"Good woman" and "bad woman".
The overall score of "South to North" has 7 on Douban1, not low. But the creators probably didn't expect that the stone that sounded the most in the ** field at the end came from the ending shot of the second female who was not too much. In the discussion about Yao Yuling's ending, the audience wrote many different stories for her, some people think that she can clean up neatly and beautifully even if she sells skewers, and some people think that with her fashion sense, she can make a fortune by opening a clothing store. In the eyes of the audience, the love of beauty and dressing up, and the pursuit of a rich material life are not only not shortcomings, but also good qualities that make people applaud.
Stills from "South to North".
Indeed, in real life, if you have a clear understanding of your own desires and abilities, and work hard to put them into practice, the probability of doing well will indeed be greater. What is attractive about Yao Yuling is precisely the realism and vitality that she presents by facing her desires and pursuing desires, and such a female image, I don't know why, seems to be difficult to present in the protagonist in domestic dramas.
Qin Wen, the screenwriter of "The Golden Years", once mentioned in an interview that she spent a lot of effort to adapt the "gold worshipper" Zhu Suosuo in the original book, and made a lot of changes in the motives, purposes and other aspects of the character's pursuit of money, "First, she has to have her own last resort, and second, she should behave altruistically rather than self-interested." ”
Of course, for the "female characters who pursue themselves", in different TV series, in addition to the "positive" adaptation, there are also "negative" adaptations. For example, Zhou Rong in "The World" is a high-level intellectual, who is beautiful and confident in the original work, pursues spiritual wealth, and forms a set of contrasts with Zheng Juan, who manages her life in a down-to-earth manner, showing the different but not binary values that professional women and housewives can achieve. However, the TV series focuses on depicting Zhou Rong's absence in family life, and her pursuit of self-spiritual independence has become hypocritical and selfish behavior in the play, and this role labeled as a "professional woman" has also become a negative teaching material for the dedicated "housewife" in the play.
This is a typical female character framework, which distinguishes female characters into two different extremes, on one side is the altruistic, selfless and kind "good woman", and on the other side is the selfish, selfish and shrewd "bad woman", and the latter will be punished by the plot or spurned by the audience regardless of whether they really do evil.
The stills of "The World" are not only in domestic TV dramas, but also the dualistic images of women in literary and artistic works have a long history, from the two types represented by the Virgin Mary and Eve in the Bible, to the two female images of mother and prostitute mentioned by Otto Weininger in "Sex and Character". In modern society, it has evolved into a "normal woman" who meets social expectations and a "crazy woman" who behaves out of line because of anger due to resistance.
In essence, the simplistic typology of women is clearly a stereotype of the gender division of labor. The "punishment" of Yao Yuling in "South to North" also emphasizes this binary differentiation. While discussing her fate, the audience realized that choosing to marry Niu Dali or Jia Jinlong was like choosing to be a "good woman" or a "bad woman", which was a trap. "In this world, there are only two options for ugly men and rich drug dealers? Can't you match Yao Er with a normal businessman? ”
Obviously, the counterattack of ** is not just because the audience is dissatisfied with the plot arrangement of this dramais also because the majority of the audience has been suffering from "stereotypical bad women" for a long time. divides female characters into "good women" and "bad women" through self-interest and altruism, and realizes some kind of "karma" through "fate" and "accidents", which is the long-term creative inertia in film and television dramas.
But times have changed.
Stills from "South to North" when we empathize with "bad women".
Of course, netizens have not always been like this. Ten years ago, Yang Zixi in "Beijing Love Story" said: "Men are unreliable at all, and marriage is a worthless thing, no matter what kind of man you are with, it is our women who are hurt in the end, so why don't I find a rich one?" Even if I can't rely on them, I can still rely on their money. ”
Beijing Love Story" stills netizens said: "I used to scoff at it, but now I learn frame by frame." Now he is regarded as a sober representative of the world who defeated countless people and money in one fell swoop, and he has also been shouted and beaten by everyone in the past. It's just that when the myth of romantic love has become almost completely outdated, and most intimate relationships are inseparable from the shackles of material conditions, young people have invested more attention in their own growth and development, and there are more interpretations of literary and artistic works that have been one-way output in the past.
Interestingly, in terms of finding oneself and pursuing progress, such "villain" characters often have stronger subjective initiative and execution than the protagonist. Just like the villain in "Long Moon Embers", the second female Ye Bingsheng said "There is no one in this world who is more worthy of my love than myself", but won the favor of the audience. In other words, the label of "bad woman" that film and television dramas try to criticize can provide positive resonance to the audience.
Long Moon Embers" stills In the early years, most of the Taiwanese idol dramas also used two women chasing one male role, the female number two is usually more beautiful and intelligent than the heroine, good at using her own advantages, and trying her best to pursue a better life or a higher position of power, and in the end it is often rare to have a good death, which is used to set off the heroine's simple kindness, fraternity and openness.
But now looking back, the audience realizes that if Ouya in "The Star of the Sheep" is an inspirational example of striving to move forward and cross classes, Anna in "Fated I Love You" is an excellent professional woman who pursues her dreams, but at that time, the idol drama trapped their value in sexual relations out of the needs of the plot, and finally ended in tragedy and became the foil of the beautiful love of the hero and heroine. Time has passed, and those self-motivated, excellent, and self-interested qualities did not make them successful in love in the dramas at that time, but they have won the respect of the audience in today's real life.
Furthermore, the "crazy woman" in classic works, such as Wang Xueqin in "Deep Love and Rain", and Jiang Yuyan in "Little Fish and Flowers", have also begun to fight a turnaround in recent years and have won the love of more audiences. Their "madness" contains resistance and dissatisfaction with their surroundings, and "madness" is an extreme and direct expression they choose in the face of oppression and predicament.
The audience empathizes and regrets, and they clearly know that what traps them is the times, feudal dynasty and patriarchal oppression, not the wrong object.
The audience judges the work with the current values, projecting the emotional needs of the moment, jumping out of the preset values in film and television dramas, and giving the characters a new space for interpretation. It is not so much that the audience begins to empathize with the "bad woman", but that the current young audience is trying to discover the richer and broader possibilities of female characters in addition to the framed "good" and "bad".
A kind of value reshaping.
Now, as audiences re-examine the portrayal of women in film and television dramas, they are also re-evaluating the occipital values conveyed by these works. The achievement of material abundance and class leapfrogging through the exchange of benefits through marriage is certainly not worthy of praise, but the problem is the double standard, because the subjugation of younger and more beautiful women to show male success, as a way to admonish women who "know no one", is completely embedded in the play as an irreproachable mode of behavior. What is reinforced here is a typical narrative of gender values, that is, the substitution model of "men give power and wealth, and women give away their youth, beauty and self". This hierarchy based on power and material not only affirms men's behavior of exchanging material and power for female self, but also uses power and material as the standard for measuring male value. However, this concept not only hinders the awakening of women's independent consciousness and exacerbates their sinking, but also restricts men's self-development and damages their personal integrity. In the face of this pressure, men try to persuade women with the narrative of "don't bully the poor youth", and punish those women who try to get rid of the shackles of traditional concepts, so they present contradictory value orientations in film and television dramas.
The audience's empathy for "bad women" is not a comprehensive admiration for their values, but more about finding the suppressed independence and subjectivity of the protagonist in them.
Stills from The Myth of LoveIn today's film and television works, there are many characters on the screen who advocate freedom and show the awakening of women's consciousness, but even those self-proclaimed "feminist" female group dramas often fail to completely get rid of the narrative mode with women's marriage and emotional destiny as the axis. These originally shining female images are either re-framed in the traditional shackles of marriage and family, or after experiencing the infinite scenery at first, they cannot escape the fate of loneliness and frustration, and a subject with desires is finally deconstructed and disciplined.
For film and television works, change needs to be promoted by the audience and the main creator.
Chen Shuting, the popular "sister-in-law" in "Hurricane", netizens used "who does the sister-in-law marry, who is the eldest brother" to describe her, which subverted the traditional sexual relationship model to a certain extent, and also gained the love of countless audiences. Although the portrayal of female characters in the plot is still influenced by the male perspective, the audience's choices also reflect the current demand for female characters.
When "Flowers" was on the air, the audience enthusiastically discussed the final emotional fate of the protagonist Po, but the series finally gave him a lonely ending. Li Li did not choose Ah Bao because of empathy, and Miss Wang and Lingzi, who had once been fond of Ah Bao, coincidentally completed their career success and self-search after leaving him. It is worth noting that even if there are suitable suitors around them, the main creators do not rashly "give women a home". There is a lot of controversy among the audience about the choice of female characters, but there is no "justice from heaven" in the play, but it gives the audience space to think and **.
For female characters in domestic dramas, being able to get rid of the shackles of intimacy and no longer be simply defined as "good or bad" is already a valuable "cool text" experience.