✪ Zhang Huiyu | School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University
【Introduction】On the first day of the college entrance examination, the discussion of essay propositions was very enthusiastic on the Internet. Against the background of the centenary of the founding of the party and the entry of party history into the topic, from "being able to make achievements" to "pursuing ideals", from Mao Zedong's discussion on sports to the cartoon of "people", from "on the time of life" to "how to understand gains and losses", this year's essay propositions almost all point to the question of the times of youth temperament and life pursuit. Why is the spiritual outlook of young people of particular concern?
Over the years, the discussion of a new generation of young people "before aging", twilight and Buddhist lying flat has increased layer by layer. This article points out that the youth of history were the subjects of history, and the new cultural movement initiated by the youth was the beginning of modern China; but from the 1970s and 1980s, under the wave of neoliberalism sweeping the world, young people changed from "angry youth" to consumers in the post-industrial era. With the gradual shift of mass cultural production to younger age, shallow manifestation, and childishness, the revolutionary practice of young predecessors has also become the nostalgic object of the era of consumerism, and youth is no longer synonymous with advanced nature; youth is only a place of squandering of love in the description of many film and television dramas. However, when young people bid farewell to the campus and enter the workplace, "class" has become a more prominent story element than "ideal", and it is not uncommon for film and television narratives to fight in the workplace and achieve class leapfrog by marriage. This kind of value of the weak and the worship of the winner has influenced the basic beliefs of an entire generation.
The author calls on us to revisit the values of ordinary heroes represented by "Lei Feng" in the context of the successful culture of "one will achieve ten thousand bones" and is respected by most people. What Lei Feng does is something that ordinary people can achieve and complete, and there is no anxiety of counterattack, which is a different value concept from the culture of competitors. In this sense, a new generation of young people can have a broader vision and independent ideals, and avoid falling into the "Hunger Games" of open and dark struggle early.
This article was originally published in the magazine "Culture Horizontal", and the article only represents the author's point of view for the consideration of the monarchs.
The cultural face of "Twilight Youth"
A few years ago, the People's Daily published a commentary entitled "Don't Let Youth Stain Twilight", asking, "What makes the young generation that should be full of vitality become twilight?" And frankly said that the real competitive pressure makes these young people who grew up in the era of reform and opening up "decline before they get old". Interestingly, in 1980, China Youth Magazine published an article signed by Pan Xiao entitled "The Road of Life, How to Get Narrower and Narrower...", and set off a big discussion on "what is the meaning of life", this discussion provided emotional support for "I" to break through the blindfold and move towards a new "self", and the spiritual core of this awakened "me" is "subjective for self, objective for others". More than 40 years later, a new generation of young people is saddled with the "taste of youth that is difficult to say", and the future of young people has once again become a sensitive topic of concern. Why do young people occupy such an important place in the social and cultural imagination? Why does the temperament of young people become a big issue related to the fortunes of the country and the future? This is closely related to the practice of young people, especially new youth, becoming the main body of history in modern and revolutionary China in the 20th century.
(Why does the temperament of young people become a big issue related to the fate of the country and the future?) )
▍ Youth imagination and youth narrative
Youth is not only an age-specific stage, but also given a dual meaning of politics and culture. Youth itself is a form of political mobilization, such as the nationalist movements of the 19th century, where young people are used as patriotic and radical forces, and there are many parties named after youth. Youth are also the main force in the creation of a new, modern culture. For modern Chinese history, youth also has these two meanings. The May Fourth New Culture Movement was the place where modern China began, and it was also the moment when young people first stepped onto the stage of history. On the one hand, the youth are political, the new people, and the vanguard of anti-imperialist patriotism; on the other hand, the youth are the main body of the new culture, and the front of the new cultural movement is the magazine "New Youth". The birth of this "new youth" is related to the modern university education system, and a group of new people who have received Western-style and modern education have appeared at the same time as the birth of modern China. May Fourth also produced a model of political movement throughout the 20th century in China, a pattern of political mobilization that was preceded by the student movement and then spread to all strata of society, and it was not until the late 1980s that this model was ended.
Young people became the main body of history, which was an important feature of Chinese politics in the 20th century. It was in the 1960s that young people came to the stage of world history and became masters of attempts to change the course of world history. In that era, there were anti-institutional movements with youth as the main body, such as the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States, the Red Guards movement in China, the May Storm in France, the "Prague Spring" in Czechoslovakia, and the "Hot Autumn" in Italy, which were not only a political revolution that tried to break the existing order and criticize modernity, but also a countercultural movement that completely rethinked the bourgeois industrial society and created a new form of civilization. The reason why young people became the vanguard of the revolution was related to the changes in the social structure of the West in the 1960s. With the advent of the post-war Western welfare state system, the white-collarized working class and the class struggle of the two-tier differentiation were not the main social contradictions. The illusion of a post-industrial society is the disappearance of classes, the so-called equality of all in the face of consumption. The proletariat disappeared in the First World because it had moved to the Third World. As the Western Marxist Marcuse predicted, the working class is no longer the main body of the revolution, but the students are the most revolutionary group. The student-dominated youth rebellion became the main force of the revolutionary movement in the 1960s, and this one that swept the world was characterized by revolutions launched in the name of culture (including China's "Cultural Revolution"), and changing state power did not mean the final victory of the revolution, the cultural revolution was the most important form of revolution.
As the rebel movement in the late 1960s suffered setbacks, disintegrated, and eventually disappeared, the countercultural movement entered the field of mass culture across the board. Among them, the film "Rebellion without Cause" (1955) starring American youth idol James Dean and the "Cruel Story of Youth" (1960) directed by Japanese director Nagisa Oshima became the basic themes of youth narratives. If the youth narrative is the cultural heritage of the youth rebellions of the 1960s, the change brought about by the globalization (neoliberalization) of capitalism in the 1970s and 1980s is that young people have changed from "angry youth" to post-industrial consumers. Youth, fashion, rebellion and other youth subcultures began to fully "occupy" the stage of mainstream culture. The culture of consumerism began to be dominated by youth, and youth subculture was no longer on the fringes of mainstream culture, but mainstream culture became youth culture. This has changed the basic state of cultural production, and the market-oriented culture is only related to the specific group of young people, so the cultural ecology in the era of globalization is increasingly showing a relatively young and naïve character. Just like the current mainstream cultural industries in China - online games, film industry, popular music, small theater drama and book market, young people are the most core consumer groups, which also leads to youth narrative becoming a type with the most market value, so youth dramas and youth films have become the tried and tested narrative themes of mass culture.
(Young age not only exists in the audience group, but also variety show directors, film and television screenwriters are almost the same age of the audience)
China's youth narrative began in the 1980s by zhiqing writers such as Zhang Chengzhi, Wang Anyi, Han Shaogong, Shi Tiesheng, Ah Cheng, Liang Xiaosheng, etc. These Zhiqing stories tell the story of the 60s or the revolutionary years as a kind of young people who encountered setbacks in life and spiritual growth, especially the dual stories of youth scars and unrepentant youth. If in the mainstream narrative of reflecting on revolution and historical violence in the 1980s, the discourse of youth became a special space for another face of revolution, "ideal and romance", then in the cultural consumer market since the 1990s, these cultural expressions of "youth + revolution" have been rewritten into a story of "blood romance". In 1994, Jiang Wen's debut novel "Sunny Days" opened the prelude to red nostalgia with a turbulent youth, and since the new century, TV series such as "Blood Romance" (2004), "Days Related to Youth" (2006), "Children of the Courtyard" (2006) have rewritten the stories of the 50s and 70s in the name of youth. The significance of this red youth story is to combine the highly politicized revolutionary practice with the growth history of individual life, and to use the ideals, ignorance and recklessness of youth to write China's 60s and 70s as a depoliticized "burning years of passion". The revolutionary tyranny that was once narrated as bloodstained in the 1980s became an era of idealism, purity and romance, and red history was no longer a heterogeneous story of the absurd era, but also a cultural landscape or even an object of nostalgia in the era of consumerism.
("Children of the Compound")
▍ The belly of youth drama is blackened
If this kind of red youth drama is the product of the "grafting" of red culture and cultural consumption, then the more common youth stories in the production of mass culture are youth idol dramas from Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan, such as "Tokyo Love Story" (1991), "Meteor Garden" (2002) and other TV dramas that have caused popularity in the mainland, and related to them are also produced in the mainland, such as "Sixteen-year-old Flower Season" (1990), "Carry Love to the End" (1998) and other campus youth dramas. In these dramas, youth becomes a romance drama of handsome men and beautiful women, whether it is true love that is unswerving to death, or the fear of finally breaking up, youth becomes a splurgeful place of love. This kind of youth love drama appeared around 2005, which is the popularity of white-collar workplace dramas, such as "Dulala Promotion", which has been adapted into dramas, movies and TV series, as well as Zhao Baogang's "Struggle" (2007), "Who Decides My Youth" (2008), and Kang Honglei's "Soldier Assault" (2006) and "My Regiment Leader My Regiment" (2009) and other film and television dramas, most of which tell the story of young people struggling in the workplace or military struggle. Inspirational stories. This kind of story of being a responsible and faithful workplace master did not last long, and it was plagued by "Snail House" (2009) and "Naked Marriage Era" (2011).
("Snail Dwelling")
According to the sister Haiping in "Snail Residence", "the speed of earning money can never catch up with the speed of price increase", the middle class that could have become the "master/homeowner" of the city "wants to become a house slave and cannot", and the "high house price" has become the biggest barrier to the marriage, family and personal struggle of urban youth. Similar to "Snail House", "Naked Marriage Era" is also considered to present the "pain" of urban white-collar workers under high housing prices. The change of the house and its two families in the period of social transformation has made the urban white-collar liu Yiyang / Tong Jiaqian have a difference between rich and poor, which has also become the biggest contradiction after their marriage, especially the daily life after childbirth has completely shattered the romance and impulse of their love era. Although the two dramas present the humility and plight of the house slaves, they also show that the urban white-collar workers convince themselves to "willingly" live a "snail" life in this kind of unfair and unequal life, and they have no other choice but to continue to bravely "struggle", just like the snail that "carries a heavy shell on its body and tries to climb up". However, these youth inspirational stories that spread "positive energy" were quickly replaced by a kind of workplace belly black drama.
If the 2012 hit "Harem Zhen Huan Biography" made "Palace Fighting" an important way for young people to imagine history and talk about the actual situation, then the three popular youth dramas "Beijing Love Story", "Floating Sinking" and "Beijing Youth" completely blackened the workplace of free competition and self-worth. "Beijing Love Story" tells the story of three university classmates who "struggled" in Beijing after graduation, and its main creative team (especially the main actors) came from "Soldier Assault". Compared with the "silly and naïve" rural children who eventually grew into special soldiers at that time, shi Xiaomeng, a peasant boy, faced the capital of beijing after graduating from university, but "soberly" knew that no matter how hard he tried and struggled, he could not stand on the same starting line with his friend "Gao Fushuai" in the same window, and even did not have the opportunity to enter, and could only become a spectator of soy sauce like Di Si. The international metropolis of Beijing in the play has become a capital battlefield dancing with wolves (the successful people in the play are all capital traders with wolf spirit), and in this invisible "capital" arena, the poor boy Shi Xiaomeng can no longer find the space for struggle, inspiration and promotion, unless he also becomes a black woman like Zhen Huan in the harem. Similar to the description of this kind of black Beijing, in another TV series", the bustling and dazzling Bund in Shanghai has also become the capital of deception with black liquid flowing in the eyes of rookies in the workplace.
"Floating and Sinking" began on the night of heavy snowfall, and Jolly, who had just experienced a breakup, wandered alone in the streets of "Night Shanghai". Jolly is determined to be a salesman and win the future by her own efforts and performance. However, Jolie soon found that her favorite, love-at-first sight boss, Lu Fan, used herself again and again, even at the expense of herself to achieve the interests of the company or individual, and she was just cannon fodder, pawns and pawns for Lu Fan's career advancement. This kind of white-collar workplace planning, which was once used as a fair competition and personal struggle, is full of open and dark fights and dirty transactions. Obviously, this is not so much the glamorous life of "people on top" of freedom struggle (from the mid-90s to around 2005, white-collar workers in foreign companies have always been an ideal life to leave the system and compete fairly), but rather a "super black" harem world of Zhen Huan. From the freshness, upward and struggle of "Dulala Promotion" and "Soldier Assault" to the workplace "belly blackening" of "The Biography of Zhen Huan" and "Floating sinking", it has become the best metaphor for China's social transformation in the past four or five years.
Compared with Qiao Li, who is no longer obsessed with the high-rise Shanghai Bund and "judges the situation" and chooses to fall in love with the director of a state-owned enterprise (a scruffy divorced uncle), in the 2012 TV series "Beijing Youth" directed by Zhao Baogang, the four brothers with civil servants, doctors, returnees and rich second-generation identities want to leave Beijing together to "re-enter youth". Although this drama has similar themes to the previous "Struggle" and "Who Decides My Youth": "Find Myself" and "My Youth is My Master", this initiative to escape from life within a stable system also has new meanings. He Dong, the eldest brother who left the system, worked as a restaurant waiter, seafood market administrator, courier worker and small package foreman in the labor market, and these urban migrant workers, who rarely appeared in the scenes of "struggle" and "entrepreneurship", were "coupled" with the middle class who had no worries about food and clothing in this way, or they really lived a "dick" addiction. If this kind of self-driving tour with a JEP car to a different place to engage in survival experience is slightly luxurious, then the escape of these post-80s itself shows the disillusionment of the middle class dream.
▍ Youth film without youth
If youth dramas around 2010 are telling stories about urban white-collar workers who can't realize their middle-class dreams, then several youth films that appeared in the first half of this year are also dealing with similar themes in another way. These films are "Beijing Meets Seattle", "To Our EventualLy Lost Youth" (referred to as "To Youth") and "Chinese Partner", which are small and medium-cost films with an investment of about 50 million, but have received 500 million or more at the box office, which is a rare phenomenon in the Chinese film market. The reason why it has such a high box office is probably related to the real life of young people who are keenly involved in these films. Just as "To Youth" is not so much nostalgic for the youth that has disappeared, it is better to tell a youth story without youth. The film has a poster divided into two parts, the first half is the protagonists holding watermelons (Zheng Wei), fish tanks (Ruan Guan), architectural models (Chen Xiaozheng) and tape recorder (Lin Jing), the lower part is these objects smashed in the fall, and the middle is the name of the film. This poster clearly explains the theme of the film, that is, the process of the ruthless destruction of these beautiful men and women's cherished "symbols of youth". What exactly does "youth" refer to in "To Youth"?
The opening paragraph of the film is Zheng Wei's princess dream, using two classic fairy tales, one is the delicate pea princess and the other is Cinderella wearing crystal shoes. Both of these stories are a fantasy of how a low-class woman transformed into a princess overnight, which is also the basic function of romantic love in the writing of popular culture, presenting a kind of daydreaming across the class divide. Different from this kind of cross-border love, Zheng Wei in "To Youth" chooses Chen Xiaozheng, a poor boy who "does not fight and does not deal". When Chen Xiaozheng agreed to be Zheng Wei's boyfriend, she felt that she was wearing that crystal shoe, and the premise of this love was that Zheng Wei "missed the temptation to marry into the rich" and Chen Xiaozheng "missed the opportunity to be the principal's son-in-law". However, love soon encounters a cold reality. In the water room surrounded by mirrors, Chen Xiaozheng said his most reasonable saying, "My life is a building that can only be built once, I must make it extremely precise, there can be no one centimeter difference pool", he clearly knows that Zheng Wei, who came from an ordinary background, cannot bring him the "magic" of changing from an ugly duckling to a white swan. There is also a person in the film who believes in the existence of love, this is the Buyi beauty Ruan Guan, who carefully cares for her love affair with her first love boyfriend in high school. However, after the boyfriend cheated on Ruan Wan, he asked Ruan Wan for help, and Ruan Wan, who was in the dark, appeared in a corner of the wall mirror with her boyfriend, suggesting that this first love can only be a mirror moon in the water. If you add Ruan Wan's self-portrait in a wedding dress, it can be said that the "mirror" that appears several times in the film completely shatters the dream of youth love.
It is worth asking why Zheng Wei's love in "To Youth" conflicts with Chen Xiaozheng's personal success? For Chen Xiaozheng, being with Zheng Wei and him to realize the American dream of becoming a poor boy to a successful person is so incompatible. The film also tells the story of Zhu Xiaobei, a "tomboy" who also came from the bottom of the family, defended her dignity, and she was angrily smashed by the supermarket because she was accused of stealing from the supermarket, and was eventually expelled from the school. At the end of the film, Zhu Xiaobei, who was renamed Liu Yun, opened a children's memory training company to teach people the unforgettable "Liu Yun Memory Method", while Liu Yun completely forgot or rejected the name of "Zhu Xiaobei", which just shows that the humiliation suffered by Liu Yun/Zhu Xiaobei is so painful, and only through personal success can the lost dignity be recovered. This ubiquitous "prejudice" exists at the beginning of the film, just as Chen Xiaozheng /Li Weijuan both claim to have a cleanliness fetish and use a curtain to distinguish themselves from other roommates, this visible curtain is a class distinction buried in the depths of Chen Xiaozheng/Li Weijuan's heart, they are very clear that "life is a building that can only be built once", so Zheng Wei and Chen Xiaozheng's encounter implies that they cannot end together, because Zheng Wei damaged Chen Xiaozheng's architectural model, which undoubtedly shook his life building.
In the climactic passage at the end of the film, Ruan Guan, before getting married, promised her first love boyfriend to attend Suede(goatskin band) Beijing concert, but in the process of going to the appointment, she was killed in a car accident. Ruan Guan paid a terrible price for "youth immortality", and her death was not only a sacrifice to youth, but also a denial of the value of youth. In the end, Zheng Wei chose to leave her first love boyfriend Lin Jing, and on the van she took, she looked at the scenery of nature and had a new understanding: "We all love ourselves, more than love love, now I know that in fact, loving a person should be like loving the motherland, mountains, rivers", the picture is a rushing river and a steep mountain. This sublimation passage, which is very similar to the "touching the scene" style often used in revolutionary historical films, may be the epiphany of transcendent values such as "love for the motherland" produced by Zheng Wei after the failure of her own small love.
If "To Youth" tells the disillusionment of youth dreams, then "Beijing Meets Seattle" presents this youth dream more clearly as a middle-class dream. One of the invisible characters in this movie is the large old clock that nurtures Wen Jiajia, and the invisible of the old clock is just like the invisible virtual capital, which becomes the unimpeded lifeline for Wen Jiajia in Seattle/New York. In contrast to Wen Jiajia, who returned to Beijing, in a pre-founding, Western aristocratic luxury space, Frank's United States has become a place where middle-class people can work hard to get rich and share the joys of their families. Wen Jiajia's abandonment of the old bell is not so much tired of French food, yacht luxury, and longing for a small life of soybean milk fritters, but rather that the closed and depressed Beijing has nowhere to place Wen Jiajia's middle-class dream, and has to go to the United States in the financial crisis to find a middle-class life of "two children and a big dog". Here, these film and television drama texts very truly present the embarrassment and pressure of young people in the structure of reality.
▍Why doesn't Lei Feng need to counterattack?
Just as "To Youth" came to an end, a film about the success of college students in the 90s was released, "The Chinese Partner", and the theme of the film was its English title " American dreams in China " . If the 1993 hit TV series "Beijingers in New York" told the story of Chinese realizing the American Dream in New York, then 30 years later, "China Partner" tells the story of Chinese realizing the American Dream in Beijing. Interestingly, the New Dream School mentioned in the film is a company that trains English and helps young people to make their fortunes abroad, that is, to achieve the American Dream by selling the American Dream, just as the school's famous slogan is "Find hope from despair, life will be brilliant!" This competitive culture, this game of determining victory or defeat through brutal "PK" competitions, has become the best portrayal of the law of the jungle and "survival of the fittest" and "survival of the fittest". When the game becomes a "Hunger Games" that only a few people can survive, this is the social reason for the current "twilight youth" of young people.
In recent years, in popular culture, there have been stories about wolves and sheep, lions and sheep, if the sheep are eaten, people will not blame the cruelty and cruelty of wolves and lions, but will blame the sheep for being too cowardly, it is right to be eaten, only from sheep to wolves, into lions, can survive in the natural food chain of "survival of the fittest". This kind of food chain of the weak and the strong is the true meaning of "Wolf Totem" and the spirit of wolf sex, and it is also the talent shows such as "Avenue of Stars", "The Voice of China", "The Strongest Voice of China" and other talent shows that tirelessly tell the myth of grassroots realization of the American Dream. In the past two years, "di si's counterattack" has become a buzzword, and the reason why "counterattack" is needed is because it is impossible to "attack head-on", that is to say, the upward space of young people has become more and more difficult, and they have to take the side of the sword and choose a "counterattack" with a smaller success rate. In fact, it is worth asking how to improve the success chances of young people, but why young people must counterattack, must climb up to have a way out, otherwise it is loser (Loser), which is obviously the product of the successful culture of "one will be achieved" after the mainstream ideology has become the mainstream ideology. Here, lei feng's example can be used as a reference.
As a communist fighter in the 1960s, Lei Feng has been constantly rewritten and appropriated in the historical changes since then, and is still a heroic model that mainstream culture has tried to reshape. People emphasize more on Lei Feng's side of doing good deeds and volunteering, and rarely mention that Lei Feng has another characteristic, that is, Lei Feng is willing to make a screw. The imagination of this screw itself is based on the view of society as an automated machine, and everyone is the screw in the operation of this great social machine. This metaphor of the individual and society is a typical imagination of modern society and the mechanical age, which on the one hand can be extended to the fact that the individual is an undifferentiated and never-ending part of the social machine, and on the other hand, every screw is an indispensable component. It can also be seen from here that the 50s and 70s were full of romanticized imaginations of modern society and mechanical civilization.
As a screw that never rusts has two meanings, one is that what Lei Feng does is something that ordinary people can achieve and complete, unlike the individualistic superheroes such as Superman, Iron Man, Captain America and other individualistic superheroes in Hollywood movies, Lei Feng does not need to transform, does not need to be blindfolded, and does not need to wear a steel suit, Lei Feng is a civilian hero that everyone can become; the second Lei Feng Even an ordinary screw has the lofty value of life and survival, therefore, Lei Feng does not have the anxiety of counterattack, There is also no need to participate in PK competitions and the Hunger Games, that is to say, ordinary people/screws also have irreplaceable meanings, which is a different value concept from competitor culture and winner culture. In this sense, the key to "don't let youth stain twilight" lies in changing the rules of the game of survival of the fittest and the values of worshipping only a few successful people.
This article was originally published in the magazine "Culture Horizon", which was originally titled "The Cultural Face of "Twilight Youth"" " Welcome to share personally, media reprint please contact the copyright owner.