Last year, a Japanese drama called "I'll Live Well in the Next Life" was eye-catching. The story takes place in an outsourcing company in Japan that produces animation and game CG, and the five employees are all "996" social animals, but their amateur emotional lives are different.
Xiao Tao (Uchida Riyō) looks like a young and beautiful girl, but secretly has five sexual partners; colleague Xiao Mei (Ota Li Cai), on the contrary, is addicted to the second dimension, and she is completely insulated from the real male and female love; the small leader Archer (Fei Yongyi) is obsessed with the wind and dust woman; the fitness man Kobayashi (Goto Tsuyoshi) is entangled with the women's clothing boss; the handsome Matsuda (O seki Yuta) is also a "sea king"...
The whole staff is emotionally "perverted" and earns enough gimmicks. However, in terms of presentation, the color of this drama is not obscene, and the erotic image is changed, and the absurd and funny emotional experiences of the characters are recorded with a life-like lens. Now, the second season of "I'll Live Well in the Next Life" has struck again, with a Douban score of 8.3.
However, in the author's opinion, the content of the second season is bland, the exaggerated performances of the actors even infinitely enlarge the exaggerated elements in the play, sometimes camp (exaggerated style) is full of purpose, sometimes the realistic meaning is strong, so that the audience's mood wanders between watching the stage play and watching vlog (network video log), and the look is grotesque.
I thought that I could find some realistic meaning in the topic of curiosity, and as a result, everyone's emotional life gradually developed in the direction of sweet pet drama. Why is it out of control? We have to talk about it in conjunction with the highlights of the first season.
Can't live in this life?
The title is interesting in a "next life".
The Japanese concept of hierarchy has a long history, and different characters need to find their position in the family and society, and must not cross the level. Even in a romantic relationship, it is limited by various rules and regulations. Therefore, the emotional experiences of the five characters in the play must be regarded as heresy in traditional Japanese thought.
If you can be self-consistent, you will not be a "good person" in the next life. It seems to be maverick, but in fact, it lives in stereotypes all the time. In Xiaomei's view, there is true love between virtual idols, and once they interact with real people, it is called an awkward twist. But after rejecting the courtship of male executives, Xiaomei reflected: If you are not interested in men, is it that you like women?
Here, Xiaomei still has a traditional view of love: if you don't like men, you like women; it's either heterosexual or gay. In short, people need to be united with others, and they must not end up alone.
Within the prejudices of the masses, individual characteristics are not accepted, so one can only pray to be a good person in the next life. The series rationalizes this pluralistic relationship, allowing people to coexist with their own "disharmony".
Xiaomei went to the same-sex couples bar, and the bar sister saw her discomfort and said to her: "Whether you like the same sex or the opposite sex is a fact that cannot be changed." "Facing yourself calmly in the places that are different from others, and reaching reconciliation with yourself is the way to survive in a heterosexual society."
After the intention of the play is determined, it is necessary to insert the real-life concept of gender love and life phenomena in the story.
Archer's love for the wind and dust girl Heart (Tomoka Nakagawa) has two faces. People greet each other with smiling faces, and people scold each other for being greasy. After all, in Japanese custom shops, making scenes is her professional need. Archer was nothing more than an ATM in his heart.'s eye. Even if she felt that Archer truly loved herself, she could only pray in her heart that Archer would receive true love, as long as that person was not herself.
At the same time, behind the emotional behavior, there is a problem of interpersonal communication. With the exception of Archer, the other men went to the heart to find a sense of existence. Either pretending to be considerate, or boasting about how good they are, and even more so, they came to preach and think that it is not easy for parents to pull their children up, and how to do this kind of work is worthy of them. But in this relationship, can the prostitute withdraw completely?
In short, "I'll Live Well in the Next Life" seems to depict "perverted" emotional relationships, but in fact conveys a delicate, true view of love, interpersonal relationships, or sighs or ridicules through non-mainstream love concepts. Unfortunately, these advantages did not break through in the second season.
Instead of sweet pets, it is better to be "perverted"
The biggest problem in the second season is: from the revelation of multiple love relationships to the style of men and women talking about pure love.
Matsuda is taken in by the infatuated daughter Yako (Fujiko Kojima), who kidnaps her and imprisons her at home. In desperation, Matsuda had to agree to pretend to be a couple for a week, and then shoot and scatter. E Jun (Big Brother Obata), one of the five gun friends, decides to live with Xiao Tao, but when the company makes a comeback, the mood of urgent need for companionship gradually cools down. Sex hunting drama has become an urban love drama.
Inexplicably, Matsuda and A Jun, who Isota likes, launch an offensive against Peach at the same time. The love triangle coupled with the "overbearing president falls in love with me" drama is obviously a bit outdated. Why Jun A has sexual abuse tendencies, and for what reason Matsuda decided to associate with Xiao Tao, the plot is not explained.
In addition, some of the character relationships are still stuck in the first season. Archer hopes to maintain his relationship with his heart through money. The relationship between Kobayashi and the women's clothing boss has not yet been clarified, and another relationship has been involved. The relationship between the characters in the play is mostly rational social relations and single emotional behaviors, rather than focusing on emotional and pluralistic internal emotions. Coupled with the fragmented life phrases, there is less coherence in the emotional clues, making the characters slightly pale in the chaotic narrative field.
Why isn't the second season as glamorous as the first? Mainly because the character image and emotional relationship are no longer curious and "perverted", only weak pornography remains. The unusual character image is easy to shape three-dimensional, vivid and plump, coupled with questions from the outside, as well as the psychological transformation inside the character, which is more visible.
"I'll Be Better in the Next Life" gives people a sense of curiosity, like nagging. This unique feeling also has to be found in the way Japanese culture deals with lust.
Sex and obscenity
Eroticism in Japanese culture is more based on the Japanese aesthetic concept of "color", that is, a feeling between pornography and taboos. The French critic Georges Bataille argues that it is the human taboo against pornography that distinguishes human sexual needs from animal sexuality (bestiality). And the color gas is precisely in this ambiguous area.
The more forbidden it is, the greater the chance that Pandora's Box will be opened. This Freudian logic of "prohibition is sublimation" happens to appear in the long history of the development of Japanese erotic culture.
In modern times, after the Meiji Restoration, coupled with the occupation of Japan by the United States after World War II, benevolent people and the ascetic concept in Christianity forced them to abolish the public prostitution system. In Japanese film and television programs, the restrictions on the scale of expression of the privacy parts of the sexes are more stringent, even stricter than in Europe and the United States, but this prohibition has the opposite effect.
Different from the carnal lens of European and American realism, the images in Japanese manga and film and television works are less of a liberating meaning and more of a carrier built through the delusion of intervals. Roland Barthes once used women in lingerie and to explain the difference between eroticism and pornography, that is, eroticism is an association caused by the field of separation.
In Japanese yellow publications and video works, only the preparation before sexual acts and the state after sexual acts are shown, the specific process is omitted, and the audience is forced to associate with sexual behavior in a blank and degraded way. "In the blank space of the picture, the reader is actually looking at his own delusions." As a result, material pornography gradually upgraded to a spiritual, obscene eroticism.
"I'll Be Better in the Next Life" is like this. Through the inner activities of the characters, as well as the characters' underwear as a shield, the erotic narrative is completed. This is not quite the same as the nature of Japanese pink movies. Although both belong to the category of soft pornography, pink movies are still, and I Will Live Well in the Next Life is more of a life emotional drama mixed with some erotic elements.
The absence of ethics and morality in works of art, the gray area regulated by modern law, and the blessing of imagination between the production subject and the audience have created the Japanese wind and moon culture.
However, the creation of this blank and distancing effect has also encountered a bottleneck, and the life language acts as a background that is painless and itchy, and the emotional logic of the characters is ambiguous. Completing the shaping of the life-like characters within the strong dramatic conflict and introducing realistic topics while ensuring the curiosity of sex may be the most correct way to open this kind of wind and moon theme.
【Text/He Thought】