A water
When she joins the Backstreet Boys Cruise Tour, Satya huddled in a group of coolly dressed girls, "most of the time watching the boys on stage play games and capturing fleeting eye contact." She can't swim, and her favorite boy band member, Nick Carter, is an Aquarius who loves water. As a child, Satya, who was afraid of water, fantasized that to learn to swim, Nick had to teach her.
Satya, a Pakistani San Francisco girl of 25 descent, fell in love with a backstreet boy in her early teens. At the age of thirteen, she created a backstreet boys website, where she wrote and published news about the boys every day after school. Her early and persistent writing training led her to become a writer, but her obsession with boys did not end with the end of adolescence.
Satya, a Native of San Francisco, once fantasized about backstreet boys with Nick teaching her to swim
On the cruise, Satya finds herself in a strange state. On the one hand, she is excited about the summer vacation with the backstreet boys, and at the same time she feels the pressure, and part of her soul is squeezed out of her body, watching herself and the enthusiasm of the girls around her as an observer (there are also a few male fans).
Australian director Jessica Leschi's documentary, I used to be normal: A boyband fangirl story, spent four years talking to four male group female fans. Each of them, like Satya, has experienced the out-of-body mania of adolescence, realizing their own mania, observing it, accepting it, and then accepting themselves, precipitating this fanaticism into a connection with themselves, and making up their minds that it will remain forever, until death.
Sixteen-year-old Yellief, a Long Island girl in New York, was on youtube for a video of her crying and shouting while watching the "One Direction" live DVD. A few years later, she told Leschi that she was "like a bomb that exploded when she heard the name of the one-way duo."
Yeleaf's reaction to watching the one-way group concert DVD
Susan is 64 years old and a Native of Melbourne. When the Beatles performed in Australia in the 1960s, she and thousands of fans traveled to where they stayed. The night before the public meeting, she and her friends stayed outside the hotel and sang all night. Conservative media in Australia called the largest rally in the country's history a "stain" and asked what the parents of the children were doing. Susan's mother was angry with her daughter for this.
Filmmaker Susan, 64
Dara, a 33-year-old Sydneysider, is the perfect object for her to take that. Her profession is a brand planner, and on a blackboard, she explains to Leschi the secret to the success of the boy band, which is the set of analyses that the media is used to doing: the role of each member (mysterious, cute, parental, sexy, non-existent), the best age of the members (17-21 years old), the best to sing love songs but not involve sex, and so on. When making ppt displays to large companies with a market value of billions of dollars, Dara carries bootlegs and puts Gary Barlow's singing into the background music, which no one notices. Dara shows the camera how she feels when she listens to Barlow's singing. Her face was filled with happy expressions to explain the secret of the boy band: they made everyone who heard the song feel pure joy.
The perfect "reception choir" in Dara's mind
Director Jessica Leskey made a fascinating story. Fascination and fanaticism are often synonymous with irrationality and danger, and young women who are obsessed with boy bands are not as dangerous, but they cannot escape being labeled "abnormal, childish, stupid, and pathetic". The first 16-year-old Yeliff perfectly interpreted these labels. She took braces, dressed rustically, and smiled foolishly. Yeliff despised boys of the same age, believing that one-way boys were his favorite people, more than his parents and brothers.
Yeliff
If it weren't for this documentary, we would rarely have the opportunity to pull out the hashtags and see these boy band female fans. They're not what we think they are. The long-term unrequited emotional dedication to the beloved boy band not only did not make Satya, Susan, Yeleaf, and Dara into failed adults, but also allowed them to retain more poetry than ordinary people.
First of all, they are not as far as people think, fantasy and reality. The youngest Yellief also knew that she was chasing dreams that could never be fulfilled. Except in her dreams, she would not have the opportunity to drink soup with members of the "one-way combo" and play hide-and-seek in the woods (her fantasy). At the age of eighteen, she took off her braces, taught herself guitar, and began posting cover songs on YouTube regularly, trying to write her own songs. She knows better than adults the stage of life she is in, which is a special moment when she is immature in the eyes of adults, childhood is over, and the window that can chase dreams without distraction is about to close.
The eldest, Susan, is a filmmaker with a son and a daughter. She never forgot what Beatles fanaticism meant in her life: a carefree time, a love that didn't care about costs and rewards.
Whenever something unsatisfactory happens, Dara will habitually look for answers from the boy band. She will ask herself, when frustrated, what do you really want. The answer is the same every time: "I want to be joyful, I want to express myself, I want to store all the delicate little things in a box, just like I want to collect the periphery of the reception choir." ”
Dara plastered the room with collages of photos of the reception choir
Like other standard documentaries, director Leskey mentions the social environment of the four female fans in the era of star-chasing. Melbourne in the 1960s was conservative, young women had little choice about the future, and Susan's parents did not allow her to go to university to attend medicine. In New York at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Yeleaf was also rejected by her parents from attending her favorite art university, on the grounds that she "could not see the future."
But Leschi didn't spend much time on the issue of being suppressed in the expression of a need for love and sex in the hands of young women's adolescence. She chose to give the microphone to her interviewees as much as possible for an hour and a half, listening to them talk about their fascination and growing up with them. The crowded star-chasing scene in the film does not have any mocking meaning.
"It's boring to be a normal person, and it just goes to show that you don't resonate with the world." This is Dara's view. Dara is handsome, she did a more handsome thing, printed "boybnd" on the license plate, drove everywhere the reputation is mixed, but will never be ignored.
Dara printed "boybnd" on the license plate
The difference forces the four women to introspect frequently, analyze the source of their fascination, and try to find ways to live in peace with it. For a long time, Dara and Satya did not dare to reveal their identities as fans of the boy band to others, for fear of being preconceived and classified as non-my race.
They are indeed abnormal. There is always such an abnormal group of people in the crowd, willing to release useless passions in the subculture, burning youth several times that of their peers. After seeing many dark sides of the rice circle culture, "I Was Normal" makes people feel good, as if they know a happy secret.
How many people can be like Susan, 64, smiling and squinting that their lives are not wasted, and one experience will lead to another, "Because of the Beatles, I will always be closely connected with my younger self".
"Because of the Beatles, I will always be closely connected to my younger self"
Editor-in-Charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Yijia Xu