Is it the best suspense drama of the year? Think too much

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

A much-watched mystery drama, why is it disappointing?

Netflix's latest Taiwan drama "Imitator", the expectations obtained before the broadcast can not be described as low. With "She and Her She" in front, the audience's expectations for the reasoning stage drama are constantly rising. However, after the broadcast, "Imitator" was a surprise: the reasoning was untenable; It is impossible to delve into social issues.

What do we expect from good reasoning works? With this unsatisfactory "The Imitator", we try to clarify this problem.

✎ Author | Zhang Wenxi

✎ Edit | Wang Yaqi

When seeing the news that Netflix's new Taiwanese drama "Imitator" was broadcast on March 31, many people were full of expectations for the show.

Such high expectations are not difficult to understand: high-scoring dramas such as "The Distance Between Us and Evil", "The Cultivation of a Common Girl", "She and Her She" directly raised the audience's expectations for Chinese-language dramas.

"Imitator" is adapted from the classic work "Imitator" by Japanese mystery writer Miyuki Miyabe, and with the blessing of Netflix, powerful actors such as Wu Kangren , Ke Jia Huan , Lin Xinru and others sit in the town. No matter how you look at it, this drama is like a good drama.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

But the actual situation is that as more and more people watch this show, the rating of this drama continues to decline. If you watch the first three episodes and still have a little luck about this drama because of the emotions and acting skills of the characters in the play, thinking that it is still hovering on the passing line, then from the fourth and fifth episodes, this reasoning drama has completely become a presence that makes the audience taste like chewing wax.

It can be said that how high the expectations are, how disappointed they are after reading it.

A pot of stew, abandon reasoning

The story of "Imitator" takes place in Taiwan, China in the 90s of the 20th century, and the broken palm case in a park connects the cases that happened in the past. Procurator General Guo Xiaoqi, reporter Lu Yanzhen and others were involved in a serial murder case. The murderer Noh is good at controlling the media, and will take the initiative to call the TV station to provoke the prosecution, and even send the tape recording the crime process directly to the TV station.

The killer, Noh, used the media to promote himself. / "Imitator" (2023) stills

Miyuki Miyabe, the original author of "The Imitator", is classified as a writer of social mystery novels, and unlike the Bengue school, social reasoning emphasizes revealing social problems through cases and conducting in-depth analysis of social problems.

The Taiwanese drama "Imitation Criminal" has three main lines of social problems: first, how to choose between procedural justice and substantive justice in the judiciary; Second, the news media reports the facts; The third is the protection of women's rights and interests. Choose one or two of these three lines to narrate, and you can reach the level of in-depth analysis. However, it is a pity that "Imitator" only scratches the surface of these three lines, and it is a shallow taste.

A still from "Our Distance from Evil"

"She and Her She", which is biased towards women's rights, and "Our Distance from Evil", which discusses "how people should come out of the shadows after a vicious incident", the narrative focus of the two dramas is relatively focused and the main line is clear.

In contrast, the presentation of "Imitator" is like a pot of stew, judicial justice, anti-gang crime, journalistic ethics, women's issues, everything I want to put in, but none of them are brilliant.

The ability of social reasoning should be more than that. It could have been extended to social issues by extending the personal emotions of the murderer, Shen Jiawen, one of the murderers, suffered childhood trauma and was therefore highly misogynistic, and the social soil that nourished this emotion was not further analyzed in "Imitator".

As a social reasoning, it is not successful, but what about as a Bengue? Bengue reasoning emphasizes the presentation of mysteries at the beginning of the story, solving them in various ways, and paying attention to the rigor of logical reasoning.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

In the drama "Imitator", there is basically no drama of tracing the source through evidence. In the serial murder cases, each of the female victims had red paste scratches on their faces, and the prosecutor general asked to find the model and brand of this lipstick.

The progress of the plot is not foreshadowed. The suspicious red van that appeared in front of the TV station the day before raised no suspicion from anyone, and the next day it attracted police attention at the abandoned factory. Counterintuitive cases also occur frequently, such as when police and prosecutors are highly suspicious of TNB reporter Chen Heping, and after questioning him as a suspect, they still do not monitor him and do not provide protection for dangerous female victims, and new homicides continue to occur.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

If the lack of foreshadowing and the wisdom of the characters are not the hard wounds of the reasoning drama, then relying on memories to reveal the murderer makes this drama completely lose the possibility of word-of-mouth reversal. The process of revealing one of the key murderers in the play only relies on the memories of his friend Hu Jianhe, and the pleasure of reasoning is completely absent.

The other murderer eventually fell to justice, not because of the reasoning of the police and prosecutors on the chain of clues, but because of self-violence after being stimulated.

A still from the third season of "Criminal Minds"

The American drama "Criminal Minds" can be said to be the benchmark of crime dramas. In order to understand the motives of the suspects and infer the crime pattern, the behavior analysis team will profile the suspects in serial murder cases through a series of on-site investigations and interviews, constantly narrow the scope of suspects, speculate the possible location of the murderer and the next possible victim according to the law of crime, and finally stop the crime.

The reasoning story presented through the spread of plots and clues leads the audience to follow the analysis ideas of the case-solvers, identify the authenticity and falsehood, and give the audience a sense of substitution. And "Imitator" abandons this way of presenting the need to peel off layer by layer like an onion, close to the truth, and directly puts the result in front of the audience.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

Claiming to protect women, but eating women's dividends

Many moments of staring at female characters in the play also bring an uncomfortable look and feel to the series: the lens language with erotic scrutiny meaning, the almost flat nature of the victimized women, the women seem to have no other constructive and promoting role in the play except for being killed, and there is even a process of torture and killing of women that has been shown for too long in the play.

When the male murderer explains his own psychological activities, he will use lines such as "to be the master of the world and manipulate the facts" and accompanied by background music.

Film scholar Laura Mulvey proposed the concept of male gaze in the article "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film", she pointed out that the pleasure as a way to watch can be divided into two types: active/male and passive/female, and Hollywood movies have such a narrative logic - the male perspective on the screen is the internal driving force of the plot development; Female figures are encoded as objects of erotic gaze.

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" stills

In fact, not only Hollywood movies, such male perspectives are repeated in different shows.

"In a world of sexual imbalance, the pleasure of viewing splits between active/male and passive/female. The decisive male gaze projects its fantasies onto the female figure, which is thus given style. In their traditional expressive roles, women are viewed and displayed at the same time, and for the sake of strong visual and erotic impact, their appearance is encoded to be able to say that they contain sex to be watched. ”

Following the male gaze, women are portrayed as passive, empty, and almost exclusively "gender".

In the name of calling attention to victimized women, amplify and emphasize the images and processes of victimized women being abused and humiliated, which could have been presented in a non-visual way, reducing unnecessary discomfort to some audiences.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

Putting aside the hard wounds in the plot, the acting skills of the actors of "Imitator" are collectively online. After being stimulated by the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Guo Xiaoqi, the procurator general played by Wu Kangren, has always insisted on procedural justice, but was finally crushed by emotions and broke through the bottom line of justice, and hit the murderer with a gun he picked up, and the entanglement of good and evil on the bottom line of human nature was deduced.

When the Internet and mobile phones were not yet popular, the media ecology of a place greatly affected public opinion, and the play focused on how the evil of human nature was spread through the media.

Lines such as "The truth will find its way home" and "We always have the opportunity to make noble choices, we don't have to succumb to instincts like wild beasts, swayed by fear or anger, the world may be different, but I understand now that neither me nor the world, the darkness will not disappear, and all we can do is balance with more warmth and light" and other lines also resonated with many audiences.

"Imitator" (2023) lines

In the first three episodes, when Chief Ma, who believes in a local religion, finds his murdered granddaughter, he touches his granddaughter's face and says, "Yijun, don't be afraid, it's all over, Grandpa will take you home"; At the funeral, he learned that his granddaughter secretly believed in Catholicism, and found that his granddaughter had been keeping it secret because she was afraid that she would be sad, "We Yijun, as long as we are safe and kind, in fact, you don't care what grandfather believes."

Attentive viewers can even find that at the end of the film, the murderer is caught, everyone's lives are restored to order, and a small cross hanging is placed on the photo commemorating Yijun.

A still from "The Imitator" (2023).

Unfortunately, localized adaptations and powerful actors can't save this drama, the reasoning structure supporting the narrative is almost zero, and a series of unreasonable character behaviors delineate the upper limit of this drama, and even excellent acting skills will be extremely abrupt under such circumstances.

Without the ability to "fake the truth" of fictional works, the depth of the topic will be like a castle in the air, and the audience who scolded and withdrew was the best proof.

Author丨Zhang Wenxi

Editor丨Wang Yaqi

Proofreader丨Lai Xiaoni