Introduction: The people inside can't go out, the people outside can't come in, are you playing with music, or is the music playing you? Please remember that it is strictly forbidden to die with life.
Released in 2001, the film "Beijing Le and Road" gathers Wu Yanzu, Shu Qi, Geng Le and other stars, showing the audience the fringe youth life at the beginning of the new century from the perspective of the daily life of a group of rock and roll youth, this article mainly takes the screen image of the two young people in the film as the analysis object, and analyzes the siege-like rock circle depicted in the film at the beginning of the century from the aspects of living space, belonging class, and character emotional destination.
Flat Road: Uneven road, trapped rock youth
Pinglu in the film is a very contradictory rock youth, who has both the self of a rock man and the inferiority of a low-level youth, but his life path is not as smooth as the name. Most of the time in the film, he gives people the feeling of not knowing himself, and the "unconscious" mentioned here refers to the failure to have a correct positioning of his identity. Indeed, this is not a problem of a flat road, the young people at the beginning of the century, struggling through the 90s ushered in the millennium, chasing dreams has become the first meaning of the era of freedom in their minds.
Rock 'n' roll as a wild, angry, extreme, loud form of artistic expression has become the first choice for young people to express themselves, in the rural low-rent housing on the outskirts of Beijing, there are a huge number of rock bands, such as Shucun, which is located near "Shangdi" in Haidian District (now the name of Metro Line 13), where more than a hundred rock musicians from all over the country are gathered. Because of the cheap rent, rock people's settlement and other factors, the musicians who have no money are dependent on each other here, whether it is material or spiritual, they all take on a quasi-communist form, and they can deal with eating a bite.
Due to its size, the local villagers are not surprised by the jingling rock music, which is also reflected in the answer that Michael gets when he comes to the city village to inquire about the Pinglu band in the film, "There are bands everywhere here.". The living environment of these rock and roll youth is the bottom level, and there is almost no place to stay in the low-rent housing except for musical instruments, and when they go out to perform in the cave, they can only live in open-air tents, built with one or several pieces of cloth, and the top is not capped, covering their privacy is finished.
As a member of these rock and roll youths, Pinglu's above experiences are part of his life, but the director has achieved the purpose of weakening his rock youth identity by inserting family narratives. The 18-year-old Pinglu jumped off the train driven by his father in Beijing, and at the same time jumped out of his father's hope for him and the family-oriented lifestyle, rock and roll became his "career" after coming to Beijing, but at the same time, the memory of his original family also gave his story a "son narrative" meaning. When his career was hurt, he sat alone on the low wall of the railway station with a tape off the disk and wept alone, seeing his father pretending to be fine and taking out money to subsidize the family, even if the rock youth was free, he could not escape the identity of "son".
If the identity of the "son" brought by the original family is still within the accepting range of Pinglu, the "grandson" identity that society expects of rock people through the record company is that he does not want to compromise in any way. Faced with questions such as "As far as you are concerned, can you mix with this circle" and "the bands that can really become popular are all rebels on the outside and obedient on the inside", Pinglu did not know how to answer, he saw himself as an artist chasing his musical dreams, but the "artist" from their mouths became an insult to himself.
On the one hand is the dream, on the other side is the reality, the flat road is not willing to compromise, even more unwilling to give up, he chooses to die, always pinning his hopes on a better next song, he hopes that his works can make the rational people of the record company face themselves with emotional thinking, but he is just one of the many sentient beings who come to play the works every day. Not everyone has the opportunity to get ahead, and some people have family support when life goes wrong, but for some people, throwing away the family when something goes wrong is the best choice. Pinglu is obviously the latter, but the two bags of gifts brought to the family did not end up in his father's hands, symbolizing that he could be alone, "Dad, I signed the contract" was also drowned in the roar of the train. If rock is a circle, then the flat road is destined to be the one that can't roll out of it.
Michael: The "prodigal son" who can't fit in
Because the film's story is set in Beijing in the millennium, Michael from Hong Kong has been given many identities, on the one hand, the son of a wealthy businessman, on the other hand, pinglu, Yang Ying and other rock and roll youth gave him the name of "Hong Kong farmer" (Hong Kong farmer), which first comes from the ridicule of Hong Kong upstarts by the children of high-ranking cadres in Beijing. In the film, Michael is stranded in the mainland for picking quarrels and provoking trouble, and on the other hand, his acting career is also threatened by this incident. By chance, he meets a group of pinglu people who are performing at the bar, and although several of them have become friends, Michael still has many obstacles in the process of integration. In the film, Michael's estrangement from the crowd is reflected in three aspects: living space, utilitarian purpose, and emotional destination.
The difference in living space between Michael and Beijing rock youth is the first to be shown in the film, as the son of a wealthy businessman, even if he is stranded in the mainland, Michael still lives in a single-family courtyard located in the center of the city, and the superior location conditions allow him to easily shuttle through various dance halls and underground salons at night, and always in contact with cutting-edge culture, such conditions are very valuable for a singer-songwriter. Compared with the box room in the urban village, the superiority of the courtyard also makes Michael have a sense of distance from the rock and roll youth from the identity, pinglu and his party like to say "that courtyard that is about to become a protected cultural relic" is Michael's ultimate belonging, when he heard that pinglu heard that michael was going to go to the cave with the song and dance troupe to perform in various places, he showed a flash of pity, perhaps out of displeasure or incomprehension, is such a rich young master coming to experience life?
It is this huge difference in identity in the film that gives Michael a viewer's perspective that the observer is not very accurate, and it would be more appropriate to quote Benjamin's concept of "Flaneur" here. As the son of a wealthy businessman, Michael in the film lives far less than the rock and roll youth in the countryside, and he dresses well before joining the song and dance troupe. Most importantly, one of the key props in the film, the handheld camera, provides a connoisseur-like perspective for his observations, and more than once in the film, Michael's footage with a camera appears, and the secondary use of this image not only gives the city's streetscape a visual element level of intertextuality, but also becomes an important evidence that Michael cannot integrate into the local rock circle - a person who is always in the observation position is cold and objective, and his perspective may be in the one who escaped from the city management with Yang Ying The two held hands and returned to the low-cost house in the afternoon, but eventually became distant and distant as Yang Ying returned to the embrace of Pinglu.
Unlike the rock youth who took root in Beijing, Michael's purpose of staying in Beijing was relatively utilitarian. First of all, he could not return to Hong Kong before the end of the lawsuit, and secondly, he initially looked at it as a spectacle and tried to integrate into the rock circle in Beijing, and his own creation was in a bottleneck, and he needed to go out to get inspiration, so he became the first choice with the song and dance troupe. This utilitarian nature foreshadows the inevitability of his separation from others after the end of the lawsuit, and also indicates that he is doomed to not truly become a member of the rock youth in the process.
The film has a controversial expression on the issue of Michael's emotional belonging, on the one hand, Michael's favorite Yang Ying has always had inexhaustible feelings for Pinglu, but on the other hand, there is also the expression of love that is about to reach a critical point when the two sell punched CDs together. From the perspective of the timeline, when the two were ambiguous, it was the lowest point of Pinglu's life, just when all the audiences thought that Yang Ying was about to leave the increasingly depressed Pinglu, Yang Ying returned to Pinglu's side, and also made Michael's emotional belonging a mystery again, and he loved, lost, swayed, and observed in the rock circles of the distant continent, unable to integrate.
epilogue
The film ends with a memorial service on Pinglu, where friends press the lighter to emit a faint light, accompanied by a low singing voice, and the crowd remembers the proud and paranoid once, but does not drink a fallen wine, does not earn money. The camera turns, and in the corner of the bar, Yang Ying sees "Mexican Jumping Beans", and Michael prepares to return to Hong Kong. After half a day of going around, about love, he didn't get it, she loved it and left; about rock and roll, he couldn't get in, he shouldn't escape. If this film gives us even a little bit of truth, it may be - don't be stuck with life.