"Flowers" has finished broadcasting, but the momentum of Shanghai's Yellow River Road has not dispersed for a long time.
Tourists crowded on the Yellow River Road to check in the same restaurant as "Flowers", waited in line for three hours to eat the pork ribs and rice cakes in the play, and the British Suite 16800 in the Peace Hotel still could not be booked for one night.
All of a sudden, it seemed that everyone flocked to the Yellow River Road, returning to the nineties under the filter of Jin Guangqi's dream, and making a dream called "tone".
However, it is also about the 90s, and it is also an epic of characters under the wheel of the times, and other period dramas rarely have such a volume transformation from online to offline as "Flowers".
Ningxia in "Mountains and Seas" is still silent; The Northeast in "The Long Season" can only rely on Harbin for a short respite.
Some people say that it is hard to imagine that "Flowers", "Mountains and Seas", and "The Long Season" are about the same era.
Yes, it was an era when dust and flowers rose together, an era in which pork rib rice cakes and Gobi mushrooms coexisted, and an era in which grand narratives were firmly bound to the fate of small people.
Under the kaleidoscope of the ethereal times, thousands of trivial lives are reflected. Thirty years later, we stand on the ferry of time and look back, and still want to ask: Have we become better?
Looking back to the nineties
In the nineties, how many faces were there?
When the trailer of "Flowers" was first released, some people asked in confusion below: Is this really the 90s?
After all, the dim light and shadow, fashionable outfits, and dizzying jewelry all look more like Shanghai Tang at the time.
But soon, a Shanghainese appeared and said: Yes, this is the Yellow River Road at that time.
Wong Kar-wai himself personally responded:"What we want to restore is what people felt at that time. ”
In the nineties, Shanghai entered the fast lane of development.
The Oriental Pearl and Jin Mao Tower have risen from the ground, Metro Line 1 has officially opened, and the Shanghai Fair has gathered goods from all over the country and even the world.
Source: Internet
Photojournalist Xu Haifeng also photographed Shanghai at that time: the city center was crowded, Pepsi signs were hung all over the street, and people on the street were holding big brothers and wearing suits.
Xu Haifeng's lens on Shanghai in the 90s
When you turn your eyes from the fashionable magic capital of Shanghai to the capital Beijing, you will see a more intricate world.
On the one hand, traditional hutong houses are still entrenched in the center of Beijing, where people live in old houses, rely on honeycomb coal for heating in winter, and go to public toilets for washing.
Source: Internet
On the other hand, with the opening of the Asian Games in Beijing in 1990, various department stores gradually sprung up, and foreign capital was also attracted to settle in.
In the sitcom "The Story of the Editorial Department", there is more ideological evolution and spicy insight into social phenomena, outlining the bizarre scenery in that era of great changes.
Source: "The Story of the Editorial Department".
The rapid rise of the coast is truly changing with each passing day. The capital's doors are wide open to the most advanced trends of thought and the most agitating reforms.
And the stretches of black soil at the top of the map are suffering from the pain behind the wind and clouds.
In the nineties, there was a wave of layoffs in the Northeast.
The story of that era is one of collapse, decline, and reconstruction. However, even today, 30 years later, the combined GDP of the three eastern provinces is less than half that of Guangdong Province.
Source: "Piano of Steel".
But it was also in the ruins of the factory that the most splendid Renaissance after the founding of the People's Republic of China was set off.
At the beginning of the year, "The Long Season" bombarded the whole network, and even the 2004 TV series Northeast masterpiece "Ma Dashuai" also returned to the public eye.
"Ma Dashuai" talks about the Northeast in the eyes of migrant workers in the city, and "The Long Season" outlines the Northeast in the eyes of urban workers.
One is the confusion and confusion from the perspective of migrant workers, and the other is the decline of the city linked by the corpse shredding case. Two perspectives, one life.
Source: "Ma Dashuai".
If the Northeast in the 90s was confused when it turned around, then in the deeper inland territory, it was a resistance that never succeeded.
In "Mountains and Seas", there is a more realistic Chinese profile.
It's the gray face, it's the lack of food, it's the girl who will be married to someone she doesn't love with the bride price of a water cellar, a donkey, two sheep and two cages of chickens, and the three brothers only have a pair of pants to change and wear when they go out.
Notoriously, a rotten place in the world. ”
Source: "Mountains and Seas".
Young people have to go out, and in the hinterland, the best way out is to go south to work, and the most desirable places are Guangzhou, Fujian, and Shanghai.
Some people also recalled the life experience at that time: they couldn't eat enough in Gansu, and the first time they ate candy was brought back from Hong Kong by distant relatives.
Source: "Mountains and Seas".
At that time, people knew that there was a huge gap in the world, but they also believed that there would be huge myths in the distance.
Unlike today, when everyone shouted to go ashore, at that time everyone was calling to go to the sea.
Coastal, Northeastern, Jiangsu-Zhejiang, inland, border. In the waves, the fate of the region and the little people are linked into a fine net, tug-of-war again and again, and entanglement and dependence again and again.
The camera is either looking at the times in the present, or looking back at the glory of that time, all of which try to present a kind of reality in the precise narration:
This is the huge China, which is more accurate for the majority.
Source: "The Story of the Editorial Department".
Our distance from the times
In the 20s of the 21st century, these gaps have not yet been bridged, but our understanding of the gap is becoming narrower and narrower.
- We live in our own information cocoon.
In 1995, the National Communications and Information Administration (NTLA) released a report, "Falling Behind on the Internet: A Survey of the Information Poor in Urban and Rural America," in which a new term was mentioned—the digital divide.
According to the report, on the one hand, the ability to process information on the Internet is closely related to the level of education, that is, many groups lose their voices on the Internet from the beginning due to the lack of relevant education.
On the other hand, the big data push mechanism will make your ability to accept different opinions weaker and weaker, and the more you are overwhelmed by homogeneous information, the more difficult it will be to understand the lives of others.
At the beginning of last year, bloggers began to teach people on the Internet to take the subway, transfer, high-speed rail, hospitals**, McDonald's to order food.
At first, there was a mockery in the comment section.
How can anyone who hasn't been on a train? ”
Some people say that it is outrageous if you have not been on the subway. ”
What is there to teach about ordering.
But it is precisely these seemingly common senses of life that have led many people to find the way to understand it.
It was also in those comment sections that we heard voices that had been ignored and ignored in the past.
I have never been out of the market in my life. ”
I actually got to college before I ate hot pot for the first time. ”
At the age of twenty-three, I am still scared to fly alone. ”
Huge disparities between regions also persist.
In June last year, the definition of the four provinces of mountains and rivers shocked young people across the network.
The four provinces of Shanhe refer to the four provinces of Shandong, Shanxi, Hebei and Henan, which are characterized by a lack of educational resources and great pressure on the college entrance examination. They drummed up Shanhe University, one person and one sentence, and created the dream mansion in the sky.
The deeper gap in education is horizons.
At the end of last year, the same ** exploded on the Internet.
The blogger saw the cultural relics at the National Museum of China in Beijing, and also saw the children who were taking practical classes on the side.
She wrote: "What I envy is not that I saw my stepmother Wuding, but that children in Beijing can take history lessons here." They are in museums, watching history and learning history. We are in the classroom, imagining history and learning history. ”
The comments at the bottom are from various provinces, and it is at this moment that their IP addresses are particularly vivid.
Yu Hua wrote in the essay "We Live in a Huge Gap":
The gap in history makes a Chinese experience four hundred years of turbulent changes in Europe in just forty years, and the gap in reality will bring the Chinese of the same era to different eras, just like the Beijing boy and the northwest girl mentioned earlier, these two children living in the same era, the gap between their dreams, makes people feel that one lives in today's Europe, and the other lives in Europe four hundred years ago.
This is our life, we live in a huge gap between reality and history, we can say that we are all sick, we can also say that we are all healthy, because we have always lived in two extremes, today compared to the past, and today compared to today. 」
Even today, we should understand that rapid economic development has not completely bridged the gap between the world"We have always lived in two extremes."
However, in this era of majestic information, infinitely close communication between cities, and the speed of high-speed rail connecting 9.6 million square kilometers, we are surprised to find that the distance between people has become extraordinarily "distant".
In the past two years, ** has tightened like never before, the ridicule of the poor has begun to be more intense than ever before, and more and more turbulent waves have slapped at ordinary people.
Some people say that they can't live with a monthly salary of 3,000, some people say that there are no people around them who have not studied, and some people reprimand that the first reaction of some people when they see the poor is not working hard enough.
The most shocking sentence is none other than ——Your afflictions are worthy of your knowledge.
Open your eyes and see the gap
If we say that in the 90s, people still cherished the ideal of the distance, and still left the awe of reality.
So today, people no longer seem to be able to imagine life in the distance, real, but instead it has become a luxury, pretending to be real, and it has become a business again.
Source: "The Story of the Editorial Department".
In film and television dramas, the sweet pet of the ancient puppet fairy supports the revenue of the whole platform, and finally a certain character is set as an ordinary person, and the next second he uses suspended lines to indiscriminately kill all the audience.
Over time, the only things we can substitute are the migrant workers who are being squeezed next to us and the NPCs who have no intention of bumping into love.
Source: "Camp with Love".
In the short **, it is full of all kinds of performances of poverty and alienation of real life.
Poverty can be a show.
On the platform, you can often brush all kinds of old people with poor backgrounds, with rural mud houses in the background, ragged clothes, and poor backgrounds. They sit in their rooms and broadcast live day after day into the night, tricking people into tears and reaping a little tip.
However, they can only get about 10% of the harvest.
Source: Internet
Various areas known for poverty have become natural traffic pools, attracting MCN institutions to settle in, turning the miserable game into a perfect industrial chain for monetizing live broadcast production and selling counterfeits.
Source: Red Star**
As a result, in the era when traffic is king, we can't tell what is true and what is false. The sheer amount of information dissolves the essence of suffering, making us avoid the real suffering again and again through the screen.
Poverty is also constantly under extra scrutiny.
Under the report of generations of migrant workers, some people said: Why don't you read more books?
The delivery man who was stabbed to death is considered to be the fall of foreign students - they are so poor and still studying, they deserve it.
Under the impassioned Hengshui oath, some people said: If you don't know how to be flexible, even if you are admitted to Peking University, no one will mix well.
The courier who changed 19 jobs in 20 years was said to be eliminated if he did not follow the rules.
- When it comes to poverty, there are countless ways for people to answer their falls. And when it comes to wealth, people do not hesitate to praise their success with all their virtues.
As the "digital divide" demonstrates, the ability to process information on the Internet is closely linked to the level of education.
Therefore, at a time when ordinary people are losing their voices on a large scale, the rich only need to show their lives, so that countless netizens can willingly become "old slaves" in the envy center.
Last year, a ** led to the fire of Wanliu Academy, and then the young masters and young ladies under the banner of Wanliu Academy quickly exploded. The natural desire to spy on the lives of the rich has added a filter to their daily lifeShaking the money bag, there is naturally attention to send it to the door.
In this era, we are full of imagination about the lives of the rich and reject the lives of the poor.
We try to prove that we deserve to be successful, we try to prove that we deserve to have good luck, we try to deconstruct and ridicule ourselves to distance ourselves from poverty in order to comfort ourselves: I will never be like that.
We also argue for the glittering wealth, try to imagine the lives of the rich by understanding and praising them on the same level, and trying to imagine the lives of the rich by identifying with the values of the rich.
As a result, life and imagination become opposites in comparison, and the fundamental empathy and understanding between people are easily erased.
In 2016, the sci-fi ** "Beijing Folding" won the Hugo Award.
The story tells the story in three different spaces:
The third space is the low-level blue-collar class, the second space is the middle-class white-collar workers, and the first space is the gold-collar class who hold power and wealth. This is a typical dystopian setting, where the class divide widens in a space that can be folded, and eventually people are completely separated in a physical sense.
Source: Internet
The isolation of physical space is Wanliu Academy in Haidian and Tiantongyuan in Changping. And the folding of the digital space is happening all the time.
Then, looking back at the disgraced nineties, perhaps, presenting the truth and letting us see the gap is already a kind of benevolence of the superiors.