Chief view:In recent years, many domestic TV dramas have focused on middle-aged women and created countless beautiful, independent and confident images of urban beauty. However, with the frequent appearance of homogeneous people, the audience has formed aesthetic fatigue for this solidified image.
Source: Wu Wei
I still remember this poster.
In March, 2018, Weibo user SUM published the brain hole of "The Character of a Lady", the story revolves around four 40+ women with high knowledge and high income, and there is no struggle between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law and mistress’s infidelity in previous TV dramas. Beautiful, free and rich, a woman is a teenager until she dies.
At that time, domestic idol dramas were popular, and the role of middle-aged women was mostly the same as that of mother-in-law Looking at the environment, the global me too movement is in full swing, and women’s power is ready to go.
In the soil of domestic film and television dramas, apart from Tang Jing in Yolanda’s My First Half Life, Andy in Ode to Joy counts as half.
Netizens spontaneously formed an Amway army, and Chen Shu Ceng Li forwarded it. Yixin Entertainment quickly bought the brain hole, and two months later, the official announced the project.
Looking back at "A Lady’s Character", we find that the story has an obvious sense of the times.
Up to now, there is no shortage of benchmark works of "A Lady’s Character" in domestic urban dramas.
In just a few years, the pattern of elite women has not only formed, but also entered a new round of burnout.
I think that when Christina called the director to give more opportunities to middle-aged actresses at the First Film Festival, the words were still in my ears. At present, Chinese women are returning to the line of sight to open the screen, and the audience is also tired of curing the image.
Why is Tamia Liu always the bully? Why is Sun Li always upgrading? It’s hard for a strong woman in Song Jia to speak at the top of her voice! How come Yuan Quan is a Tang Jing semi-permanently!
After "Living in the Heart" started, Tanya was still Gu Jia.
A middle-aged era was established, and a bunch of middle-aged eras came out.
Elite women and their girlhood
Non-suspended urban drama is not a conventional domestic drama. Therefore, when "Love is delicious" was broadcast at the end of 2021, it was regarded as a clean stream.
The story is about the life, emotion and career planning of three girls who are about to turn 30.
Fang Xin (Baby Zhang) is a beautiful girl from childhood, Xia Meng (Naomi) is a three-good student from childhood, and Liu Jing (Chun Li) looks ordinary from childhood, but she is very opinionated.
One of the important reasons why Love is Tasty is highly praised is that the three types of girls are the greatest common denominator among girls’ personalities.
At first glance, they seem to be quite different from the elite women in other domestic dramas, whose shirts and suits are thin and high-heeled, and their faces are cold and vague. They use a magnifying glass to find details and find that those suspended dramas still use this set of personality portraits.
The first category is the three good students when they grow up.
When they are studying, their grades are among the best. They behave themselves obediently and seek a stable and happy life. If they are lucky in life, they will be beaten by life in adulthood, but they will get what they want after all.
Tamia Liu’s Xiao Yan ("I really love you") and Sun Li’s Su Xiao ("Ideal City") all belong to this category.
The misfortune of miyoshi students is often a stronger desire to win and lose and a stronger heart to compare with others. Because of this background, they have to fight hard with themselves, their environment and their surrounding eyes for a long time.
Typical such as Rulu’s Dong Sijia (Our Marriage).
The second category is girls with ideas when they grow up.
This kind of people appear with a cool feeling, but because of their own way and their own lethality, people’s attitudes towards them are often polarized, either like them or hate them, with little ambiguity. Among them, the lucky ones, whose lethality is ornamental but not destructive, get more love than disgust.
For example, Bai Baihe’s Comet Shen (Our Marriage).
The boring way of doing things is both destructive and ornamental. This kind of person has clear goals, clear self-awareness, and ignores morality when doing things, so the road to rise is also blamed.
Ling Ling in My First Half Life played by wuyue and Tang Xin in last romance are among the best.
The third category is the flower of Gaoling when it grows up.
This kind of role is usually a combination of AB faces. How lucky you are, how sad you are. Gifted and with its own shortcomings, it is a common way in ancient romantic novels.
Yolanda, Chen Shu and Song Jia are popular actors in this branch.
Looking back at the works of the above-mentioned actors in their girlhood, we will find that they have formed some intertextuality with the present situation.
After "Our Marriage" was broadcast, the appearance of Bai Baihe’s husband and interviewer made people feel that they should never quarrel with Bai Baihe, but they also dreamed of "33 days of lovelorn love".
It turns out that Huang Xiaoxian people live like this when they reach middle age.
When Sun Li was young, her films "Romance in Blood" and "Happiness Like Flowers" were all good girls with standard templates. Even if she later turned into a heroine, protecting the background color of goodness is still the greatest characteristic of all her roles.
There is nothing in Tamia Liu’s role that he doesn’t work hard. Yolanda’s role will always have a calm. Chen Shu’s role is always elegant and beautiful. Many characters in wuyue are self-centered, and Rulu is always a hard worker with a strong desire to win or lose …
The audience doesn’t care that the role is not glamorous for a while-anyway, there is always a protagonist aura to blame and upgrade.
What the audience cares about is this middle-aged person. She is really unreal.
What is the truest? Watching her role along the way, from young to middle-aged, is the most true.
Young actors rely on the impact of fresh faces to win the passers-by, while middle-aged actors rely on familiarity.
This kind of familiarity either comes from the accumulation of actor’s role output in his career.
Or from the familiarity that satisfies the imagination of the audience, such as the Yi Shu girl in Yolanda and the perfect wife in Tanya.
However, familiarity is also a double-edged sword. The audience’s preferences are amazing at first sight, surprising at second sight and annoying at third sight.
It stands to reason that when people reach middle age, the breadth of life is not the same as when they were young, and the angle they can show will only be more yuan. Then why do elite women still love delicious food when they are young, but they are not fragrant when they reach middle age?
The ideal lover’s perspective of male director
It must be admitted that the more angles, the more roles people play in life, the more difficult it is to balance, and the greater the probability that Bai Yueguang will become a bean curd.
The main creative team of domestic dramas, the current situation is that male directors are the main force in both male and female dramas.
Shen Yan, Jian Chuanhe and Kaizhou Zhang are the directors who have delivered the most elite women in recent years.
The former includes My First Half Life, last romance, Our Marriage and other dramas, while the latter two jointly created Ode to Joy. Recently, Jian Chuanhe’s Meet Time has been said to be the first bad drama at noon.
When a male director shoots a woman, it is easy to show her life as a male gaze.
This first depends on the difference in thinking between the two sexes.
Let a straight director shoot female beauty, and the director will easily get to the point.
Look at Jing Wong’s lens. Chingmy Yau, with a small buck tooth and a shrinking chin, is the ultimate beauty, Shu Qi, with a wide eye distance and a big mouth, has a unique style, and Loretta Lee, with a baby fat and naive expression, can be photographed as sexy. The output of these images has laid a solid foundation for actresses to lay a style later.
And Tsui Hark, Brigitte Lin’s image of pure herself has been exported in Taiwan Province for more than ten years. After arriving in Hong Kong, she was discovered by him as a heroic spirit. Joey Wong people who played basketball were big and burly, and under his training, there were also demon’s jiaochen and weakness.
Woodenhead’s Angelababy, who has been ridiculed for many years, played the leading role in The Dragon King of Di Renjie, and was also trained by Tsui Hark.
It is not difficult for male directors to appreciate all kinds of beauty with keen eyes, but it is really not easy to think about women’s fate with female thinking like Guan Jinpeng.
Straight male directors are doomed to be difficult to understand the delicate entanglements in women’s living conditions.
Typical such as "Meeting Season".
There are many female images in the play, but none of them are really pleasing.
This means that the team’s interpretation of the role is wrong.
The actor practiced playing Chen Xin ‘er, the ex-wife of the actor, in the play, which was a very crazy, annoying and hysterical role. When practicing talking about the role, everyone thinks that Chen Xin-er is difficult to shape in the reading stage of the script.
In her understanding of the role, there is a biography of a character-Chen Xiner had a nickname called Chen Rules since childhood. She was a well-behaved student when she was a child. After graduation, she found a good job, met Jian Hongcheng (the male master), ushered in a rebellious period, and then bet her life on this person. After divorce, she lost not only a marriage, but the life she defined.
This man has a strong tragic existence, but in the end, he is an image that is only crazy and not worthy of sympathy.
Another example is Yolanda’s heroine Ning Yi. Yolanda’s interpretation is that this person’s life is too hard, so she looks for the possibility of happiness and enlarges it.
As a result, the audience only saw the bitterness of the chicken flying and the dog jumping on the surface. The woman’s inner depression, the long-term compromise of the first marriage and the reasonable footnote of the virgin’s behavior were all hidden.
The women in the director’s perspective of "Meeting Season" are labeled with many intuitive labels.
A shrew is a shrew who is caught at any time and place. As for the formation of splash, there are few introductions. Elite women are decent all the time. In the face of her husband’s cheating and corruption, they have to deal with the aftermath, but they don’t explain the reasons for this person’s aftermath, as if everything should be taken for granted.
These loopholes that can’t stand scrutiny are the reasons why the role finally collapsed.
"Ode to Joy" and "My First Half Life" also have the same problem. Kochi women are ignorant and rigid. Andy’s hidden anthomaniac attribute, Tang Jing’s uneasiness and constant guidance from men in her career path make them seem to be present, but they will always be at someone else’s home.
At first glance, the audience will be attracted by the breakthrough roles of elite women in those few years, and after careful scrutiny, they will find that they can’t be consistent in the current context, let alone figure out where they came from and where they are going.
The female screenwriter wrote about the absent father.
Interestingly, most of the writers of dramas that produce elite female roles are women.
It stands to reason that straight men don’t understand women from the perspective, and women should understand each other better. Female screenwriters guard the story, and female stories should be told more smoothly.
It is also true.
Compared with "Dress Up" written by a male screenwriter, the strong woman Chen Kaiyi (Song Jia) is awkward in falling in love as if touching her hand is violated, and the strong woman portrayed by a female screenwriter is obviously much more feminine.
However, we can’t escape the pattern of novel adaptation. In the process of film and television, female screenwriters still make strong women fall into the situation where their father is not present.
This consideration, in some cases (for example, in the process of making Anai’s works film and television, he also works as a screenwriter), which is the embodiment of respecting the original works.
However, in more works that entered magic change, the father’s absence was originally intended to show the deep-rooted strength of women’s self-reliance, but in fact it set off a ubiquitous lack.
Yi Shu’s original "My First Half Life" has no drama in which two women compete for a man. Before his divorce, Luo Zijun, a teacher’s pen, was a person who could help her husband manage various cocktail parties, and his overall planning ability and communication ability were above most people. After the divorce, I found a new love by living my own life. I just informed Tang Jing that my life had entered a new journey. The whole story is free and easy.
The film and television drama adapted by Qin Wen, the teacher’s breath is gone.
Luo Zijun changed from an independent divorced woman to a workplace puppet who was promoted step by step by men, and her family of origin, from her mother to her sister, met love rat all her life in the cycle of getting rid of love rat and looking for a good man for the rest of her life.
The lack of a father in this family was originally intended to set off the difficulty for a single mother to support her two daughters. In the end, the strength of women was not shown, but the damage caused by the lack of men was everywhere.
In this case, shaping elite women is like a castle in the air.
"last romance" is the same. Jiang Nansun’s mother, Xiao Yan, went abroad early to get rid of family of origin and married early to get rid of family of origin. When Xiao Yan saw her mother, her first sentence was to persuade her to divorce, which made people feel puzzled and her strong hostility was tenable?
Zhu Suosuo stayed with his father all the year round, and finally fell in love with a man about his age. After being rejected, he quickly married a small man of the same age, and then began a new round of men’s absence in the growth of children …
Women’s strength is emphasized everywhere, and there are irreparable shortcomings left by father’s absence everywhere. This makes a seemingly strong appearance turn into a bubble that will burst with a poke.
Focus on showing everything, and everything becomes more and more empty.
Nowadays, David Wang, led by the domestic drama master, has learned to show his vulnerability appropriately in all kinds of unscrupulous situations. Who says a scheming bully can’t be mean or fail?
Elite women, on the other hand, are packed like an iron wall, always tight, as if they bowed their heads and lost their crowns.
However, the direction of the story made them collapse from time to time.
It seems that it is the elite women who are improving step by step. As for personality, they are still floating in the air of imagination and marking time.
Nowadays, in the consumer market, the symbolization of elite women has been completed.
In the next step, film and television dramas should let them fall into living people.
* Disclaimer: This article is the author’s independent opinion and does not represent the position of the Chief Entertainment Officer.
