Reporter | Dong Ziqi
Edit | Yellow Moon
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Your boyfriend, handsome, well-known, well-known, well-talking, runs the family's global diamond business, shuttles between different luxury cocktail parties and beach parties, and is the only one who loves you. This is exactly the beginning of the love dream shown in the recent Netflix hit documentary "Tinder Scam King". There are many female protagonists in the film, and their love stories correspond to the same "Diamond Prince". When the heroine was attracted to the prince's profile (that is, expressed interest), she found that the prince was also interested in her, and the two immediately reached a match, and the prince invited her to meet at the local five-star hotel.
"Tinder Fraud King" movie stills The person pictured is the "Diamond Prince" and his girlfriend
Isn't the perfect boyfriend the ideal person you can find on Tinder? However, when the heroine fell in love and began to plan to have children and find a house, the prince sent a message claiming that he was threatened by the enemy. So the heroine began to send money to the prince, pay credit card bills, and even carry online loans, just to help her sweetheart get through the difficulties. The end of the story, of course, is that the heroine is in debt, and the prince has long disappeared.
Why does a dream love story that starts with online love end up with women finding themselves paying a heavy price? The parties who are willing to stand up and claim that they have been deceived are always less than the girls who have to silently bear the debt because of shame. Many of the film's comments mock the girls for being "too addicted to fantasy" and "lacking self-knowledge", but this accusation does not help us understand the scam, after all, the scam king has cheated tens of millions of dollars, and the women who have been deceived are not alone, the focus is not on them being hooked like fish, but why they are willing to believe.
If you think of a scam as a virtual love story, what exactly is its story structure? Why does love become a "Ponzi scheme", where there is always fresh blood being squeezed dry?
Pitfalls for women: encouraging fantasies, making up promises
Under the handsome and golden appearance of the male protagonist in the film is a gentle and considerate, good at communication and sharing, although the intimate messages to the girlfriend are grouped, but it creates a unique feeling. Compared with real people getting along in the field, he has perfected his image with the narration of messages, videos, and photos, and the girlfriend who interacts with him seems to be reading a real version of a romance novel customized for himself: although he is often unable to be around, he is still considerate and warm to you, saying good morning and good night to each other every day, sharing videos of private plane business trips, and occasionally sending flowers, or occasionally appearing and sending a night surprise to a luxury hotel.
The first female protagonist in the film believes that the male protagonist is the Disney-style prince she has been looking for for a long time. The film is meaningful in presenting her romantic fantasies, suggesting that she seems to have been infused with the love archetype of "beautiful princess, exotic prince" in her mind by the story of "Beauty and the Beast".
Stills from the Tinder Scam King movie
Love has the power to save. Writer Zhang Jie wrote in "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" that the long love affair between her mother and a man was maintained by reading, dialogue and diary monologues, and it was the imagination of warmth that accompanied her through the most difficult years. In the many love fraud cases of "Tinder Fraud King" and "Today's Statement", when the victim women tell their own deception process, they often emphasize that the other party is "good at listening", "gentle and considerate", and "exactly the same as imagined". The irony lies in the fact that literature that calls for holiness and transcendence of true love has something in common with the clichéd "pig-killing plate" case, that is, the love in it is not formed by the accumulation of day and night, but by dialogue and promises that encourage fantasy.
Weaving love in virtual dialogue and promises, and supplementing with imagination, these women practice the narrative of romance novels, which is also reminiscent of what scholar Zhang Li said in "Three Literary and Artistic Women, a Love of the Times", just as Madame Bovary will chase love madly by reading romance novels, Zijun (the heroine of Lu Xun's novel "Wounded Death") will be free to love after new literary enlightenment, love stories Chinese the identity of artistic women is so important, bringing invisible motivation and reasonable reasons to tell love - this seems to say, Women learn to love through reading, and women who have love are literary and artistic youth.
In the context of Chinese literary and artistic works, this fantasy is not bad in a specific period, but is full of precious tenderness that is difficult to find in harsh environments - the promise of mothers and real lovers during the "Cultural Revolution" in "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" is a set of "Chekhov Novel Anthology", the exchange of letters between intellectual youths who fell in love during the "Cultural Revolution" in the TV series "Longing" is classical music records, and liu huifang, a worker, falls in love with Wang Husheng and has a yearning for the culture and mood of an intellectual family that is very different from factory life.
"Love, can not forget"
Zhang Jie
Guangdong People's Publishing House, 1980 edition
Sometimes, this tender fantasy brings disastrous results. There is also such a deception in Jane Austen's novels, and the handsome and amorous Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility traps her sister Marianne, who believes that "man has only one love" and values learning and interest, and she expresses her thoughts in the style of a literary youth—playing his beloved songs and singing the minor keys they once sang in unison. In Austen's pen, however, this fanatical sentimentality is ultimately clarified by facts and reason, and it is reason—not passion and sentimentality—that ultimately leads to happiness. In fact, the point of revealing the scam is not to point out how inferior the man's qualities are, although Willoughby does covet wealth and see different ideas, but the focus is on women waking up from the dream of fantasy, and the scam chose her because it is very compatible with the romantic legend she believes. It was her previously firm convictions, not his clever tricks, that led her into a lost path.
If "Tinder Scam King" is regarded as a contemporary romance satire, it is a contemporary substitute for the romance novel read by Madame Bovary, the Disney love fairy tale, which also shows the dangers that can be caused by an overly sentimental view of feelings. Fairy tales believe in a flash of salvation and epiphany, and the reality of the situation of immediately soaring with sincere emotions is unlikely to happen, just like "Reason and Emotion" Marianne almost paid the price of life, "Longing" ironically reveals that Liu Huifang's emotions based on knowledge and mood also made her suffer in the rest of her life, and the heroine of "Tinder Fraud King" is facing debt and threats after waking up. The sudden changes in the style of painting and music also point to the difficulties of reality, women in addition to love, but also have to consider reputation, economy and livelihood, which is not with a little sincere love for the opposite sex can be detached. Of course, treating women with love expectations as people with Madame Bovary syndrome is equally biased. The first heroine in "Tinder Fraud King" is still willing to use dating software to find true love after suffering a painful scam, taking the search for love as the most important purpose of life, and it is difficult to distinguish whether this is driven or active reading strategy.
How Men Are Deceived: The Money Fog in The Year of Life
Of course, the deceived objects in the love story are not all women, and on the opposite side of the women with tender affection and child house routines, there are also scams that men are easy to fall into. In the movie "The Year of Life" adapted from Liu Heng's novel "Black Snow", the male protagonist played by Jiang Wen has just been released from prison, is in the confused period of life, and met his ideal object in the dance hall, she is pure and honest and beautiful and weak, and incompatible with the dirty dance hall, so that the male protagonist who has suffered setbacks has a desire to protect. Emotions are developing, and she innocently asks him: You're not as vicious as people are rumored to be, so "What the hell are they lying to me?" Or are you lying to me? This question is an interesting turning point, unlike those girls who fantasize about falling into the torrent of love, she puts herself first in the position of being deceived. And it turns out that her naivety and vigilance did not last long, and soon there were rumors in the population, and she did not care about the truth or falsity of love, and in the face of the male protagonist calling the feelings "just like that", even if it was an extramarital affair, it did not matter.
"Honmei Year" movie stills Pure heroine
The 1990 broadcast of "The Year of The Life" is not a morally corrupt man who obtains money and love through disguise, but a typical story of how literary and artistic women degenerate under the impact of the tide of money. This kind of depravity is common in modern literature, as exemplified by Ge Weilong in Zhang Ailing's "First Burning Incense" and Chen Bailu in Cao Yu's "Sunrise". If it is not said that the girl in "The Year of The Life" deceived the male protagonist, it can only be said that her transformation was too unthinking, which greatly shocked the male protagonist. Under the gaze of men, the biggest change of the girl is from insisting on singing dreams to being willing to trade her own beauty: her performance line has changed from the original simple dress to a gorgeous and revealing dress, and she has also changed from shyly facing the audience to not caring about the inspection of the opposite sex. The problem is that, from a male perspective, the intrinsic motivation for the transformation of women's roles appears ambiguous. As if without anyone's persuasion, she acquiesced to the rationality of the transaction, like many women who lost themselves in the city, she herself has become a symbol of depravity, as to why she has fallen, it is the male protagonist himself who is not clear, and the film does not reveal it clearly.
In this stillborn love story, the male protagonist changes from the party who is asked whether he is a liar to the cheated party, and this realization seems sentimental, because after he struggles to compromise with the status quo of money supremacy and indifference, he finds that the reason why he bites his teeth and compromises, and the women who let him retain a trace of warmth have never been aware and willing to degenerate. Due to the lack of female perspective, the male protagonist played by Jiang Wen appears more innocent and pitiful. What if he was moralistic and manly? She is the one who is more adaptable to survival. Unlike the women in "Tinder Fraud King" who can finally be deceived and revealed, the emotions he faces are foggy and quagmire woven by commodity money, and there is no possibility of getting out.