"I'm so tired,
Really tired,
Every day sitting at my desk, I just want to cry. ”
As the Korean drama "My Liberation Journal" aired to the sixth episode, this feeling of withering and stagnation almost overflowed the picture.
But just to show how miserable the social animals are, it can't set off such a big resonance.
With the increasing quality of Korean dramas in recent years, it is not unusual for them to be able to score super high scores at the beginning of broadcasting.
But what is rare is that "My Liberation Journal" not only reached 8.9 points in the first episode, at present, the number of episodes is more than half, the score does not drop but rises, soaring to 9.1 points, this trend also explains the quality of the show.
Its screenwriter is Park Hye-young, who is known for his "funeral", and this "My Liberation Journal" actually has some similarities with his other work, "My Uncle".
Contrary to the kind of "ordinary" fiction created by similar Korean dramas, it will not give pain a nice sugar coating.
("My Uncle")
Take "My Liberation Journal", for example, although it revolves around the life of the Lian family, it is not in a hurry to tell the story step by step, explain the time, place, and characters, and then complete the task indicators of encountering, kissing, and falling in love.
Instead, let the real "life" happen, take a scoop of atmosphere, and pull out a bunch of relationships.
It is precisely because of this that compared with the realistic theme of Korean dramas, the breakthrough achieved by this drama is more surprising.
You can finally see a distinct kind of life flowing.
It has established a daily network that is mostly found in Japanese dramas, encompassing marginal people in all corners, and together they form a strange harmony, which is the truth of the world we live in.
The characters in the play who radiate outward with the three sisters and brothers as the center of the circle look the same from a distance, but with the careful scrutiny of the camera, everyone's body is covered with scars struggling on the assembly line.
It was these scars that carefully peeled open the back of the working class.
In the city where "office workers" are mass-produced, too many people hide in a series of words such as "996", "transfer", "team building", etc., classifying and sorting out their personalities, daily lives, and even their entire lives.
However, "My Liberation Journal" digs out those in the cracks that are difficult to say, and will be criticized as "sentimental", "fragile", and "unsatisfied" careful thoughts, and solemnly waits.
As a result, the theme of the whole play is spread out, not only to serve the final family and the thrilling Happy Ending, but to present some purposeless, fruitless, very vague state.
At first, this state seems to be simply tired.
The three brothers and sisters of the Lian family and their parents live in the countryside of Gyeonggi Province, and it takes a full three hours to commute to work, changing countless means of transportation.
When I leave work, it is still daytime, a little delay, it is already midnight when I get home, and I have to get up early in the morning to catch the early bus after removing my makeup and my head has not yet stained the pillow.
There was no time to do anything, just the last train, the taxi fee of the AA, the meeting time of the subway station, strangling the neck, like a live fish waiting for Ling Chi.
Of course, what is more tiring is that the real conditions do not allow them to make any changes.
Parents are traditional and strict, and they have worked hard for their children all their lives, and now they still nag about the same reprimands as they did in childhood.
The daily processes of the family are tightly threaded, without a single gap.
There is no word at the dinner table, you have to help with farm work on weekends, you must sit down to eat together even if you have nothing to say, and you have to buy an electric car with your father's consent.
Again, this is an East Asian family we are familiar with.
Parents talk about disgust, but in essence, they rely on the discipline mode of prolonging childhood to pin their own meaning of existence.
In the airtight framework of "fatherly kindness and filial piety", everyone is difficult to move in their position.
On the other hand, these three people each have the most common pain points of the working class.
The eldest sister is single at an advanced age, and begins to deny herself in the dead cycle of failing blind dates and spitting on each other:
Don't I deserve to be loved?
Can you just find someone to fall in love with?
Does love have to be talked about?
The younger brother is more than the top and the bottom.
Being scolded by his ex-girlfriend on the street, no house and no car, only angry, this twisted sense of inferiority, so that he can not manage a relationship well.
The little sister Meizhen, with introversion as a mask, hides her extreme indifference to life. While looking at the crowd coldly, not participating in the group, he was also hurt by interpersonal relationships.
The state of the characters in the play is tired, but tired to death, they still have to live.
Pressures such as older unmarried, social fear in the workplace, working across the city, no money to buy a house, credit card dunning and other pressures come together to form the same "face" of urban people - silence.
Few Korean dramas have so much, down-to-earth silence.
Not for the sake of aesthetic lyricism, but for the sake of dry silence.
The family did not speak when they looked at each other, and when they got off work, they could not open their mouths without opening their mouths, and everyone was in a trance, their eyelids were shrugged, they were weak, and they did not say a word.
It seems that from the physical to the psychological, the whole person is tired, tired, from the inside to the outside is pumped clean, can not squeeze out a sincere smile, can not say a warm good word.
Then there is only silence.
In contrast to this silence, the series deliberately focuses on the height of summer, especially in the countryside of Gyeonggi Province.
When vast expanses of lush green, pouring sunshine, evening breezes and distant mountains become the background, it seems to tease weary humanity from a God's perspective.
As a result, extreme depression brings a sense of humor.
Gradually, several office workers seem to be simply tired and begin to split into several levels, and this is the most interesting part of this drama.
It uses a lot of monologues to outline the image of the little sister Meizhen, so that an absolute "scrap" becomes the heroine.
And she may be the "self-portrait" of many people.
To use labels such as "introverted" or "social terror" to summarize it, it is instead caught in the trap of a certain system.
When we single out introverts, it's as if extroversion is the right answer. Similarly, when "social fear" becomes a convenient buzzword, the encounter between man and man is reduced to two modes and becomes tasteless.
Mei Zhen is actually not an introvert, in the face of the rough man workers of unknown origin in the family, she is moved, and she dares to take the initiative to go up to the dialogue.
But in the face of colleagues and family, I don't want to say a word. Sitting in the dinner table, I thought about leaving, without a desire to share.
She took the initiative to wash the dishes and take the initiative to work, seemingly well-behaved, but in fact, to avoid more dialogue.
She is not so much introverted as she is indifferent, and the object of indifference is not people, but life itself.
This is the total reaction of a pessimist who tortures himself daily with existentialism, to life.
There is no essential difference between happiness and unhappiness, but in any case, they are all doing meaningless things, going to the end of the same death.
When the eldest sister holds the dream of falling in love and buying a house, the brother feels that everything will be different when she lives in Seoul, only Mei Zhen knows that nothing will happen.
Whether it is their own behavior patterns that are solidified by the family environment, or the depreciation of living people in ineffective labor, these are not problems that can be solved by money or moving.
The problem was herself.
There is no pleasure in anything, because every moment of waking up is labor, and all interpersonal interactions are tasks that need to be completed.
But what is even more ironic is that Mei Zhen is not a pessimist who is 100% committed.
This drama punctures the internal friction of a highly sensitive personality that is not understood after it is integrated with the system.
On the one hand, she feels that everything is meaningless, but she will still shed tears for the abuse of the leader and be sad for interpersonal communication.
It seems to have a sober god perspective, but it is still difficult to extricate itself from the reality of the fly camp dog.
Stuck in the gap between coming out or going in, he tortured himself all day long, validating his conclusion that "nothing will happen, it will only slowly wither".
The only way she can catch her breath is a disguised "spiritual victory method" that objects herself and imagines life as a kind of role-play—I'm not me, I'm someone else.
This "me" has ideal love, a perfect life, and a fulfilling everyday life.
In this way, Mei Zhen will take the initiative to approach Mr. Gu next door, which is actually not obtrusive at all.
When she was no longer interested in the life in front of her, Mr. Gu happened to be a complete outsider.
He had no name or origin, and suddenly appeared in the Lian family and became an employee. Drinking all day long, without saying a word, like a wandering soul on the edge of the world,
The story aired to the fifth episode, the most important thing for men and women to do is to pass by and be relatively speechless.
They may be the same kind of people, but they become each other's outlets.
It is two people who are equally ascetic, repressed and hungry for love, in the same frame that is so few and pitiful, that they can pull out the sexual tension of the heavens and the earth.
For Mei Zhen, the stranger next door is a test.
Test whether she can "liberate" herself and step out of the uncomfortable "comfort zone" at all.
The feelings that surged between the two people are thick precisely because it is not the so-called heartbeat or love, but more like a bet, a fierce collision.
When life is nihilistic to the extreme, we must grasp something to survive the despicable mind.
This is also why What Mei Zhen asks Mr. Gu for is not "love", but "worship", or should be translated as "pushing and admiring".
Compared with the two-way giving of love, worship is unconditional, one-way, and unrequited.
Because Mei Zhen does not want to give, afraid of being hurt, and is too lazy to devote herself to it.
This refined egoism is also the "hateful" behind the "pitiful" of the working class.
You will find that the most frequent word in the play is "love".
Every character is like thirst, shouting "give me love", I want to be loved, I want to be filled.
Such a direct and sincere line, shooting through the neon curtain, do not know who to send.
At the same time, everyone is tired and waiting, setting aside an acre and a half of the work station, waiting for "something to happen" to save themselves.
But the so-called "liberation" is a transformation that hurts the bones, and it is absolutely not enough to just wait passively.
It is with the state of Mei Zhen's twisting that the episode instead of the social animal asks a very essential question:
The alarm clock goes off, we go to the workstation, we do the same work, we curse the same people, and we are like this for an infinite cycle until we die quietly?
This is almost a non-problem.
It's like the three siblings can see billboards on the subway every day, which says "Today you will have a good thing happen."
If it's a smooth day, the sentence will be comforting, and conversely, it will become irony.
Similarly, in Zhou Fangzhengxing's "Talk About Love, Dance", Yamashina looks at the sign of the dance classroom in the daily subway and constantly stirs him.
We all know when he takes the step out of the car and change follows.
("Talk about love, dance")
It is gratifying that "My Liberation Journal" does not intend to talk about the big truth of "enjoying the present", it just tells us that when the end is certain, life is ultimately idealistic.
In the fifth episode, when Mr. Ku finally decides to take that step, he asks Mei Zhen:
"Spring has arrived, will you and I be transformed?"
In fact, he doesn't need answers at all, because whether he transforms or not, he doesn't care about spring, he only cares about you and me.
And this kind of sobriety, this is the kind of healing we need more.