For a long time, "marriage" and "family" have been popular themes sought after by film and television works.
From "New Marriage Era", "Wang Gui and Anna", "Golden Wedding" to "Parents' Love", "Thirty Only" and "Little Shede", popular TV dramas of different eras provide an important window for observing the changes in marriage concepts and family life.
An obvious trend in recent years is that the traditional life-oriented film and television dramas centered on family relationships have gradually been replaced by female-led marriage and childbirth-oriented creations.
Compared with parents in ordinary life, how women, especially women in the workplace, deal with the relationship between family, work and childcare has become the most immediate traffic password nowadays.
On the one hand, it shows the awakening of women's consciousness in the whole society and the promotion of women's status; on the other hand, it is also a media representation of general anxiety about marriage and childbirth.
How to view the social impact of this film and television boom can be carried out from two aspects: on the one hand, marriage and childbirth film and television dramas comprehensively show various aspects of contemporary marriage life, and the modern family concept of pursuing independence and autonomy conveyed by them can be used by young people. Form positive value guidance.
At the same time, they tried to respond to structural issues such as fertility and education with the family as the starting point, which aroused extensive discussion and reflection.
In the long run, it is conducive to promoting social progress and policy innovation, and reflects the responsibility of literary and artistic works to serve the development of the country and society.
On the other hand, in order to develop a more healthy and orderly industry in the future, under the premise of affirming its positive impact, it is more important to be alert to possible risks.
After the rapid popularization of short video platforms, the audience's self-produced content and fragmented information in film and television dramas have become an important source of audience's social cognition.
There are many negative topics that are falsely exaggerated or deliberately made. Once coupled with the experience fragments in real life, it is easy to deepen the inherent stereotype, and through the reinforcement of the information cocoon room, it will cause extreme evasion such as "unmarried" and "sterile". psychology.
Therefore, how to grasp the degree between "exaggerating anxiety" and "promoting problem improvement" is the core problem that needs to be solved in film and television works.
In recent years, the so-called "explosive models" in the film and television market have shown similar disputes to varying degrees.
For example, the trilogy of the phenomenal hit dramas "Little Joy", "Little Separation" and "Little Shede" respectively focus on the key stages of children's growth in high school, junior high school and elementary school, and cut into the proposition of parent-child relationship in urban society from family education.
The success of the three works lies in their relatively true reflection of the anxiety, struggle and helplessness faced by contemporary families on the issue of children's education.
The only score theory in the college entrance examination, the fever of going abroad in middle school, and the introversion of chickens in junior high school are all the difficulties that ordinary people may encounter in the process of raising the next generation.
Through the characters' exploration of family life and educational concepts, the TV series realizes multiple reconciliation between adults of different generations and society, self, parents, partners and children, and provides a realistic view for solving the current anxiety about marriage and childbirth.
However, some plots over-dramatically exaggerate the anxiety atmosphere, and at the same time have the negative effect of too much.
For example, "Little Shede", the irrational educational comparison between the two families and the suffocating chicken method, the psychological panic brought to the young audience has far exceeded the benign reflection.
Therefore, although the idea of film and television drama is to use the subtle aspects in the family scene to present the larger and more complex reality behind it, its creative process must more subtly handle the dramatic tension between different plots in order to better realize the concept. The effect of leading and social distancing.
From a deep perspective, the increasingly serious problem of "trafficking anxiety" in film and television works can be partly attributed to the stratified imagination of society that is constantly solidified by creation.
Most of the current popular marriage and family dramas are basically set in the high-income class, and the core contradictions of the characters focus on maintaining social status, achieving class jump, or balancing the conflicts between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law of senior women in the workplace.
This kind of plot is obviously suspended above the daily experience of most ordinary people.
They build a distant other world through dramatic elements. It is difficult for characters to solve problems with universality and reference. Ordinary people can only obtain fragmented emotional resonance from them, but they have to endure a huge sense of gap and powerlessness. sense.
In the play, anxiety is real, and the future is false. If people who have more social resources are inevitably coerced by reality, how can struggling young people resist the pressure of life?
It can be seen that when film and television works overemphasize class position, it is easy to form cultural separation and lose effective connection with real life. As a result, the attention of social problems is weakened and emotions are dominated.
Relatively speaking, life dramas such as "Parents' Love", "The World" and "Dear Child" provide more appropriate solutions.
Although all three mentioned the difficulties of marriage, family and parenting in different eras, especially the widowed parenting experience of a female middle school teacher created at the beginning of "Dear Child", once triggered a debate on "trafficking anxiety" on the Internet.
However, the plot consciously dissolves anxiety and tension into the triviality and warmth of life, making the relevant plot more reasonable.
Then, through the personal growth of the protagonist, the courage and resilience of ordinary people to face the difficulties of life are shown, and the original anxiety of the audience is turned into deep empathy and emotional stimulation.
It can be seen from these cases that under the premise of truly reflecting reality, film and television works do not necessarily cause negative social impact by exaggerating emotions or asking questions. The key lies in how to deal with these emotions in a convincing way for the audience.
Going back to the most authentic and simple life itself may really help more people find a way to deal with the uncertainty of the future.
This also reminds regulators and creators to pay more attention to the diversity and richness of film and television themes, and not to fully cater to the audience's preferences in order to chase traffic, thereby ignoring the importance and necessity of the power of "life" in this era.
(Author: Liu Liming, postdoctoral fellow and associate researcher at the School of Communication and Design, Sun Yat-Sen University)