeared one after another and were covered up. Yang Si in the interrogation room was just one layer in the fog. More importantly, as the tide of time continues to roll in, a past event in Northeast China from 1990 to 2005 has surfaced.
Different from the serial cases and linear suspense drama structures and narrative models that have been popular in recent years, "Black Soil Silence" only focuses on one important murder case and has no side branches. The first episode starts with the murder case, straightforward and without any ambiguity. The key point of the analysis is that Yan Hongqiao and Chen Xiaoming have "complex social relations and they are lovers, so the case must not be simple." As the investigation continues to deepen, the audience is dragged into an infinitely enlarging spider web, intricate and interconnected. Next, the series peels off the cocoons from the character relationships, social background, and interest network, and advances in a roundabout way. In the first three episodes, the suspect Yang Si was arrested based on on-site fingerprints. His identity was the "Second Entering the Palace" Hob Daorou. He was deliberately easily arrested but was full of doubts. However, from various divergent investigations, the audience saw that Yan Hongqiao's ex-wife Wang Ping (played by Deng Jiajia) was kind-hearted and mysterious; Yang Si's adopted son Yang Xuesong was Chen Xiaoming's ex-boyfriend and was resentful of Yan Hongqiao's occupation of his girlfriend. Yu Huai; Yan's nephew Feng Gen is the biggest vested interest after his death, and he is also a gangster; and many of Yan's business partners have long been dissatisfied under Yan's lustful power and want to get rid of them. The parallelism and interconnection of these people make the case like a web, and the audience has to use their brains to figure it out.
Although Guan Yu issued a five-day military order to solve the case, "Black Soil Silence" does not stick to the time node and fight for every moment. Instead, it uses one case and three dead people to conduct divergent investigation and radial advancement, divided into 1990 and 1990. The narrative is interspersed with two lines of the era and 2005. The case may seem straightforward, but everyone involved in the case is inextricably linked. The investigation and questioning may seem ordinary, but there are deep meanings in the interactions between you and me. Everyone has something wrong, and it is not a simple matter of "a cat chasing a mouse." ". This kind of " please close your eyes after dark" "werewolf killing" style suspense setting and detection makes everyone involved closely connected with the case. The first half laid the groundwork again, and it was not until the sixth episode that the Guan team and others were brought back to the restructuring of the Lanhe Fertilizer Factory in the 1990s, which was very important to everyone. Workers were laid off, the land was resold, and the gears of everyone's destiny began to turn.
Another suspenseful feature of "Black Soil Silence" is that it has rich characters and a strong sense of arc. In just twelve episodes, various characters appear on the stage. The center of the cobweb is the decision-making duel and intertwined fate of the three protagonists Guan Yu, Yang Si, and Wang Ping. Among them, Yang Si and Guan Yu, one is arrogant but delicate, and the other is wilted and energetic. The scene where Guan Yu feeds Yang Si dumplings in the interrogation room is an exciting moment when Chen Jianbin and Hu Jun show off their skills. The entire drama does not focus its narrative on bloody revenge, but pays more attention to the fate of the characters. The development of the characters' fate constitutes a strong sense of arc. For example, Yang Si is both good and evil.Yang Lijia was high-spirited when she was young. She was an "outstanding employee" in 1990. In order to borrow money to save her children, she reluctantly injured her own master. She was abducted by a black-hearted coal mine. She survived the disaster and took Yang Si's ID card. She wanted to keep her name anonymous, but unexpectedly acted on her behalf several times. He had to be cruel and ruthless to take action, and was imprisoned in a "fence wall (prison)". It is a legend of Lanhe. In the end, when he reached middle age, he was willing to sacrifice himself in order to fulfill his son, and his father's love was as strong as a mountain. The fate of the characters in
is closely related to the hot land of Northeast China, but it cannot escape the dilemma of the Northeast drama itself. The intricate connections of the case and the complex changes in human nature create excitement, but both the type and the characters always make the audience feel "déjà vu." In the ninth episode, Yang Xuesong's body was found in the glacier. This design is a replica of the victim frozen in the snow that appeared at the beginning of "Undocumented Crime"; and in the second half of the episode, the female killer was exposed because she wore mink, which reminded people of "" In "Fireworks in the Day ", Gui Lunmei's character kills someone because of a mink coat; and the tragic and joyful fate of the characters brought about by the so-called drastic changes of the times have been repeated in film and television dramas such as "Double Detective", "A Blizzard is Coming", and "Gonggong·Old Northeast Stories" Emphasize that this is undoubtedly the biggest theme routine and creative dilemma in Northeastern dramas, especially suspense dramas in recent years.
The publicity and hesitation of Northeast aesthetics
The black soil is speechless, but the Northeast is sentimental. The northeastern theme made "Black Soil Silent" a success, but its artistic expression paradoxically limited its performance. The pursuit of Northeastern aesthetics in the play is conscious and explicit, and the typical winter in the Northeast is selected. The social environment is also a critical period for the withdrawal of counties and districts in a Northeastern county, and the undercurrent is surging. In the first episode, Yan Hongqiao was arrogant and domineering. After beating up his unruly boss, he set off fireworks in the snow on Christmas Eve. The flowers fell and they were as brilliant as smoke. This predicted his own destiny and made the cold and solemn people in the Northeast shine. Unobstructed view in the snowy night. Several important plot twists in the play also took place on a snowy night, such as when Yang Xuesong and Chen Xiaoming watched the stars on the ice, which was romantic but unreal, and then Chen was kept. In the ninth episode, the clues hidden under the ice in the Lan River gradually surfaced, making the elements of Northeast ice and snow a key breakthrough in the narrative.
However, while the whole drama promotes Northeastern aesthetics, it falls into the embarrassment of simple repetition and stacking of elements in many places. The ending of the story is not too unexpected - a female college student who chose to be kept as a foster girl jumped to her death because she felt that studying could not change her destiny. The police, who had family problems of their own, were under pressure to dig out the big boss with a criminal background and his protective umbrella.
More importantly, the expression of Northeastern aesthetics seems to be just "two skins inside and outside". On the surface, it is about the coming of ice and snow, but in its bones, it is a "nostalgic" recollection of the Northeast's past, including the legacy issues caused by the pain of restructuring, and the individual's role in the times. The struggle in the torrent, etc., attempts to restore the background and proposition of the times. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Northeast encountered a development bottleneck and the old industrial areas declined rapidly, which prompted the restructuring and change of direction of the large state-owned enterprise Lanhe Fertilizer Factory in "Black Soil Silence". How did Yan Hongqiao, as the "second generation of the factory", transform into the CEO of Hongqiao Group? How did Yang Si, once an outstanding employee, become a middle-aged "blind worker"? There is a detail in the play: both the deaf-mute children supported by Wang Ping's charity and Uncle Yang Xuesong said that "learning is useless." The ice caves under the Lan River hide the secrets of solving crimes, and they also seem to hide the chaos, disorder and barbaric growth of the Northeast at that time. This kind of development dilemma and the pain of the times has been repeatedly written and conveyed in various previous Northeast-themed film and television works, such as "The Piano of Steel" more than ten years ago. The director said, "Finding the murderer is not the most important thing in this drama, the important thing is the past", which exactly illustrates this aesthetic orientation.
The Renaissance in the Northeast is not a simple world of ice and fire - it is either a "carnival of language" or a "depression of the atmosphere". The former is a Northeast-style comedy, and the latter is a crime in ice and snow. In reality, we have already seen the passionate and unrestrained Northeastern rock music such as the band "Secondhand Rose", the "modern and earthy" Northeastern flower elements, and even the popular Xuecun Cultural Tourism in Harbin. The longing for life in the bones of Northeastern people is always for A sad story brings the final light. In this way, "a new chapter in the comprehensive revitalization of Northeast China" should not disappear into dust and smoke in literary and artistic works, "black soil without words".We look forward to more Northeastern films and TV shows being more diverse, more fashionable, and more up-to-date in terms of elements, themes, types, aesthetics, etc. After all, the harvest season in autumn, the yearning and vibrant forest farms, and the "human world" full of fireworks are equally moving.
Author: Ma Lunpeng
Text: Ma Lunpeng (Associate Professor of Zhejiang University of Communication) Editor: Fan Xin Editor: Shao Ling
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