About the Author:
Zhou Su, male, a native of Beijing, is a doctoral student at the College of Letters of Nanjing University and the director of the Higher Education Branch of Beijing Normal University Press, mainly engaged in film criticism and chinese film history research.
First, the problem is raised - the "anti-aging" turn of domestic comedy films
Since the 21st century, domestic comedy films have shown an increasingly "youthful" style shift - the subtle transformation from "middle-aged comedy" to "youth comedy". This "anti-aging" transformation at the level of film style has become the focus of domestic comedy to attract the attention of the current film academic community and industry. Some scholars pointed out that "most of the booming tide of comedy films in the new century has a distinct youth culture ... It is mainly a kind of 'youth comedy film' that occupies the mainstream and the main trend, rather than the 'middle-aged comedy film' or other mainstream comedy film represented by Feng Xiaogang" [1].
Whether it is "Road Angel" (Yuan Muzhi, 1937), which highlighted social reality in the 1930s, "Long Live the Wife" (Sang Arc, 1947), which was full of "mournful middle age" texture in the 1940s, "Before the Arrival of the New Director" (Lü Ban, 1956) with traditional irony in the 1950s, or "Li Shuangshuang" (Lu Ren, 1962), which showed a strong era brand in the 1960s, and "The Black Cannon Incident" (Huang Jianxin, 1986), which was full of absurd speculation in the 1980s. In the context of mass culture in the 1990s, Feng's New Year films "Party A and Party B" (1997), "Not Seen and Not Scattered" (1998), "Endless" (1999), these classic 20th century domestic comedy films, often under the cover of humorous appearances, infiltrate a deep reflection on society or human nature, and the audience of the film is mainly middle-aged audiences with rich experience.
However, domestic comedies since the 21st century seem to have changed course, showing an increasingly "youthful" style change, which has been concretely manifested from two aspects. On the one hand, from the perspective of creative content, more and more domestic comedies take the internet language, parody, spectacle narrative, and refreshing culture that young people are keen on as the object of presentation or expression, which to a certain extent reflects "some kind of new youth culture or the ideological symptoms of the rise of youth"[2], which in turn reflects the "domestic comedy narrative dominated by the strong youth consumption culture at present", which seems to be more "suitable for the mainstream young audience of the current film"[3]; on the other hand, from the perspective of the audience, In recent years, young audiences have gradually replaced middle-aged audiences and become the main force of film consumption who enter the cinema to watch domestic comedies, and some scholars have counted eight groups of film audience surveys conducted in major cities from 2000 to 2008, and found from the "age, education level, occupation, income and other indicators of each group of survey data" that "the consumer group of movies is based on young audiences and highly educated audiences with certain incomes and small family burdens of 20 to 30 years old, and the occupations are mainly students and young white-collar workers" [4]. ]。
Therefore, refocusing on the phenomenon of "youthfulness" in domestic comedies in the 21st century will find that the "problem awareness" can be extended again, and the following derivative questions are worth repeatedly asking: Why does domestic comedy since the 21st century produce such a change in "youthful state"? Why have other types of domestic films not seen such an obvious phenomenon of "intergenerational transfer"? What are the specific characteristics of the "youth style" of domestic comedy films? In order to answer the above questions in more depth, it is necessary to rely on appropriate theories for targeted and in-depth thinking.
This paper selects the "collage" style of "youth subculture" research of the Birmingham School as a theoretical analysis tool because domestic comedy films "appear in the reality of the increasingly young audience viewing age since the new century, and have distinct youth subcultural characteristics".[5] The following attempts to use the theoretical tool of "collage" in youth subculture to "spell" the series of problems "puzzles" that have triggered the "youthful state" of domestic comedies since the 21st century, and present the "scenery" behind the "youth subculture" style implied under the appearance of domestic comedy "rejuvenation".
Stills from the movie "Endless"
Second, "Guerrilla Warfare of Symbols" - the "collage" style of domestic comedy films in the 21st century
On the whole, the theoretical research of the Birmingham School on youth subculture is mainly based on the perspective of cultural sociology, of which "resistance", "style" and "incorporation" are the three characteristics that support the theoretical research of "youth subculture" of the Birmingham School. Looking further, focusing on the core characteristic of "style" in the study of youth subculture, it can be seen that the important role of "collage" is indispensable to the reason why "youth" has generated such a unique "subculture style". According to the Birmingham School, the generation of style stems from the continuous collection, creative use and active construction of elements of youth subculture, that is, "from the perspective of style generation, what is important is not these objects, but how they are used".[6] This ideological assertion, which originated in the mid-to-late 20th century, has been used to analyze the phenomenon of "youthfulness" in Chinese comedy in the 21st century, and still shows a more suitable theoretical applicability.
When studying the phenomenon of "youth subculture", the Birmingham School borrowed an important concept of Lévi-Strauss in structuralist anthropology , "collage". As mentioned earlier, an important point of the construction and formation of the "youth subculture" style is the appropriation of the existing object system and the tampering with the meaning system, that is, through "collage", the original subculture "props" themselves "carry the meaning" to constitute a new "harmonious system". This is because "the emergence of subcultural styles, instead of creating objects and meanings in 'nothing', transforms and relocates existing objects in the existing context, converts them into new contexts, and adapts them to generate a new meaning"[7]. Throughout the 21st century domestic comedy films, the influence of this "youth subculture" style with obvious "collage" attributes can be seen repeatedly.
For example, the "new mainstream" comedy "My Hometown and Me" in 2020, ""Magic Pen Ma Liang" combines the exaggerated comedy, language memes, and talk shows that 'Happy Twist' is good at, "Beijing Good People" combines the unique sketches, advertising sense, and "jitter baggage" of 'Uncle Ge', and "The Way Back home" combines 'XiaoYueyue' and Jia Ling's own sense of variety, beauty camera, two-dimensional, etc., and these "are full of subcultural elements that are easy to be accepted by the 'Netizen Generation' audience"[8] for symbol transplantation and cultural adaptation. Through its strong "collage" function, it is placed in the new image text context of "new mainstream" comedy, and then subtly reshaped into a discourse system suitable for young audiences to accept and even enjoy. Another example is the "new power of comedy" in the 21st century, represented by Ning Hao, Xu Zheng and Chen Sicheng, all of which have built comedy brands with their own distinctive styles. Whether it is the "Crazy" series of black humor comedies, the "囧" series of road romance comedies, or the "Tang Detective" series of detective suspense comedies, they have formed a falsification collage of the original dominant comedy symbols through the elemental shifting, cultural grafting and context iteration with the characteristics of "youth subculture"; and in a structured way, the system reshaping of the old comedy model that occupies a dominant position has been completed, so that the "youth discourse" can gradually challenge the mainstream comedy dominance of "middle-aged discourse" and realize the "youth subculture" Attempts to transform, partially replace, or even subvert "mainstream culture."
It should be noted here that the meaning of the existence of the term "subculture" itself is reflected in the game process of constantly confronting the "mainstream culture", trying to integrate, and finally being absorbed or even trying to replace the "mainstream culture", so that the original mainstream becomes a "tributary". Domestic comedies since the 21st century have embodied this strong characteristic in the process of "youth discourse subculture" against "middle-aged discourse mainstream culture". Dick Herbertig, the representative of the Birmingham School, once borrowed echoes the term "collage" as a figurative "semiotic guerillawarfare" (symbolic guerrilla warfare). From this vivid description, it can be seen that this "collage" attribute of subculture implies a strong sense of "resistance" and challenge, and its purpose is to achieve "subcultural resistance" through the appropriation and appropriation of existing cultural elements, "to produce new opposing meanings in the sense of engraving within these commodities".
As a typical commodity, the cultural representation of the increasingly "youthful" domestic comedy film in the 21st century can be explained by the process of change of this youth subculture of ritual resistance. "Guerrillas" often shoot one shot at another and change places, and it is very easy to "deviate" from the radical process of challenging the "mainstream" discourse because of the extremes of their own efforts. Therefore, domestic comedies since the 21st century often form excessive "carnival" because they cater too much to the taste of young people and rely too much on the use of imitation, parody, and miscellaneous elements, breed kitsch "spoof" characteristics, or are eager to seek to be recognized by the mainstream discourse of commercial attributes, resulting in excessive fall into the creative misunderstanding of "consumerism" and "cynicism".
From this point of view, domestic comedies in the 21st century are precisely facing the multiple possibilities brought about by this "youth subculture" style, that is, "with the rise of media culture and consumerism, comedy films with mass culture as the texture have begun to achieve 'collusion' with mainstream values and commercial forces, and the youthfulness and homogenization of the main audience of the film have further promoted the postmodern transformation of mainland comedy films"[10]; at the same time, the "guerrillas" are not "regular troops". Therefore, the subculture itself is often full of marginal discourse and lacks the rigor and standardization of orthodox discourse, that is, domestic comedies are still in a clearly weak position and have strong uncertainties in the process of consciously or unconsciously "collage" around the law of "youth subculture"; as a result, postmodern comedies with collage attributes in domestic comedies gradually "no longer face sharp social chaos and are ironic and exposed, but use gags, parodies, parodies, collages and other means to disassemble symbols and subvert values. Entertainment revelry became an important source of aesthetic pleasure for the audience". Leaving aside the new forces mentioned above, such as Ning Hao, Xu Zheng and Chen Sicheng, which have formed important comedy brands, just looking at the "new and new" forces of comedy such as "Happy Twist", Dapeng and Bao Bell, which are gradually rising, there are still many performance themes in their films that cater to the concept of spoof culture and the supremacy of money, which is the "side effect" caused by the over-eager search for "commercial acceptance" in the process of using "collage". For example, after testing the waters of many comedy adaptations in the early stage and achieving great success, "Happy Twist" chose to continue to create absurd comedy works such as "Li Cha's Aunt" in the "path-dependent" comedy industrial assembly line model, but these works did not depart from the continuous consumption of similar topics such as "money worship", and gradually produced shallow "laughter" caused by spoofing and imitating cheap joke elements. Although these theme jokes full of youth topics can attract the attention of young audiences to a certain extent, so that producers can still partially grab the value "dividend" brought by the symbolic desire satisfaction of young audiences, the final box office and word-of-mouth results show that the excessive misuse of "youth subculture", so that such skilled use of "collage" means to form a unified style of "industrial assembly line" domestic comedy, has long been full of consumerism of the mainstream business discourse model to absorb or even regurgitate. As some scholars have pointed out, this kind of comedy makes "in an era of cultural consumption, the meaning of comedy is no longer 'tearing the worthless to show people', but more of a sensory stimulation and entertainment." [12] People seek inexplicable pleasure and stagnation of stream of consciousness in déjà vu fragments to pass the time" [12].
For another example, "Fast Food" style "crash comedies" full of spoof elements, such as "The Nineteenth Generation of the Ancestors", "YueGuang Treasure Box", and "Three Laughing Talents", which seem to cater to the needs of young audiences of the Internet generation for the subcultural carnival atmosphere such as online language, cool culture, and grassroots counterattack, are actually "using harmless symbols of subversive means to dissolve and evade power and get the pleasure of rebellion from it"[13], that is, this "carnival" temperament that seems to be brought by "collage" is only one" In the funny and absurd pictures and plots to obtain a kind of foolish self-psychological satisfaction and wanton carnival"[14], this use of "symbol guerrilla warfare" to carry out "ritual resistance", although it does subvert the comedy predecessors such as Fung's "insincere do not disturb", "private order" and other mainstream comedy models with "middle-aged characteristics or middle-aged atmosphere"[15], seemingly with a fresher and more cheerful spectacle narrative, more fashionable Internet buzzwords, and a refreshing cultural discourse closer to the reading mode of the new generation. It narrows the distance with young audiences, the main consumer group of comedy films at present, and symbolically replaces the midlife crisis comedy context that requires rich experience and baptism to resonate; but the direction of its collage has long been "deviated", which is essentially only a "funny dialogue that completely jumps out of the narrative situation, and frantically deconstructs the long-known content in the national culture and real ecology, and finally leads the audience to carry out a rebellion full of 'hooliganism' against the entire cultural ecology" [16]. This process makes "collage" deviate from the established track of youth subcultures that should play the "ritual resistance" function in their style, and become a booster of "deviant" behaviors that should not be involved in the production of comedy film subcultures.
At this point, in the face of the above-mentioned questions such as "why domestic comedies in the 21st century have a 'youthful' turn" and "why domestic comedies in the 21st century are more intergenerational transfer than other genres", the answer may already be clear. First of all, the production threshold and production cost of comedy films are relatively lower than other genres, and at the same time, the comedy genre has the characteristics of being more easily empathetic to the audience, which is conducive to being quickly accepted by a fixed group of audiences; secondly, since the 21st century, with the continuous emergence of "low-cost and high-yield" comedy success stories such as "Crazy Stone", "Charlotte Troubles", "People Again on the Road", many producers have seen the huge business opportunities that investment in comedy films may obtain on the basis of smaller risks, "with small and broad" Third, the comedy genre itself has a "cultural discount" feature, which makes it difficult for comedy to smoothly achieve "spread between different regions, classes or ages"[17], and in the face of the easy production method of "quick laughter" that is easier to obtain through the "collage" function, a large number of domestic comedies "abandon the old and start the new" and choose to specialize in young people (the heart is simply inexperienced, preferring to get instant pleasure and less choice to delay gratification). Subcultural " attributes ( relatively conceited but self-sensitive , more receptive to fragmented satisfaction experiences , eager to gain mainstream recognition by manifesting individuality ) , and then keenly grasp and even deliberately cater to the subcultural psychology of young audiences — young audiences "are better at using subversive means of harmless symbols in public space to conceal this antagonism, thereby overthrowing the subjects constructed by society and ideology by dissolving and avoiding power, and deriving a provocative pleasure from this rebellion".[18] Thus realizing the maximization of commercial benefits after the input and output of comedy films. Therefore, it is necessary to be particularly vigilant against the huge side effects that may occur from the overly skillful use of the "collage" function of such domestic comedy films - excessive deviation and enter the creative misunderstanding of "increasingly shallow and 'mainstreamed'" [19].
Especially after the unprecedented success of many small-budget comedies represented by "Crazy Stone", "Perfect Nine Beauty", "Charlotte Troubles" and "Pancake Man", a large number of comedies of the same model have come to the scene. They "mainly use spoofs, parodies, collages, carnivals, nonsense, etc. as the main means to create comedic effects", and their "collage" nature is reflected in "comedy gimmicks can often be displayed independently of the plot, and the overall style is biased toward subverting conventions, cynicism, and value nihilism", precisely because this type of comedy has gradually become a "cultural product oriented to directly satisfying pleasure consumption, funny technique modeling, low investment cost, easy to make a profit"[20], so when domestic comedy is in "youth subculture". Guided by the inertia of the style, the overemphasis on the "lying flat" strategy of seeking commercial acquisition and the overall formation of an impetuous and deformed competition in the "inner volume" model, when the mainstream culture is "ritually resisted", it is likely that the end is that "the absolutization of the spirit of entertainment carnival can easily be transformed into the opposite of criticism and subversion after the mass production of business logic - a nihilistic and cynical cultural attitude".[21]
Specific analysis, from "囧Mom" choosing to premiere on the online platform during the epidemic (it is undeniable that the director lacks full confidence in the box office appeal of the theme of "middle-aged culture"), to "Detective Chinatown 3" grabbing 4.5 billion yuan at the box office but encountering a huge creative bottleneck (the typical "youth subculture" collage technique has been "poor donkey skills"),from the great success of "My Hometown and Me" with the new mainstream comedy model (subtly absorbing many subcultural collage style types), to "Hello, Li Huanying" to " Return to the mother's youth" theme to create a box office myth (under the shell of the family theme can not hide is the "chick movie" essence that covers the elements of "youth subculture" such as crossing themes and youth discourse), which shows that the current rapid development of domestic comedy films is in the stage of seeking innovation and change, and it can also be predicted that it is being or will be included in the next wave of "mainstream" comedy culture elements. From the overall perspective of the development of the film industry, in order to prevent domestic comedy films from being prematurely led astray by the "adolescent rebellious period" under the influence of "adolescent syndrome", we should try to prevent problems in the following two aspects:
First, in the 21st century domestic comedy, too many collage elements are reflected in the creative technique of "parody". Some scholars have pointed out that parody "attacks classical texts, serious themes, and classical aesthetic principles with multi-faceted, multi-dimensional cultural 'guerrilla warfare'", which can "'coronate' categories that classical aesthetics despises or discard, and 'de-crown' previous noble categories, and use the entertainment effects it creates to undermine the seriousness and certainty of meaning of the previous texts".[22] It can be seen that "parody" is a high-level creative technique that can "degrade authority" in the context of postmodern culture. However, the current domestic comedies often entrust them with vulgar use strategies, and strive to produce shallow physiological pleasures for young audiences through spoofing classics, but neglect to stimulate the audience's psychological level of elegant taste and enhance the aesthetic concept of young audiences. For example, "The Surprise of the Three Guns Shooting" "tries its best to simulate the language of the Honyama style sketch (and the language of the "Wulin Waichuan")" at the level of character dialogue,[23] and attracts people's attention with cheap "making people laugh" rather than spontaneously "laughing", and lacks the respect of domestic comedy itself for parody. It can be said that such domestic comedy films "replace the critical spirit of rebellion and skepticism with the dissipative power of nihilism, and also lose the aesthetic narrative quality of critical realism in Chinese comedy films, as well as the grassroots and rebellious spirit of small characters".
Second, in the process of gradually skillfully borrowing "collage" to create domestic comedies, domestic comedies have gradually abandoned the rich and exquisite structural attention to comedy itself, and pursued fragmented narrative language and "sketch-style" creative structure with a lazy creative attitude. For example, small-budget comedies such as Pancake Man are basically "presented in fragmented scenes and lack close and organic narrative connections with each other" in terms of the structure of the play, and the result of this treatment is that "the sketch narrative undoubtedly severs the film structure and leads to the non-reproducibility of the genre". At the same time, precisely because films such as "Pancake Man" and "Perfect Nine Beauty" have achieved a great return on investment, a large number of domestic comedies are now flocking to apply and imitate their models, and trying to "use the absurdity generated by the dislocation of time and space as the only driving force for comedy", then there will be a result of "collage eventually becoming sensational" [26].
epilogue
In general, as domestic comedy creators become more and more skillful in "collage" creation with the help of youth subcultural laws, we must be wary of Huxley's deep concern about "producing happiness" itself: "What pains is not that they replace thinking with laughter, but that they do not know why they laugh and why they no longer think"[27]; and then more importantly, we must be wary of the warning given by "Entertainment to Death": "If cultural life is redefined as the cycle of entertainment, If serious public dialogue turns into childish infantile language... The fate of the demise of culture is imminent. [28] Looking forward to the domestic comedy of the 21st century, in the youthful style, constantly realizing self-iteration and genre evolution, collages the more beautiful scenery behind the "subcultural style" with mature industrial forms and benign creative postures.
Sources of Information
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[6] [7] HU Jiangfeng. A Study on the Theory of Youth Subculture of birmingham School[M].Beijing:China Social Science Press,2012:113,114,118.
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[12] Wang Xianping. "Parody" in Contemporary Comedy Films: Representations and Meanings[J].Contemporary Film,2008(10):73,73.
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[18] Yang Liu. The Carnival of Dissipation and Spoofing: Domestic Small-Cost Comedy Films and Youth Subculture[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy,2010(2):26,26.
[22] Wind Dynasty. Parody: Postmodern Strategies for Comedy Film Narrative[J].Film Literature, 2008(5):14.
Wang Yichuan. Mainstream Blockbuster Spectacle and Comedy Trends: A Glimpse of Chinese mainland Films in 2009[J].Journal of Beijing Film Academy, 2010(1):33.
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Fund projects
This paper is a phased result of the 2018 National Social Science Foundation's major project "Excavation, Collation and Resource Library Construction of Modern Chinese Film Literature Materials" (project approval number: 18ZDA262).
Editor: Cao Honggang
Editor: Zeng Zhen
Source: Film Review, No. 12, 2021
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