Author: Ya Ting
Interestingly, "Angry Life", co-launched by A24 and Netflix, starring and produced by Huang Ali and Steven Yuan, although it has won Metacritic's professional film and television media evaluation of 86, Rotten Tomatoes freshness of 98%, and Douban 8.9 "generally praised at home and abroad". It can be reviewed that different praise has analyzed and praised the wonderfulness of this show, and the media of different cultural backgrounds have given relatively different answers.
The cultural media in Europe and the United States believe that "Angry Life" is subtly reflected in the script structure and screenwriting techniques, and its thematic connotation is mainly about class, revenge, the repressed spiritual dilemma of contemporary people and the problem of deep existentialism in human nature. The evaluation of Douban and other Chinese cultural media mainly praised the portrayal of the depressive characteristics of East Asians in the play, in which the plot setting of East Asians collectively went crazy, and also wrote the "East Asian sexual spiritual dilemma" that many people can identify.
On the one hand, starting from "anger", this drama indeed echoes one of the most significant social issues in the United States in recent years, but the audience who enter "Angry Life" can still immediately perceive the difference between this "anger" and widely known social issues. The Asian Americans in this drama are indeed angry, but unlike the development of women's rights and black social movements in recent years, this anger is not too external in essence, and does not even emphasize the anger of the Asian American community, which needs to be seen, recognized, resolved, and even further change the reality of the appeal.
East Asians, on the other hand, seem to be able to grasp this form of anger instantly, where it came from and where it was going. Compared with anger being seen as a clear signal of social issues, what pokes the audience more is the temporary freedom of them in the play, relying on anger to escape from a state of self-monitoring all the time. The pessimistic view is that this may hide a tacit understanding of reality that is "hopeless". On the optimistic note, this empathy may indeed decompress, and simply imagining and watching the escape from one's own socio-cultural identity can lift people's hearts.
In the latter dimension, it seems necessary to refine "East Asianness". Most obviously, this drama has "East Asian" choices and settings from the director and screenwriter to the adoption of the protagonist and supporting roles. At a deeper level, with the spread of memes such as "East Asian XX Hand in Hand", in the context of the Internet, "East Asianness" will always be combined with "negative" qualities such as patriarchy, female exploitation, patriarchy, cultural repression and poor verbal expression. It just so happens that the source of frustration for the two protagonists in "Angry Life" restores almost every familiar "slot".
A brief introduction to "Angry Life", the plot of this drama begins with the road rage incident of contractor Danny Zhou and entrepreneur Amy Liu. After a car chase and car fight, the two enraged people write down each other's license plate numbers and prepare to cross into each other's real life to retaliate against them. As retaliation escalates and chaos expands, the dilemmas and setbacks in their lives are constantly pushed to the forefront.
Compared with the conventional Asian film and television genres, "Angry Life" does bring out a lot of unconventional Asian characters. Taking the two protagonists of the road rage incident as an example, Danny, as the "head of the family" who wants to work hard for his brother and take his parents to the United States, not only does not have the spirit of hard work and hard work, but also frequently confesses the bad things about his personal style with an unreliable image, he is not only not a reliable "eldest brother", but also the culprit who personally ruined the "future" of his family. Amy is a female entrepreneur who wants to take care of the family's livelihood and happiness, and turns between appeasing her full-time husband and working hard. Compared to the specific characters who constantly appear and bring problems, Amy is always out of control due to excessive pressure, and her biggest villain and enemy in life is more like herself.
"First Comer" stills
From the perspective of the evolution of Asian film and television works, "Angry Life" no longer shows the inspirational life of the Asian community working hard to achieve the American dream, nor does it repeatedly use chopsticks and mahjong to write about the cultural conflict between tradition and modernity, let alone in white-created works such as "First Comer", laughter and tears coexist to show how they rely on decent ridicule and slowly integrate into the interesting life of the American middle class community. The prefix of "East Asian" to indicate this series seems to be combined with the fire of "Instantaneous Universe", indicating that the Asian film and television cultural works in the future will be more "real", more "sharp" and more Asian subjectivity.
To a large extent, this is also the clear merit of "Angry Life" in the play. It comes from the expectations of social issues such as anger and racial discrimination in the United States, and every step of the plot's progress since then, it can bypass expectations of "political correctness" (both at home and abroad) and give other new possibilities. In the end, in the form of seemingly no specific solutions and answers, the answers released everything in the audience's different recognition and applause.
In the first half of the episode "Choking Life", my expectation for this show is still social satirical comedy.
Maybe it's because Danny says after the episode starts, "I'm really fed up (pretending to smile)." In addition, Amy's Japanese husband always asks his wife to be calm, Amy is willing to suppress the setting of personal simplification into Zen inspiration in the face of white bosses who want to buy her own business, and the overly strong smile from Amy to other Asian characters in the early stage of the show... Even without too much narration, the way it is performed seems to be a direct indication of how hard this group of Asians is adapting to other cultural norms. If there are white people who have the power to influence people's wealth life, the impression of Asians comes from "yin and yang", "Zen" and "calm". Class spans such as Amy living in a big house and the Zhou brothers living in a motel wearing the "Asian mask" expected by the mainstream.
Paches
However, although "Angry Life" brings out the above story background, it does not further externalize the contradiction, shifting the focus of the conflict to the Asian group and other groups, or extending the expression and theme of "Paches" to tell the historical plight and sacrifice of Asian group migration and migration.
By the middle of the plot, the conflict of "Angry Life" returns to their respective families, Danny's extrajudicial fanatic cousin constantly pressures him into the abyss, and Amy's family, mother-in-law and friendship seem to have buried a lot of lightning points, and it seems that they may be detonated at any time. If the core of "spiritual (old) East Asians" comes greatly from following the steps and living their lives well in a standard society. Compared with comedy, the mid-section of "Angry Life" is more like a psychological thriller for me, whether it is knowing relatives and friends in each other's lives under pseudonyms, or constantly hiding personal secrets, and rushing to each other's important occasions to make a big fuss, almost every bridge can make people feel pressured. The degree of drama is also reflected in such a setting, who would have thought that East Asians who are "down-to-earth", simple and capable and the first to maintain stability, have so many ways to make their lives more and more troublesome?
In the later part of the plot of "Angry Life", the apparent crisis was suddenly stopped by the "cleverness" and "affordability" of the protagonists. They returned to their lives in a rewarding way, but under the calm wind and waves on the surface, there was still a little bit of a heart that wanted to set off wild waves. Therefore, in the further promotion of the plot, they realize that the crisis cannot really be solved, and the fundamental problems that destroy their lives may still have to return to their original family, childhood and growth experience that cannot be changed.
As a result, "Angry Life" appeared at the end of the episode with the A24 brand, a bit of the "Instantaneous Universe" gene psychedelic "soul exchange plot", in an almost dying state, Amy and Danny exchanged the worst parts of their respective lives, and showed extraordinary understanding and acceptance of each other's situation, and at the end of the episode, they helped each other out of the dark passage of East Asian classics, and seemed to have deeper bonds and feelings...
For audiences who are not bound by "East Asianness", the flow of the three parts of "Angry Life" really seems to be only explained by "exquisite structure", "human dilemma" and "existential anxiety". However, for those who live in the constraint rules of "East Asianity" all the time, the connection of these three parts is not only not abrupt, but also transcends time and space, creating widespread resonance in the Asian groups that have immigrated to the N generation and the East Asian local groups here and now, by naming the "cultural salvation" that really exists. From this point of view, the structure of these three plots even has consistency.
Compared with themes such as racism, collective madness of East Asians, and love and acceptance, the most wonderful portrayal of "Angry Life" is actually the relationship between "East Asians" and families, and the system of family representatives, which hates and needs each other, and is somewhat morbid but strong and deep. Based on this, the plot of Amy and Danny returning to the family at the end and exchanging souls in "Angry Life" was established.
The funniest part is that while we're all obsessed with the episode of Amy and Danny going crazy at critical moments, we actually know the "powerlessness" of this anger. In addition to the aforementioned distinction between Native American feminists and black social movements. The anger in "Angry Life" is inward, full of self-destructive gestures and accumulators at all times.
Amy and Danny are constantly at odds with each other, on the one hand, they both have their most urgent tasks, and they are all about preparing for a "better future". But on the other hand, rather than denying that a future is bad, finding a good future, their reaction is closer to being unable to bear the burden of the present. Using strong pressure as an opportunity or excuse, they actually do a lot of things that the injured person "can't forgive" because they break through the other party's bottom line.
The two protagonists thus present a similarity, and in the general social morality, they have some virtues that seem good. But to the closest people, they all hurt the people they can, but this person is so important and largely the spiritual pillar of their lives. That is, constantly repeating the relationship between an imaginable "East Asian" native family and themselves, (unintentionally) hurting themselves (both Amy and Danny are unhappy mentioned by their husbands and brothers), making the spiritual pillar sad, or hurting the spiritual pillar itself.
Amy and Danny's relationship with the family thus takes on a distinct symbolic color, and is dotted by the demon that Amy sees whispering "If you do something bad, you don't deserve to be loved." On the one hand, they are so dragged down by the "family problem" that they recognize from the bottom of their hearts that they would be better off if it were not for the family (more emotional bonds than class) problem. But on the other hand, no matter how bad they do, as long as the family/family still accepts and understands him, he can psychologically accept that he is not a very bad person.
This is a very typical model of a patriarchal surveillance mechanism. For Danny, this patriarchal system has a more explicit existence, his parents in South Korea, and the inexplicable masculinity, and the expectation of marrying a good girl. For Amy, perhaps because she is a second-generation immigrant, even if she leaves the family, she is still monitored by the psychological shadow of her childhood, and more broadly, her social and family relationships have also evolved such surveillance. Whether it is a plastic girlfriend or her husband, she actually plays the existence of a "guardian", and she occasionally plays the role of the other party's "guardian" in her relationship with her affair partner.
For people with such pathological and strong relationships with the family, and the social support system represented by the family. The so-called "madness" does not exist as an energy to destroy everything, but more often it is a tool to free people from constant self-surveillance. Sounds a lot like a tantrum with a parent, right? But like Amy and Danny, everyone "goes crazy" and looks forward to being captured, because if you don't confirm the meaning and value of being loved from family relationships, the other path will only be more confused.
This is also the second metaphor for "East Asian history" made by "East Asian Sexuality" in "Angry Life", and to a large extent, it also responds to the appearance and development of Asian film and television cultural works today. The general similarity of the history of China, Japan, South Korea, or the wider East Asia, is that all three countries were countries that were "forced to open" their doors in recent history and urgently needed to learn to modernize in order to protect themselves or gain competitiveness. Many scholars in China, Japan and South Korea have put forward the view that the process of modernization of China, Japan and South Korea is also a process of (all) maximization of westernization. If the emancipation of modern times (that is, the liberation of the head of the family/family) East Asia still has the process and exploration of self-cultural formation, the arrival of East Asian modernization will be more accelerated than that of other capitalist countries.
In many East Asian cultural works, it is reflected that the end point or sign of a successful person is the immigration of the family to the United States. If, for a long time, East Asia equated the West with more efficient productivity and modernization, then living in the old capitalist countries such as the United States and Europe would also be an expected terminal for modernization. It is only in recent years that the second/third generation of Asians began to create, and the hardships of Asian immigrant life have been continuously introduced in mainstream film and television cultural works.
"Angry Life" answers the above question in this way, Amy and Danny understand the constraints of family/cultural inferiority, so they choose to adapt to another cultural norm. But after trying to get contracted jobs, fail to run a family hotel, dye their hair blonde, and behave Zen, they are willing to return to the feeling of "abusing" themselves, at least so that they can live in flesh and blood. In fact, we all understand that either outcome is a "tragedy," even if it was packaged as an ideal place. "Choking Life" thus reveals the next real problem, which is that the process of adapting cultural norms (for Asians/those trapped in modern traditions) is so difficult that we have neither a tailor-made path around "East Asian" modernization nor a path to walk out ourselves.