Wen 丨 Lucifer
At the New Year's Eve party, the drug dealer "Little Fei" rode on Nate's body and punched him in the face, which may be the biggest heart-warming scene in the recently returned American drama, after all, the audience of "Hyperfluence" has been looking forward to this scene for almost three years.
The second season of "Excitement"
For overseas audiences, the TV series depicting the high school life of American teenagers unveiled the dark side of the glamorous life of the middle class in the suburbs of the United States: promiscuity, bullying, and drug abuse were rampant among young people; but for native American audiences, "Excitement" was just a quick passage to awaken the nightmares of adolescence.
The first season of "Excitement"
"The real audience for 'Excitement' is neither real-life teenagers nor even parents of teenagers, but parents of children between the ages of five and ten, who still maintain relatively good relations with their children, but can already faintly see dark clouds rising on the horizon." 」
VOX commentator Emily van der Waal wrote during the first season aired. She accurately predicted the fate of "Excitement": it is not a social problem drama like "Line of Fire", in its bones it is still a genre drama driven by a tortuous plot, and sooner or later it will return to the positioning of "normal" genre drama.
"What are the young people in their heads today?" From ancient times to the present, every generation of human parents can't help but complain the same at some point. The answer to this question can be divided into factions: one is "young people are different", and the other is "when I grow up, I will become you".
Two recognized tributes to "The Uplift" – Larry Clarke's "Half-Baked Boy" and Danny Boyle's "Guess the Train" – are just two of the answers.
"Guess the Train"
At the end of "Half-Baked Boy", the protagonist Terry, who has been infected with AIDS, has no remorse: "The thing is, I love sex, without it I really have nothing." 」 At the beginning of each episode of "Excitement", the protagonist Xiaoru will use a provocative tone to tell the character's previous history, not so much as Xiaoru's own voice, but rather to draw an incomprehensible gap between teenagers and adults with deliberate offense.
"Half-Baked Boy"
At the end of "Guess the Train", the nihilistic "lazy" reports the drug addict to the police and becomes a decent social person after a change of heart, but "I will become like you" is a more creepy ending, which shows that there is a continuity between normal adults and problem youth, and there is no essential difference.
Nate, who is beaten in "Excitement", is actually the same problem youth, his most despicable thing is not bullying, but bullying and then disguising himself as a victim by playing with his wrists, escaping the punishment he deserves, and the audience realizes that once he tastes the sweetness, he cannot repent, and growing up is only a worse degeneration for Nate.
Among the many characters in "Excitement", only Nate's growth trajectory is relatively clear. He grew into a bully because his father was a closet homosexual who suppressed himself and unconsciously transmitted violence and hypocrisy to his son.
The motives of other young boys and girls in the play are much more ambiguous as to why they are contaminated with drugs and promiscuity. In the case of Xiaoru, she was born with a mental illness, and when caring for her father who was suffering from cancer, she was first exposed to prescription drugs that should have been strictly controlled, and she has been out of control ever since. But her father's death is not enough to explain Xiaoru's motives for indulging in drugs, in her own words: "Even if my father is alive, I will still take drugs." 」 She unconsciously embarked on another path of life, and there was no key choice in between.
Because of the understatement of the causes of adolescent problems, "Hyper-Excitement" refuses to give a sociological prescription for solving the problem from the beginning. This is not necessarily a flaw, "Half-Baked Boy" and "Guess the Train" do not analyze the characters too much, and it is also a desirable style to faithfully document social problems, and adult audiences have to put aside their superiority and approach the sensitive and suspicious youth group cautiously with a "moral zero" attitude and listen to what they say.
From this point of view, the special episode of "Excitement" broadcast in 2020, especially the first episode of the special episode, is the essence of this drama. The special episode takes place at the end of the first season, after Xiaoru and Jules parted ways. At this time, the painful Xiaoru wanted to relapse, and even wanted to commit suicide, and she found her mutual aid partner Martin in the drug rehabilitation club to seek life advice.
"Excitement" special chapter
The main scene of the episode takes place in a roadside restaurant, and the plot is the two of them. From the original family to the social movement, Xiao Ru murmured the reasons for wanting to escape, and Ali was a clever spiritual teacher, on the one hand, he took All of Xiao Ru's pain: the world was indeed irredeemably rotten, on the other hand, he encouraged Xiao Ru to "live to death", after all, Xiao Ru was willing to talk to him about this matter itself is a manifestation of not being willing to give up on himself, so all he can do is push behind the confused Xiao Ru.
In this episode, "Hyper excitement" has expressed the pain, depression, anger, and struggle of teenagers, and the most appropriate response that adults can make has been expressed, and the show has reached the peak it can reach, and then it is inevitable to go downhill.
Yes, although the first episode of the second season won the highest score since the show's premiere on IMBD, it was because Nate was beaten up for the audience to take a bad breath, and the various signs in this episode have shown that the show's creator Sam Levenson intended to smash and rearrange the character relationships of the first season.
The first is the appearance of the new character Elliot, this drug addicted teenager and Xiao Ru have the same disease, and save the life of Xiao Ru who took drugs and had an adverse reaction on the cross-Chinese New Year's Eve. Because Jules strongly opposes Xiaoru's drug use, Elliot will naturally become Xiaoru's confidant, and he will inevitably destroy the stable relationship between Xiaoru and Jules, and also reflect the embarrassment of the two protagonists' delay in making substantial progress.
The second is the fat girl Kate who "transformed" in the last season, and her role in the first episode of the second season was cut to a small extent. If you don't pay attention, the audience will not notice that she has ended her "net pornography" career and begun to formally establish a relationship partner.
Kathy, who was born with no idea how to reject men, has a spark with Nate, and has to betray her friend Maddy for this reason...
If it weren't for the fact that these characters weren't problem teenagers who took drugs without a word, it would be easy for viewers to discover that a relationship between gain and loss is the classic recipe that romance soap operas are most enthusiastic about.
After the special episode, "Excitement" has stood on the watershed, if the first season has fully demonstrated the muddy adolescence, then the second season is bound to find a way out for the troubled characters, which is in line with the audience's normal psychological expectations, but the dramatic growth is also contradictory to the realist style.
The uncompromising gesture is cool, but the shock experience can only be limited to the length of a season. Looking back now, many of the plots in the first season were superfluous and unnecessary pompous and ostentatious, such as Xiao Ru's high theory of "identifying birds and knowing people", which was only to cause moral impact on the audience.
Even the rebellious youth always has an end, just like the acting skills that made Zandaya take the youngest Emmy Award in history, and the more you watch, you will also find the pattern. No matter how clever the screenwriter is, there is no way for teenagers to maintain an anti-moral and rebellious posture on the one hand, and on the other hand, to find an ending that satisfies most viewers.
In the end, it still seems that the winner is "Guess the Train" instead of "Half-Baked Boy", and the incomprehensible teenager slowly becomes understandable: "I will become like you".