Wen | Zhiyong
An East Asian creator who has seen a rise in popularity in Hollywood in recent years. A series of film and television dramas led by them about the living conditions of East Asian immigrants in the United States began to come to the fore.
A24, the producer of "Instantaneous Universe", has launched an American drama "Angry Life" created by an almost all-East Asian lineup. Continuing the momentum of this genre, the series received a top rating of 100% freshness on the American film review website Rotten Tomatoes, and the media score was also as high as 85 points, making it a strong candidate for this year's best series. In China, Douban's performance of 8.9 is equally amazing, as netizens said, this is a "story that every East Asian can empathize with."
The two protagonists of the series, one is Korean, the other is Chinese-Vietnamese, and the male number two is Japanese. Their stories lead to the survival of immigrants from East Asian countries in the United States. Although several of the protagonists are second-generation immigrants, self-discipline and self-repression in East Asian culture still flow in their blood. The unsolvable negative emotions finally made these two East Asians decide to go crazy.
Black comedy of East Asians
"Angry Life" began with a sudden "road rage" incident, the extremely depressed male protagonist Danny Zhou, driving by the extremely anxious heroine Amy Liu. Because of a small friction together, two strangers instantly went crazy and frightened each other, forming a bond and using all kinds of outrageous means to destroy each other's lives, which became the greatest pleasure in the painful life of the two. The crazy energy of mutual harm and self-destruction between the two has also become the biggest driving force for the story of the series.
Unlike the relatively serious style of most Asian immigrant-themed film and television dramas in recent years, "Angry Life" has become an out-and-out black comedy in the various crazy criticism of the two protagonists. But the highly typed shell does not affect the social expression of the series, and the East Asian logic of the characters is always the core of driving the story.
Under the influence of East Asian culture, neither protagonist can deal with his emotions, but will either suppress the pain in front of acquaintances, or instantly burst into flames, pouring his long-accumulated anger into the lives of strangers for no reason. Going crazy about each other became the only way for them to gain pleasure and peace, to maintain their appearances of normality.
The two repeatedly jump between strong laughter and crazy rage, and their highly unstable mental state explains what it means that "adult collapse is often only in a moment", so that the series always remains like a roller coaster, and the plot seamlessly rushes from one extreme to another extreme with a strong rhythm, ensuring a high degree of watchability. The intensity of the genre and the anger continue to escalate, and finally cause irreparable disaster consequences in the lives of the two, making the "black" of the black comedy genre of the series completely become the emotional background of East Asians that are difficult to control.
In the "comedy" of black comedy, the series still implements an extremely East Asian expression. The hidden jokes in the dense lines are often clever and sharp "hell jokes", which are not very hurtful and insulting. The frequent racial and gender memes make the characters break their defenses in a second, and the more they offend or be offended by others, the more they expose their fragile hearts as East Asians who cannot be consistent.
"Hell Joke" becomes a double-edged sword for this group of East Asian characters to hurt each other under the surface harmony, the offended person is instantly furious out of the mask, swept away by the wound that has never been dissolved, and the offender pretends that he does not care about trauma by stabbing others first, but in fact, only they who are also victims of trauma know which knife hurts people the most. All jokes are pain points, and this is the black humor that belongs to East Asians.
More laughter stems from the two protagonists' unstable mental state, and they burst out fiercely and embarrassed all the time. Sometimes they are so angry that they howl like beasts, and sometimes they have to show a standard smirk, and the switching of the two contrasting states at any time is presented in an exaggerated performance that is extremely ridiculous. The audience was amused by the crazy criticism of the two, but this was the most painful moment for the two. Living under the standards of East Asian life, they have never been truly happy.
You are not truly happy
Hollywood's past presentation of East Asian culture has often been a simple collage of stereotypical elements such as kung fu and tea ceremony, and there are few truly in-depth depictions. But perhaps thanks to the human observations of a group of East Asian creators, "Angry Life" analyzes East Asian culture in depth, even deeper and more comprehensive than most local East Asian dramas.
As the second generation of immigrants, Danny and Amy, the two protagonists, actually did not really spend a few days in East Asia. But the East Asian values of suppressing emotions and encouraging sacrifice, passed down from their parents to generation, still follow their bloodlines and have an indelible impact on them. East Asian identity also exposes them to discrimination in American society, sometimes in the form of outright violent bullying and sometimes casual jokes based on racial stereotypes. In a weak position, they can only laugh it off on the surface, but they are sad and depressed inside.
These past have plunged the two protagonists into an extremely contradictory psychology. They have no choice but to become the heirs of East Asian values, but under the influence of discrimination in the open and in the dark, they hate their East Asian identity in their hearts, so much so that they vent their dislike of themselves on their own ethnic group through anonymous masks. The inferiority and self-esteem aspects of East Asian culture have not been diminished by crossing the sea, but have intensified among immigrants.
The influence of East Asian standards on the protagonists is also reflected in the multiple anxieties of career and family. In East Asian societies, which emphasize striving for progress and striving for the top, in order to remain at the forefront, people must always strive to keep rolling, fearing that the slightest slack will destroy all previous achievements. Although Danny and Amy belong to two different classes, the bottom and the middle class, they are dominated by the phrase "go against the tide, if you don't advance, you will retreat", just to maintain the status quo, they have to swallow their anger, do their best, and be physically and mentally exhausted.
The high demand for career stems from the supervision of the established family division of labor in East Asian society. Starting a family is the uniform standard for adult men in East Asian society. In the prime of life, Danny, as the pillar of the family, must carry the burden. East Asian women are responsible for caring for their families. As a working woman, Amy also has to juggle family and career. Instead of personal liberation, work placed a heavier burden on her.
The career and family anxieties experienced by the two are all caused by the East Asian monistic value standard, which is extremely typical of East Asian anxiety. Sadly, however, they are victims of East Asian anxiety and have built everything in their lives on East Asian standards, and have therefore become the most loyal adherents of such standards. Danny repeatedly emphasizes the importance of traditional values, and although Amy has long been unable to balance family and career, she still sells the myth of herself as a model of the "perfect woman" in public, hypnotizes others, and successfully hypnotizes herself.
But when they go through twists and turns and truly realize their dreams, their hearts are still empty. Success in the worldly sense is not enough to relieve the backlog of pain in the heart, and the essential disorder of emotional processing patterns will eventually cause madness to explode again.
In the irrepressible madness again and again, "Angry Life" does not stop at pompous laughter, but allows these madness to point to the deep contradictions of the East Asian mentality: people are both self-respecting and inferior, both victims and perpetrators, pursuing success and pursuing it for some reason. The individual predicament of the two protagonists reflects the structural dilemma of the entire East Asian value system, and they have nowhere to vent, and they can only eventually go into unreasonable madness.
Until the building collapsed
Apart from going crazy, how else can East Asians be redeemed? To this question, the answer of "Angry Life" is extremely pessimistic.
The two protagonists, one who had turned to religion but whose relatively ethereal teachings were not enough to calm the raging anger. A therapy that has received psychotherapy but is biased towards rational peace is not enough to open the closed heart defense, as a famous line in the play, "Western psychotherapy is useless for Eastern minds, you are the best evidence."
Family, too, failed to become their safe haven. Under the East Asian social structure, the family is the smallest unit that oppresses the individual, so their attempts to find "unprovoked love" in the family to heal themselves are doomed to failure. By giving birth or taking care of the younger generation, hoping that the other party will solve the problems in their own lives, it will only allow oppression to be passed on from generation to generation.
The series' attitude towards the East Asian concept of family can be said to be an unreserved negation, not so much that the family is a safe haven, but rather a superficial illusion of family harmony, just a fig leaf for the members' inner restlessness. This statement is quite bold, and it is also a sighing truth.
The protective nets of religion, psychotherapy, and family have all failed, and the two protagonists seem to have only one way to go crazy. But in the end, the series still points out a clear path for them and for all East Asians: only by no longer blindly suppressing emotions and communicating their pain frankly and sincerely with others can it be possible to get out of the cycle of victimization and harm.
In the middle of the strong rhythm of black comedy, the series leaves a breath from time to time, allowing the protagonist to have unexpected resonance with strange characters outside of his own life, and it is rare for them to open their hearts in the face of strangers. The final episode is completely anti-genre and anti-climax, and the entire episode is about two protagonists who have lost everything, and when they are facing death in the wilderness, they finally communicate each other's powerlessness and emptiness for the first time.
This makes the ending of "Angry Life" the last light left in the extremely pessimistic and desperate atmosphere under the crazy criticism of the series. Two sworn rivals who were stripped of all family, class, and racial identities in the face of death finally realized that they were actually facing the same trouble, and even exchanged bodies in hallucinations, using each other's lips and teeth to tell their pain. They comfort each other in their bodies and use each other's understanding to achieve self-healing.
This ending is extremely romantic, because it believes that the connection between people is still enough to allow people to recover a little energy from nothingness. This ending is extremely disappointing, because it believes that only when everything is lost can people reconnect. It is a sad prophecy that East Asians "live like this for thirty years until the edifice collapses", and it is a cure-up to East Asian values, and in the complete collapse, complete rebirth can be found.
But such a therapy is obviously too costly for us in reality. In the case of unavoidable structural difficulties, perhaps loyalty to our feelings in daily life is the only way for us to avoid falling into a "choking life". At the very least, every East Asian deserves to go crazy for 5 minutes at the top of Mount Tai.