Zhang Fujian
"Grandma's New World" is an outlier, an experimental work that provides a scarce path to conventional online drama creation, that is, the practice of highway themes. On the one hand, it has a coherent emotional logic and no lack of realistic undertones; On the other hand, it adopts a loose unit narrative and a more romanticized imagination - this sense of fragmentation is so pronounced that it cannot be simply relegated into a specific genre or narrative framework, resulting in polarization of audience word-of-mouth. This drama is like a monkey popping out of a stone, destined to have the effect of stirring up things, it makes some audiences marvel and praise, and also makes another part of the audience decisively abandon the show. But in any case, this bold creative experiment is encouraged, it opens the viewer's eyes to a rare possibility and challenges established creative concepts. The emergence of road-themed online dramas represented by "Grandma's New World" has begun to renew the deep-rooted concept of genre in creation, and has also introduced new explorations for domestic dramas.
The screenwriter played a big trick with the dissociation effect
"Grandma's New World" is not a typical online drama form, it tells the legendary story of grandmother Sun Yuping who suddenly ran away from home five years ago to see the wider world and find and recreate her new life. The onlookers' statements in the play have a double meaning, first of all, their statements and evaluations of their grandmother's experience, and secondly, their self-statements and evaluations. The former layer is related to the development of the entire plot, and the latter layer undoubtedly increases the "dissociation effect", making the story more stimulating the audience's rational thinking and judgment. The script is set up in this way, stemming from screenwriter Li Xiang's preference for dialogue drama art, and he integrated stage skills into the creation of online dramas, trying to create a breakthrough work.
Five years after my grandmother left, the family unexpectedly got news of my grandmother. So granddaughter Dou Qi and grandmother's twin sister and aunt Sun Yulan embarked on a journey to find their grandmother together. They searched all the way, listened to her grandmother's bizarre story along the way, and felt everything her grandmother had experienced. These stories made them realize that their grandmother was deeply hidden but abundant in life energy. Grandma's own story and the story that grandma saw were sometimes surprising, sometimes contemplative, and also made Dou Qi and Sun Yulan explore their hearts and re-recognize themselves. They walked from stop to stop, and the puzzle about Grandma became more and more complete. Grandma's experience is so colorful, she put aside her trivial life, ran away romantically, devoted herself to society and lived her own life along the way, and boldly pursued fairness, justice and idealism in her heart. Everyone also saw themselves by observing Grandma, and together they began a journey of redemption that touched the soul.
The biggest suspense of this play should have been "why did Grandma run away", but the screenwriter did not give a reasonable motive. In the screenwriter's view, "running away" itself is psychological and allegorical, a gesture of an elderly woman to break with her past life and even transcend. This setting is quite virtual and romanticized, which is a bold and dangerous move made by the writers, and it is also the key to determining whether the audience can continue to watch the show. Imagine, if the audience can accept this assumption and not dwell on the reality of whether the grandmother can run away in reality, then what happened after the grandmother ran away would be reasonable; On the contrary, if the audience cannot accept its presumption, it is inevitable to abandon the show. Therefore, the focus of the play is to see the strange life and society from the main perspective of an elderly woman whose life experience is disconnected from the current world, rather than why her grandmother ran away. The screenwriter played a big trick and took a big risk, deliberately frustrating the audience's curiosity, which is indeed different from the creative routine of regular dramas.
The grandmother and aunt in the film are both played by Yan Ni, these two are mirror images of each other, although they are sisters, but their personalities and experiences are very different. This character design is obviously deliberate, providing a vision and interest for both sides of the narrative. But what is more radical is that the screenwriter does not want to fully portray Liu Yuping, Liu Yulan sisters and their family relationships, but through the perspective of the Liu sisters (conservative and open) and the perspective of Liu Yuping's ancestors and grandchildren (there are generation gaps and age differences), to obtain different value judgments of real events, thereby deepening family issues and social issues. There is no doubt that the screenwriter practiced this creative method in the play, so that the perspective is constantly changing, and the audience who is accustomed to conventional routine narratives feel uncomfortable. So we see that the emotional drama in "Grandma's New World" is full, and what Grandma sees along the way makes Grandma's family feel upset, builds the emotional clues of the whole play, and lays a good foundation for the plot. The people and experiences that my grandmother saw closely followed social issues, reflecting the complexity and multifaceted aspects of today's social life, which is of practical significance. In particular, it should be pointed out that the units in this play are limited in length and lack the complexity of a long-form series, but the emotions of each unit have a beginning and an end, and this emotional transformation is very clear and reasonable, even higher than the logic of the plot. From the perspective of the plot, this play involves many social hot issues such as pension, gnawing the elderly, cat abuse, child education, extramarital affairs, professional ethics, etc., and the screenwriter has given self-consistent logic and deep torture within each unit, which is enough to make the audience with life experience empathize.
And that's what makes "Grandma's New World" moving. Many times the reasonableness of the plot is forced because the screenwriter must respect the audience's rational judgment. But I don't know what to do, and the touching sense of substitution in the story is what people can't forget. As ordinary audiences, our viewing tastes may have been shaped for a long time without knowing it, or in other words, the common lotus does not feel that peonies are beautiful, and the audience has long been accustomed to the details of the series and the plot peaks and turns and reasonable episode construction, they are no longer able to adapt to the slow, light outlier of "Grandma's New World".
Grandma who wakes up is not perfect for female writing
"Grandma's New World" starts from Grandma's own awakening, showing difficult stories through her perspective, interspersed with memories, and through the growth of characters, step by step unshackles on women. In the creative practice of online dramas and even TV series, this kind of story setting is not only powerful, but also extremely avant-garde. As a highway-themed unit drama, the whole drama connects various social issues through the grandmother's travels, showing the author's deep sense of intervention, and the most significant of these is the writing of women's consciousness.
Among the stories of each unit, the most relevant to my grandmother personally is the story of my grandfather's cheating when she was young. My grandmother accidentally learned on the road that my grandfather's death in a car accident was due to an extramarital affair, which hit my grandmother with strong traditional concepts very hard. After my grandfather died, my grandmother lived in the fantasy of "I have a gentle husband who died in the line of duty but loved me". It wasn't until more than 20 years later that the perpetrator of the car accident came with the truth and evoked the spirit of defiance of my grandmother. She ran away alone, leaving behind a lot of baggage, including her "husband", daughter, granddaughter, sister, and at that moment she became herself. She does everything with self-awareness along the way, bravely exercising her rights. After the pain was exhausted, she chose to let go completely and continue on the road, explaining the pain of marriage and the abandonment of her original identity. A woman completely freed from the shackles of marriage and family is undoubtedly a revolutionary awakening, and grandmother is also reborn.
Of course, the women's writing in Grandma's New World is not perfect. From the cheating grandfather, to the cat abuse perverted man, to the infatuated man who "abducts people", to the old man who uses his mother... The male images in the play are very unbearable. And the topics that the screenwriter wants to discuss are really rich, even too rich, which brings a lot of side plots and incidental writing. Grandma has been through so many things along the way, and she can perfectly integrate into the event itself every time, even if it has nothing to do with her. This undoubtedly greatly enhances the legendary character of the grandmother, making the image of the "big heroine" tall and majestic, but it also makes many plots seem far-fetched. The reason is that although the stories of each episode of the unit drama exist independently, because they belong to the same drama, there must be the same and related core elements. For example, the character personality, the number of protagonists, the story framework, the story background, the background music, the main environment, the ideological theme and many details are the same and run through the whole play. If there are some elements in the middle of the new setting, future episodes cannot violate the new setting. By adopting this narrative method, the creators of "Grandma's New World" undoubtedly presented themselves with a difficult task to complete an almost impossible task perfectly. Therefore, it is not easy for "Grandma's New World" to withstand the test of market positioning and audience acceptance.
But in any case, "Grandma's New World" contains the exploration, ambition and adventure of the production and creative team. It takes family issues or social problems as the core, allows value judgments to cut into each story unit, and judges the good and evil of people, things, and emotions in the play with clear ethical and moral concepts. The efforts made by this drama make us realize that the story not only exists in the plot, but also in the minds of the audience, and the most attractive part of the series lies in the reverse frustration of the audience, which means that the audience will have corresponding narrative expectations after receiving certain information prompts from the plot. The biggest charm of the play is precisely that the development of the plot exceeds the audience's expectations, which is different from the traditional linear narrative and binary antagonistic character relationships. The main creator broke the clear and clear genre creation mode of starting and turning, which made the attempt of the highway theme go further, and also opened a gap for the innovation of creation, providing new inspiration for future film and television drama production. (The author is a doctor of drama and film and television, and a teacher of Hangzhou Normal University)