"New Life", which failed to whitewash, dragged the woman into the water again

New Weekly

2024-05-23 17:03Published on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly

Some people say that after watching the finale of "New Life", they only saw the whitewashing of a wicked man.

The impoverished swindler, in the accidental peeping, became obsessed with a luxurious life, and since then he has tried every means to steal wealth and ascend to the sky step by step.

Jing Boran's new drama "New Life" was originally the most tempting "Ripley" story. He may be scheming, full of lies, and unscrupulous, but a person who pursues material fame and fortune infinitely must also have an inscrutable shadow behind it.

▲ "New Life"

The noir story hovering at the junction of light and dark, since the 50s of the 20th century, has become the soul spice of countless suspense movies, which is called the "Ripley" flavor.

Watching this kind of crime drama, the audience is not obsessed with the black and white mystery, but tries to explore the motives and reasons hidden behind the crime from the perspective of the villain, and then look at the heart.

"New Life" is the drama closest to the shadow of "Ripley" in recent times. It's a pity that when I saw the back, the flat evil women who kept popping up, and the male protagonist who finally forcibly sacrificed his life in order to save people, all turned a tasteful suspense film into an innocent male narrative driven crazy by a woman.

▲ "New Life"

The script of this drama is adapted from the popular suspense novel "Fei Ke's Dinner", and the beginning is naturally charming.

From the first episode, when Fei Ke played by Jing Boran appeared, the statements of the 5 "victims" outlined his three-dimensionality. In the eyes of coal mine boss Chen Shufa, he is a murderer who stole the identity of the second generation of officials, cheated money and marriage, and caused his daughter to commit suicide; In the heart of Su Qian, a married female high-level executive, he has transformed into a charming and high-IQ lover, specially customized rhetoric for her, and seduced her to steal tens of millions of property from the company.

▲ "New Life"

In order to keep him, his first love kept borrowing money for plastic surgery, and he also gave it as a gift to the bigwigs in the financial circle, and the dance students of famous universities fell into the dust. Even successful people in the financial industry in high positions seem to be unable to resist Fei Ke's charming trap, and there is no choice but to empty their assets.

But in fact, Fei Ke is just a poor boy who came out of the bottom, relying on exquisite means and good-looking skins to change his life.

Fei Ke is cunning, intelligent, good at taking advantage of people's hearts, and has a twisted desire for success. This is a male version of "Anna", in which no one is clean, everyone has a residual evil in their hearts, and if he continues to dig into his Ripley genes, it is likely that he will stand up to a charming villain symbol.

▲ "New Life", Fei Ke has different fraudulent faces.

It's a pity that the screenwriter seems to lack the courage to satirize the evil of the male protagonist.

In the last episode, Fei Ke's sin was completely subverted - blaming his father for cheating, blaming his stepmother for her viciousness and abuse. There is nothing wrong with deconstructing a person's motive for committing a crime from good to evil, but the plot in the play is really old and outrageous.

A stepmother can be bad, but a bad person doesn't mean stupid. The stepmother treats children who are not born to her differently in an open and honest manner, and the word "vicious" is like a label she puts on her face, which looks a little bit of a tool man.

▲ "New Life"

Fei Ke's experience was too miserable, so the screenwriter calmly blamed the tragedy of his life on his original family, and what he thought was a complex human nature drama was only a mess in the end. And the whitewashing technique is still as always, creating a gold worshipping girl, a green tea girl, and a top love brain.

▲ "New Life"

The core of the script and the novel is completely different. In the drama version, the story of her first love Zhang Xuan has undergone a wave of reversals, she is not an innocent girl who was PUA by Fei Ke, but a scheming girl who actively wants to cling to the resources of the powerful. She got a green boyfriend, and she also wanted to borrow money for plastic surgery, so that the audience who wanted to be angry with her at the beginning turned to feel distressed for Fei Ke.

But in the original book, the story before the reversal is the truth. Fei Ke always regarded Zhang Xuan as a stepping stone to enter the financial circle, and he was completely unable to empathize with the other party's pain. She was afraid of being abandoned by Fei Ke, so she used a lot of means, and finally had to drop out of college.

Fei Ke in the drama version lost his cunning genes and became an innocent teenager, and the audience could not see the complexity and shadows projected by the original work.

▲ "New Life"

The way of dismantling the characters in the whole drama is still traditional. can't find a new foothold, so he puts the blame back on women, trying to use women's madness to promote men's helplessness. This seems to be the usual trick used by the main creator in many suspense dramas to create suspense, which is the laziest method.

In recent years, women with gray backgrounds and women who dare to talk about their desires have become popular. The dark factors are fascinating, but they often blur the concept of "evil women". To show the charm of evil women, it is not about how "evil" they are, but about the complexity of shaping men, showing their tears when they are helplessly transformed in the process of being squeezed by the environment.

But in "New Life", we can only see women's money worship, and we can't see the dilemma that behind the "money worship", dancers can only use their beauty to obtain living space, and the capital bureau that prompts them to fall into the crazy appearance.

Behind the reversal, it is not so much that the screenwriter is shaping their complexity, but that they are using the dark side of their humanity to exonerate the male protagonist's depravity, and in the end it is still the innocence and goodness of the male protagonist in the play.

▲ "New Life"

This whitewashing technique is essentially the same logic as requiring women to prove themselves.

In today's social platforms, once the issue of gender relations is encountered, women often have to bear some stereotypical and biased accusations. If a woman's fault is greater in one thing, then her fault can easily be used as an excuse to be picked on and vent her displeasure. And if it is the men who are more wrong, the women are often expected to be innocent and morally unblemished.

If you talk about outlining the evil of the male protagonist, there is still a sad growth history; Then the curvature of the female characters in the drama version is almost straight and stiff.

The character of Chen Jiajia, the daughter of the coal mine, is too facial. She is simple, naïve, superstitious about romance and love, and is a "high-level love brain". The evolution of the love between a rich girl and a poor boy is like forcibly creating a love line.

▲ "New Life"

Confusing dots are everywhere. Chen Jiajia is a rich adult woman, after quarreling with her father and refusing to go on a blind date, why doesn't she find the company of her friends, or go to the hotel to relax for a night, but instead commit herself to boarding and playing ambiguous at the home of a single male driver? Even if this scholar who has lived abroad for a long time does not understand people's guesses, then she at least has vigilance against safety and a sense of boundaries between her superiors and subordinates.

Talking about Fei Ke's misery, there is a scene in the play that after he was reported and released from prison for the exam, he was so sloppy that he could only eat other people's leftover steaks. Jing Boran performed the downfall, unwillingness, resentment, and vividness of the teenager, and he and the heroine He Shan once cherished each other's teenage years, earning enough tears. It's a pity that I saw the back all the way, and it turned out that this was a foreshadowing for the heroes and heroines to occupy the moral high ground.

▲ "New Life"

The original name of the novel is "Fei Ke's Dinner", which refers to the fact that at the end of the novel, Fei Ke, a wealthy man with cancer, uses a Hongmen banquet to reveal the ghost of human nature.

Several people who were cheated of money and love by him, Fei Ke doubled the value of his property. The owner of the coal mine who lost his daughter was more excited than sorry when he saw the property gift of up to 200 million yuan; Su Qian, who asked her husband to substitute for herself and go to prison, rejected Fei Ke's kindness to rescue her husband for her, and planned to take the money to experience a better life.

They all know they're wrong, but they still can't hide from their selfish desires. This is the best thing about suspense films.

For Fei Ke, among the reasons that led him to go the wrong way, vanity had a greater impact. In the original work, there is no scene of the father cheating and the stepmother being vicious. Fei is not a genius, and he was not admitted to university, but he was proud of his talent, but he was hit hard when he failed the first college entrance examination. Fei Ke's parents were farmers, and they could not understand his obsession with higher education, nor could they afford to provide for him to repeat his studies. So Fei Ke chose to flee his hometown and use lies to get everything he wanted.

▲ "New Student", Fei can forge a student card.

The drama version of He Shan is like a robot with a Bible on his head. She couldn't get used to Fei Ke taking the test, so she chose to report it frankly, even if Fei Ke was her ambiguous object, she didn't struggle at all. She judges the good and bad of the people in the play with super high morality, and the screenwriter is reluctant to show her flaws, and the result is "daddy".

▲ "New Life"

He Shan in the original book is a big boss who "trades souls with the devil". She is not the embodiment of justice, nor is she a good person who loves Fei Ke, but like Fei Ke, she is not willing to be mediocre in her background, but she wants more, and she can do anything for fame and fortune.

Since her college days, He Shan has wanted to be a journalist. She has always known Fei Ke's identity as a liar, but she never reveals it, and even acquiesces in all evil deeds in the dark. She stopped Zhang Xuan's idea of calling the police to expose Fei Ke, and persuaded Chen Jiajia, who wanted to escape from marriage, to give up the opportunity to expose the truth of Fei Ke's identity to the financial tycoon. When she saw Su Qian dating Fei Ke, she chose to pass by silently.

▲ "New Life"

She doesn't pay attention to good and evil, but is just curious about where Fei Ke's liar road can go, and whether she can take this opportunity to dig up the "big material" and become famous? For this reason, she can abandon her friends, and even denounce Fei Ke with a clear conscience and accept the villa he gifted. Of course, Fei Ke also knows it. The psychological battle between these two is good-looking.

In the novel, this kind of black bridge shows not only the complexity of human nature, but also the question of class: how difficult is it for poor children to climb up? To what extent can human ambition be distorted? It's not about men and women, it's about greed and the game of people's hearts. It's a pity that the drama version didn't shoot these levels. And the drama version of Fei Ke, under the backdrop of the scumbag and scumbag stories along the way, completed the whitewashing of a wicked man in the ending of falling into the water to save people.

▲ "New Life"

The contradictory characters and happy endings dissolve human nature and erase the practical significance. The success of "New Life" is more like the completion of a poor boy's counterattack story with a suspenseful shell, suspense and love are not on the side, and it is really difficult to dig out a little Ripley's complex charm from its ending.

Contents: Rich white card

Editor: Felicia

Typesetting: Yang Panpan

Title image: "New Life"

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