[Viewing the tide of literature and art]
In recent years, the popularity of female images and the iteration of female creations have become a phenomenon that attracts attention in the field of television and online audiovisual creation.
Especially recently, "Come on!
"Mother", "Lady's Law" and "Ride the Wind and Waves" and other works that express women's images and show women's demeanor have been launched one after another.
According to the public information of the film and television works that have been launched and to be broadcast, there will be a large number of "her theme" works in the future.
There are various signs that the era of "her theme" film and television works has come.
The breakthrough of "her theme": the multi-faceted beauty that does not allow men
The rise of "her theme" stems from social and cultural changes.
Women, especially young women, have become more and more important roles in the audience. Their appeal for gender equality, their cry for women's growth, and their expression of women's emotions have spawned an endless stream of "her theme" works.
Among them, the "her theme" TV series is the largest and most numerous category of works.
Looking back on history, Chinese TV dramas have never lacked the portrayal of women. Since the first TV drama "One Piece of Vegetable Pancakes", women have always been important characters in Chinese TV dramas.
However, in recent years, the "her theme" is significantly different from the traditional TV drama's focus on women.
"She Subject" emphasizes female perspective, female protagonist, female emotion and female growth.
In the play, women are no longer passive postures to be stared at, but gradually become subjectivists and have the courage to express themselves.
This transformation has made women's demands more socially concerned.
The TV dramas that best represent "her theme" are mostly realistic themes. These works focus on the times, are based on the present, pay attention to the real situation and life destiny of women, and have made many breakthroughs in the shaping of women, which has greatly improved the image of women. Great abundance.
Family identity is often the most important social identity for women in traditional TV dramas, such as mother, daughter, eldest sister, and wife.
And "she theme" makes the female image jump out of the family narrative logic, and cheers for the development of women's career.
The women in "Her Theme" can work in any profession. Chen Shan in "Perfect Companion" is a lawyer, Fang Sijin in "An Jia" is the manager of a real estate agency, and An Jing in "Eye of the Storm" is a national security officer. Stand alone.
The choice of the heroine also breaks through the age constraints. In "Beyond" and "Twenty Not Confused", there are women's youth and struggle in their teenage years. In "I'm Good in Another Country" and "Thirty Only", there are women in middle-aged and young age. Emotions and careers, and "Dear Them" and "Old Girlfriends" have women's life and thinking after entering old age.
In the shaping of these images that are different from traditional women, the core breakthrough is the retrieval of women's personal value, that is, the meaning of women's life in the works is no longer just from one family to another family, no longer just from daughter to wife to mother. , but has its own independent value, and uses stories to present and explore the various possibilities of life.
Women's emotions have also been portrayed in a more three-dimensional and in-depth manner.
In the family relationship, "daughters" can file complaints against the original family who prefer sons over daughters. Fang Sijin in "Settling Down" and Fan Shengmei in "Ode to Joy" are all female images who face this social problem; "mother" In addition to the two extreme shapes of "tiger mother" and "kind mother", there are also many faces, similar to the movie "Hello, Li Huanying"-style reminiscence of the mother's youth, which appeared in "I Don't Want to Be Your Friends" " Hello!
Mother" and other dramas.
In terms of friendship, the sisterhood between women has become the focus of description.
TV series such as "Empty House" and "Camphor Tree" portrayed sisterhood incisively and vividly many years ago, but later the female friendship presented in the series was once distorted and vilified. For example, Lan Weiwei in the TV series "Let's Get Married" is a female The protagonist star fruit can stick a knife in both sides, but he still robs her boyfriend, showing the beauty and vulnerability of female friendship.
At present, there are too many "her theme" dramas focusing on sisterhood, and even two heroines and multiple heroine dramas are popular.
Such as "Golden Years", "The Great Girl", "Ode to Joy", "I'm Good in a Foreign Country", etc. In these stories, women help each other throughout, and to a certain extent bid farewell to the traditional narrative of men saving women.
Women are not only alliances, but also mirror images of each other's growth.
Love stories remain an essential element of many "her subjects."
Compared with traditional love narratives, "her theme" downplays the proportion of women's "love brain" in love, that is, women do not regard love as their full value.
Many works respect the various possibilities that women face in love and marriage at the moment, and love in different modes such as strong women and weak men, sister and brother love, and full-time wife are all understood and respected.
From the perspective of drama production, "her theme" expands the type of stories. Although family emotional themes still account for a large proportion, there are also a large number of dramas that jump out of family topics and face a wider life.
In the process of expansion, genres have merged into a clear trend, such as "Skyscraper" and "Jiang Zhao Dawn" with suspense genres, and "Please Call Me Director" and "Lady's Law" with workplace genres.
In the mixture of various types of narratives, finding new ways of telling women's stories and exploring new placements of women's roles is not only an innovation in artistic creation, but also an innovation in social culture.
In addition, the story sources of "her-themed" TV series are becoming more and more abundant. In addition to originals, there are also novel adaptations, such as "To Our Simple Little Beauty" and "Sito", as well as remakes of foreign drama series, such as "An Jia" ""Imperfect Her" and so on.
These female-themed TV series show the diverse innovation and international vision of the creation of "her theme".
The shortcomings of "her subject": the inevitable stereotyped gender dilemma
Although the "her theme" TV series has made many breakthroughs in the shaping of women's images, there are still many shortcomings in the expression of women's stories.
Many "she-themed" dramas overemphasize women's gender identities, and often use explicit or implicit male voices as the evaluation and judgment criteria for women, and even use male characters as the driving force or turning point of the story.
"The First Half of My Life" added the role of He Han on the basis of the original novel, which became an important help for Luo Zijun's new life. In "Beijing Women's Guide", Chen Ke has developed at work by virtue of multiple relationships between men and women, making the original women struggle and break through. The story turned sour, which led to the independent growth of the women the story wanted to represent.
Some "her-themed" TV series use the binary structure of men and women as a meta-narrative, and still complete the story with love and marriage as the main line.
In order to reflect the consciousness of women, the creators chose to shoot at gender issues, using a strong dramatic way to construct gender antagonism and gender anxiety.
Taking "Thirty Only" and "Two Conjectures on Marriage" as examples, women with different personalities and different pursuits are often to blame in love and marriage, and they will be wounded no matter what.
Among them, the imagination of marriage and love, and the imagination of the relationship between the sexes may be sharp as dramatic conflicts, but as images reflecting reality, it is too one-sided, and in the end it can only be a pseudo-realism packaged under the skin of realism.
In addition, although TV dramas have created more and more female images, many characters have shown new routines, which have evolved into new simplified and stereotyped treatments of women's situations and issues.
The writing of campus dramas and workplace dramas is especially prone to levitation and monotony. The heroines of dramas such as "To Our Simple Little Beauty" and "Twenty Not Confused" are far from the real life of students. The characterization of women in the workplace, such as "The Law of the People", is also not in line with reality.
In fact, there are thousands of women in different life stages, which can be an excellent source of stories for "her subject".
Creators shouldn’t give up on down-to-earth innovation in order to catch up with popular models.
The future of "her subject": a concerto of realism and romanticism
It is conceivable that "her theme" TV series will continue to constitute an important creative category of Chinese TV series for some time.
On the one hand, it has the audio-visual art value of cultural innovation and genre innovation; on the other hand, it is a breakthrough in female stories and female images, and it also carries the cultural significance of social progress and gender equality.
For the future development of "her theme", there are various directions for reference, such as further basing on reality.
It can be seen from the previous "her theme" TV series that the display of women's workplace anxiety, marriage anxiety, fertility anxiety and other real pain points often causes the drama to have a greater social repercussions, and even forms a cultural effect that goes beyond the TV series itself.
Some of these episodes have extreme trends and become topical dramas with more topics than content.
The real realism should be based on real life, and appropriately show the desires and anxiety, joy and sorrow of contemporary women.
And such works with realistic texture can not only talk to the audience, but also contribute to the high-quality development of my country's TV dramas.
At the same time, the creation of "her theme" can be appropriately integrated with romantic creation techniques, and some "should" elements are superimposed on the basis of "real", so as to guide the audience to think about real problems and let their real anxiety and pressure be vented .
Among the audience's cultural needs for TV dramas, relaxing entertainment and gaining warmth and comfort are also a major component. Dramas such as "My Babylonian Lover" and "Sito" have used their imaginative imagination and novel and delicate brushstrokes to face up to and respond to some of the audience's feelings. this psychological need.
It’s also important to note that the pursuit of gender equality does not need to be manifested in ways that dwarf men or create gender opposition.
Blindly depicting the contradiction between men and women in a dramatic way will give the audience a kind of extreme pleasure, but at the same time, it is also a distortion of real life and a distortion of the relationship between men and women.
A benign "her-themed" TV series should create a more benign gender relationship.
(Author: Yang Hui, Lecturer, Department of Cultural Industry, College of Literature, Capital Normal University)