Stop making suspended workplace women's dramas

As Hidechi Shono, the male screenwriter of "Restart Life", said, write a female character as a "person", do not think that she is a woman, but first think that she is a person. Every time he designs a plot, he doesn't think about whether a woman will do it, but whether a person will do it.

Author|Lin Lili\Editor|Avba

In recent years, women in the workplace have been a type of character that is very popular with depictions in film and television works.

There is certainly a good side to this – creators are focusing on women and trying to recognize and promote women's abilities and roles in the workplace.

But from the current many works, this theme seems to just use a concept to start, and then rely on imagination to arrange the plot, and then shape a group of "imaginary women in the workplace".

Similar works emerge endlessly, as if using the same set of templates, labeling women, focusing on the plight of women, and then there is no more.

It can't help but remind people of "Lady's Character" (Douban 6.5 points) broadcast earlier this year, focusing on the stories of women of different ages after the 70s, 80s and 90s pursuing personal value and career development, but did not impress real women in the workplace, and the role was considered to be a "strong woman in the male sexual version".

Last year's other drama "Lady's Law" (Douban 5.1 points) with the beginning of "Ms." was obviously not recognized, and the lawyer's profession was not professional enough, and was ridiculed by netizens as "Lady's legal illiteracy".

A recently aired "Shining Her" seems to make people see a similar routine again. It has a good idea to tell the story of several 30+ women with very different personalities who faced challenges and lived brave lives. However, the expression of some plots has not separated from the word "suspended", and the beautiful sisters have the courage to face life, but they can only watch from a distance and cannot land.

So, what exactly is a woman in the workplace? How should a women's story be filmed? Similar issues that had been discussed many times were brought up again.

In fact, this answer is complicated, but it is not complicated. In a simple word, it is first necessary to treat women as human beings, not as objects of gaze and imagination. Because no matter how many female labels are put on the body, female characters are a person first and a woman second. The story of women's group portraits, whether or not they are women in the workplace, should first and foremost be the stories of different people, not "different age versions of small times".

Suspended working women

"Shining Her" tells such a story: after the career of Guan Wen (played by Qin Lan), a 33-year-old strong woman in the workplace, reunited with her former lover Ding Ning (played by Wang Yang), found love at the same time, and revived her career step by step.

Guan Wen (played by Qin Lan), Ding Ning (played by Wang Yang)

The other two heroines - Guan Wen's best friend, married star Jing Zhiqiu (played by Zhang Meng), retired athlete Chen Xuanxuan (played by Liu Yun) also fell into the setbacks of love, marriage and career, and several women faced challenges together to win the battle of "life".

But I don't know when it started, the working women in film and television dramas have been equated with "strong women" and "elites", and there is only one way to externalize this equivalence, that is, dressing up like fashion week.

For example, the passionate cross-dressing of a workplace beauty at the beginning of the play - black slip dress sequin high heels, smeared with the most colorful lipstick, as if passing by unintentionally.

This is not some corny demonstration ex-boyfriend wedding scene, nor the two faces of workplace workers going to and from work, but the appearance of the heroine Guan Wen, the purpose is to be promoted, yes, the purpose is to be promoted.

The cross-dressed heroine "stumbles" into a future customer, who is being bumped by a drunken woman who demands compensation for her alcohol. As for why the customer happened to be in trouble when they met by chance, of course, because this is a play of "beauty saving heroes" arranged by the heroine, and it is her two girlfriends Jing Zhiqiu and Chen Xuanxuan who participated in the planning.

So the heroine Lu Jian pulled out a knife to help the customer solve this problem, but was vomited by the drunken woman, and the customer who owed favors handed over the suit in time to solve the heroine's problem, and the heroine took the opportunity to ask for WeChat and a suit.

A deliberate encounter, full of curiosity and frowning emotions. But I didn't expect that the main creator had less faith than the audience, and the heroine who was vomited actually stretched out her hand to flick the vomit on the small black dress, as if to tell the audience: Don't enter the play, anyway, these are props.

Even if this is not the point of the plot, it is enough to make both the hygienic and the non-clean explode in place, because it does not conform to common sense.

In the next session, the female vice president of the bureau had already sat in front of the customer she calculated, and talked about business in the name of returning the suit. After a seemingly persuasive negotiation, the end falls back to the customer asking Guan Wen Ai what coffee to drink? The heroine answers Black Coffee. So the customer said meaningfully, cold.

It turns out that the customer knows that he is calculated and sits here without temper and listens to the heroine's talk, just to wait here for the greasy and obscene moment of sexual harassment in the workplace.

In another plot, Guan Wen rear-ended when riding in the car after getting drunk, and when he got off the car theory, he found that the other party was Ding Ning, a classmate and ex-boyfriend of the university, who wrote "bastard" on the car with lipstick, and the male protagonist actually used lipstick to leave a phone number on the female protagonist's face. Seeing that the topic #Wang Yang left a number on Qin Lan's face with lipstick#, it caused a full screen of question marks from the audience.

Ding Ning used lipstick to leave a number on Guan Wen's face

It's not right to write on someone else's car, and it's even more wrong to write on someone else's face, even Wang Yang, an actor with uncle circle traffic, can't make people believe that such a crushing behavior will bring love through his acting skills. I never expected that Qin Lan, who has always shown her beauty, would accept this plot with a regretful face and illogical face.

At this time, I really want to turn a line of Chen Xuanxuan in the play into a barrage: "I said what's wrong with you, it's all about to run to the four, every time I drink too much, I get into trouble, and the older I get, the more unconscious I am!" ”

Dilemma should not belong to one person

In any case, after a flip operation, the heroine's career advancement path turned into a difficult stage.

But in this type of episode, it seems that the only female protagonist who encounters difficulties is the female protagonist, and the other women are NPCs in the game, except for saying instrumental lines, there is no character display. And the colleagues involved in the work, rushing to work are like AI, can not eat, drink or rest, and gladly accept the fact that the company does not comply with labor laws.

For example, the heroine has worked hard to initially set up a cooperation and returned to the company, a water of male employees in the conference room, facing Guan Wen yin and yang strange she relies on female gender advantages to promote, and the meeting is held insultingly without leaving gender, and the heroine fights back with professional performance - may I ask that the entire company is only the heroine who focuses on her career, right?

In the next scene, the heroine heard that the competitor female colleague was going to do something secretly, so she asked the whole team to work overtime when she was about to leave work at 6 o'clock, and submit all the content she needed before 12 o'clock, including not limited to a complete design plan within 6 hours - dry design and non-dry design are tears.

In the next scene, the heroine has to go to the hospital to deal with her brother's mess, but fortunately, the parents here do not ask their daughter to be a "brother demon", they all stand on their daughter's side and try to count the brothers who do not grow. After that, the heroine went back to work overtime amid the support of her parents, and mainly played a role in the hospital to let her brother appear to show that he was in trouble.

Immediately afterwards, after working all night, the heroine was full of energy and set off again to the client company. At this time, her competitors are coquettishly giving customers luxury diamond bracelets.

In the real workplace, would any customer really dare to accept such a valuable gift in a fully transparent conference office? The customer rejected the gift and the heroine's plan, and in the face of the heroine's threat, he said meaningfully, You are more interesting than I thought. If the above scenario is true, then the audience must have learned to presuppose that the surveillance camera in the conference room should be broken.

But anyway, after some operation, the heroine's victory is in hand, and the promotion is in sight. So the next scene is very classic (corny) comes, the heroine's colleagues gather in the bathroom, gossip attacks the heroine, the heroine's competitor says the famous line, "She is 32, no man and no children, I heard that she is about to celebrate her birthday, I wish her a lonely old age, and everyone betrays." ”

In 2023, 32 is also the 90s, where is the middle management of a luxury company in a big city so feudal and so pediatric? Although high-end business wars are often carried out in the most simple way, there are too many misunderstandings about professionals in this way of elementary school students fighting office fights.

The heroine's competitors are simple and rude, and the main means of struggle are focused on saying bad things about the heroine behind the company's back, sacrificing herself to be a junior to the married company executive, and seducing the customers that the heroine talks about.

The plot of the heroine's active efforts in the workplace is half to make full use of her feminine (beautiful) characteristics to talk to customers, and half to design and use the client's wife's suspicion and jealousy to make the client agree to cooperate. The heroine's workplace dilemma and family dilemma appear in a series of female colleagues, female competitors, male colleagues, oral debt to customers, sexual harassment, parents urging marriage, and brothers causing trouble.

But in reality, these dilemmas are the dilemma of all women, not those exclusive to one or several women with the aura of the protagonist. More ordinary, everyday women's dilemmas are never seen, but instead become women creating dilemmas for women.

It's hard to say whether this is a misunderstanding of female audiences by the producers or a misunderstanding of women by the main creative team. So much so that a Douban netizen wrote this comment: "Set misogyny, female competition, male condensation in one." ”

The future is a long way off

In recent years, whether at home or abroad, the number of film and television dramas dominated by female narratives has increased significantly, and the quality has kept pace, and many new types of stories with women as protagonists have been born. Radical ones such as "Deadly Woman", such as "Dark Glory" that caused a boom, and domestic ones also include "I'm Very Good in Another Country", "Love is Delicious", "Rock Crazy Flower" and so on.

Film and television dramas with female narratives can trigger a boom and discussion, and then produce more film and television dramas with female narratives, which is of course a good thing, but how to sincerely do a good job in real female roles still has to put a question mark.

Some film and television works do have female creators and a large number of good female actors, but they cannot be equated with being able to do a good job in women's themes.

In recent years, the well-known "First Furnace Incense", written by a famous female director superimposed on a famous female writer, and then superimposed on the actresses after the Golden Horse Movie, the final result is still ridiculed "The First Furnace of Steel", and the title of the first popular title of Douban film reviews is "Xu Anhua Why is it difficult for Zhang Ailing".

In the early years, a well-known Weibo story telling #Lady's Character # became a hot search of 83,000, and then this story was bought by Next Line Pictures and filed for filming, and there are three "Lady's Character" filed at the same time, although there has not been a broadcast so far, but the middle-aged female group portrait dramas broadcast by this popularity are unknown, but most of them are evaluated as "suspended middle-aged small era".

Screenshot of the lady's character Weibo

In fact, it is not difficult to find out what the female characters in the widely acclaimed women's stories have in common.

In the recent Japanese drama "Restart Life", the heroine has two choices after her unexpected death, reincarnated as an anteater in Guatemala, or reincarnated as her own again, accumulating virtue and doing good, and modifying the mistakes in life. So we see the heroine reborn again and again, destroying her father's cheating, studying hard, trying different jobs, etc., the only thing that remains unchanged is the girlfriend relationship between her and her friends, and how the heroine finds new meaning in life in constant rebirth, and how a "person" chooses his own life story.

The fifth season of "The Great Mrs. Maisel", which ended this year, tells the complicated life of Mickie's career success in the form of constant interpolations of everyone's memories, the partner parting ways halfway, her son estranged from her and living far away from the United States, and her daughter genius who needs to see a psychologist. She also faces workplace and family difficulties, but she knows that she cannot and does not have to be a perfect woman, her career success must be entirely because of her stand-up ability rather than beautiful appearance, she dares to stand on the stage and say everything that women can break free from, because she lives the way she wants.

Screenshot of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"

At the beginning of its creation, "Love is Delicious", which was not favored as "not sweet enough", eventually won the audience's love and a Douban score of 8.1. The three girls are not "men"-oriented, nor do they fall into their own "gender" traps, but as real living people, they show their respective pursuits, both life difficulties and life fun.

Many stories deliberately emphasize their femininity, but in fact they float on the surface, emphasizing their female identity like a performance, and never really delving into what choices women can make in the current social environment, what kind of difficulties they face, and whether they can eventually become the person they want to be.

So, we still have a long way to go in terms of the performance of female characters. Ordinary audiences can distinguish the advantages and disadvantages, it is impossible for insiders not to know, but why they are still producing suspended female themes, I am afraid that only they know. It is not difficult to use sincerity, but it is difficult to use it or not.

As Hidechi Shono, the male screenwriter of "Restart Life", said, write a female character as a "person", do not think that she is a woman, but first think that she is a person. Every time he designs a plot, he doesn't think about whether a woman will do it, but whether a person will do it.

No matter how many feminist theories are dressed up, female characters are a person first and a woman second.