This article was published in the 37th issue of Sanlian Life Weekly in 2019, and the original title was "Revisiting the < Revolutionary Road >", which is strictly prohibited from being reproduced privately, and infringement must be investigated
Reporter/Jing
Stills from the movie "Revolutionary Road"
A hopeless marriage story
The Road to Revolution takes place in the 1950s on the outskirts of Connecticut. A young man and woman, full of spirit at first sight, after marriage, the two lived in the suburbs and chose a beautiful little house at the end of the road called the "Revolutionary Road". Young man Frank raised his family with "the most boring job in the world", and the young woman who dreamed of being an actress, April, became a standard middle-class wife, a mother of two children. However, there was still a little flame in her heart that was not willing to be flat, until one night, this flame burned up, prompting a change - moving to Paris. "I can do a secretarial job there until you find your passion." The young man was persuaded, and this decision completely changed the mental state of the two, and the small house was filled with "happy madness".
The insaneity of happiness, interrupted by the fact that April was pregnant again. In contrast, Frank's big relief, "a cheerful smile struggling to climb to the face", April, after a few weeks of hesitation, finally chose to miscarry, she used a kind of modern people seem absurd "rubber pipette", and died of excessive bleeding, and the crazy happiness finally ended miserably.
After the tragedy, Richard Yates devoted another chapter to the reactions of various people after April's death, as if the concentration of despair was not enough. On the last page of the story, Mrs. Givens, who sells her house to young men and women, is chattering with her hearing-impaired husband, denigrating April: "If someone had put so much effort into sending you a pot of good plants, a pot of things that can spread and grow, something alive..." At this point, Yates ends like this: "But from here on, Howard Givons can hear nothing." A pleasant, thunderous silence swept over him. He turned off his hearing aids. ”
If witnessing April's death shocked my heart, the gentle chapter after this tragedy made the sense of despair become dense, as if there was already dead silence in front of me. Yates did not redeem the characters in his book, did not leave the reader with a little outlet for hope, and it is no wonder that the novel was unable to achieve success in the popular sense at that time. Yates's debut novel, published in 1961, was not a bestseller and did not win any awards, so such a hopeless marriage story would have to rely on Hollywood's will to become popular. Its film adaptations are ill-fated. The film project went around in the hands of several producers and did not follow until half a century later, when it was finally made. The key actress Kate Winslet, who loved the story so much, took the script and lobbied two people, Leonardo DiCaprio, who had never worked together since becoming famous for Titanic, and sam mendes, the director who had stunned Hollywood with American Beauty, and her (then) husband and father of her two children.
In 2019, Chinese drama director Jiang Tao put this story on the stage. The screenwriter of the drama version of "Revolutionary Road" is a husband and wife (Zhu Zhu and Tian Xiaowei), and the male and female protagonists also happen to be a couple (Hu Ke and Sha Yi), and what is finally presented to the audience is a "comedy". Good theatrical productions do not reject comedic techniques, but when the creators set up too many comedic melodies for such a desperate story, the dark tones in the story are inevitably diluted. Paradoxically, every meme thrown by the actors on stage was picked up by the audience, so that I, who was deeply resistant to it at first, gradually gave up that little obsession. The bitterness in the marriage relationship will indeed make the audience smile.
Before the death, it was a process of April's increasing despair. When I revisited the original book and compared it to the film version, I found that Mendes accepted Yates's despair in its entirety, did not use comedy to dilute fate, but frankly spread the essence of tragic fate, and his choice was more powerful. Perhaps, if the original book is not so desperate, the Chinese director's script of this drama will be a better version than it is now.
Richard Yates, the original author of The Revolutionary Road
A little courage
The story of The Revolutionary Road is almost semi-autobiographical. In 1951, at the age of 25, Yates traveled from New York to Paris. He had been to the city twice, once as a child, once as a soldier in World War II, and this time as a writer. In the "Belle Epoque" before World War II, a number of American writers, led by Hemingway and Fitzgerald, had cast a thick golden light on Paris, and young people with ambitions in writing, regardless of whether they were talented or not, regarded Paris as a paradise, or a huge "literary workshop". That spring, Yates moved to Paris with compensation from his family and the army, where he made a humble plan for himself, "to publish a short story a month."
However, the results were dismal. He submitted 14 articles to the New Yorker, all of which were rejected, and the story that was finally published was published in the Atlantic Monthly the following year. In 1961, 10 years after moving to Paris, Yates published his first novel, The Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award alongside Rule 22 and The Movie Watcher. But critics joke that The Revolutionary Road destroyed Yates not so much as Itater, because none of his later works could achieve the first one of its kind of success. This phrase is reminiscent of Fitzgerald. Yates also bears a resemblance to Fitzgerald in that they both drank heavily and both died young, and even, just as Fitzgerald inaugurated the Jazz Age, Yates was also named the representative writer of the "Age of Anxiety".
The difference is that Yates was never known to too many people during his lifetime, and after his death, he was forgotten at a faster rate. To make a living, he worked at the company and made a quick buck in Hollywood, but never stopped writing novels. Yates's character of Frank is mostly a projection of himself, and may even simply make fun of himself. He mingled in Paris, married and divorced, and lost custody of his children. Frank, on the other hand, who is doing "the boringest job in the world", regards himself as superior, and has always been wary of the boring and lifeless identity of "suburban husband", believing that as long as the time is ripe, as long as he wants, he can abandon the current desperate life at any time, and "one-click restoration" becomes a spirited self. It wasn't until April pressed the reset button and said, "Let's move to Paris," that Frank recognized himself.
In reality, Yates took the whole family to Paris after marriage, but did what Frank did not do, but the marriage was broken down in the process of pursuing his dreams. He and Frank made two choices, but both of them lost a lot as a result. In a way, Yates records the undercurrents of daily life in American society, which should resonate with readers, exclaiming in many details and feelings, "He monitored my life." In fact, Yates did not become a best-selling author during his lifetime, he always wrote about family, and used a humble narrative technique. In 1999, the American novelist Stewart O'nan, in a long essay reviewing Yates, compared him to Carver, writing: "It's a Carver-esque world of misfortune, but without Carver humor and without the glimmer of hope he often leaves the reader, nor does Carver's famous whitewashing style edited by Gordon Leish, nor does Yates." It's a world that doesn't seem bizarre or chic intentionally, just ordinary, sad, and inescapable. ”
In 2008, the film "Revolutionary Road" won multiple nominations for the Golden Globes and Oscars that year, and because Kate Winslet and DiCaprio appeared in the same movie again in 11 years, social networks were hotly discussed: "If Jack and Rose were together, would their marriage be like this in "Revolutionary Road" now?" ”
Yates feminism
In "The Road to Revolution", there are two lingering characteristics of the times. One was "Escape, Escape to Paris", which existed as a haven for the escapees of that era, and the other was about the legitimacy of women's work.
Yates may not be a feminist, but he is a very traditional man who believes that women should have children and be housewives. His biographer once described the detail that on one occasion Yates disagreed with his first wife about a car heater, and it turned out that his wife was right, and Yates angrily said, "Well, then you cut off my genitals." The insecurity of male identity is astonishing, and his works always brutally dramatize this male trait.
Other times, he did pay more attention to men. The protagonists in his collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Solitude, are mostly male and depict the life situation in which men are excluded from the game. The sergeant in "Jody Hits the Bad Luck" is not tolerated by the army, and sobel in "Fight with the Shark" gives up his high salary to the newspaper to realize the dream of a literati, but he can't even keep his job. In The Revolutionary Road, Frank and April seem to be on a par with him, but Yates satirizes Frank's cowardice more than to express sympathy or encouragement to April. Instead, in the film version of "Revolutionary Road", Mendes quietly shifted the focus of the narrative to the heroine, from the perspective of watching the film, in fact, it is Winslet's performance that drives Xiao Li, and the female character is the power that drives the development of the plot - this is almost the choice that the audience does not need to use their brains in the 21st century.
But the United States in the 1950s and 1960s was different. On the eve of the second wave of the feminist movement, the entire American society seems to be indulging in a comfortable family atmosphere, and suburban life is a typical example of it, and today there is still a steady stream of film and television works describing such scenes: a big suburban house, a housewife who does a job he hates in the city, a housewife, three or two children, a dog - is not the basis of the story of "Revolutionary Road" such a background?
Yates isn't the only writer influenced by his time, Aonan said, and the only person who rivals Yates in documenting mainstream American life from the '30s to the late '60s is John Cheever. The latter, who had won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was known as the "Suburban Chekhov", and it can be said that he received praise and recognition that Yates did not receive at that time. His work, like Yates' work, is also about exposing the undercurrents and sadness beneath the surface of postwar American comfort. His work inspired the 2007 premiere of Mad Men, a tv series that won many awards, as well as many family models derived from this template, as well as the weak living space for women in the male workplace. To this end, its creators also urged the actors to read "Revolutionary Road" in order to "deepen their understanding of the social background at that time" . In "Mrs. Maisel", which aired for three seasons, the heroine also lived an extremely comfortable housewife life before she began to talk about talk shows.
In the book "The Mystery of Women", the author Friedan proposes that the only dream of women in this period (note: 1930s and 1960s) was to find a husband of their choice, become an impeccable wife and mother, give birth to 5 children, and live in a beautiful house. What will happen to women who have other ideals out of this routine life, women who are restless and eager to find an outlet like April, under the influence of this non-mainstream social ambition? The Revolutionary Road gives one of the most desperate of them all. Although Yates is more directed at men, their cowardice, and the anxiety of maintaining masculinity, the consequences of the bankruptcy of masculinity are borne by both sides. Yates describes Frank's cowardice, and the most brutal scenes in his next few scenes occur after April announces that she is unexpectedly pregnant, Frank's irrepressible smile, the pressure to disappear in an instant, the comforting words that flutter happily in his head, and in order to persuade April to cancel the miscarriage plan, he even uses "male color" to try to seduce his wife with his appearance as he did during the love period.
Feminism has developed to this day, and the issues raised by Friedan are still not outdated. Before a performance of the play "Revolutionary Road" in Beijing, I interviewed Hu Ke, the actor of April, in the dressing room. She and Frank's actor Sha Yi have been married for 8 years and have two children. In this play, Hu Ke, as a professional actor, wife and mother, found that many lines in "Revolutionary Road" resemble her heart: "I am also trapped in this hopeless and repetitive housework every day, especially when I give birth to my second son, this emotion will be very strong, and when I wake up in the morning, I will think, who am I, what am I doing, and what will happen to me tomorrow?" ”
One of the conflicts that most challenged this multiple identity occurred during the filming of "Ruyi Zhuan". This drama Hu Ke filmed for 8 months, and at the same time also recorded the reality show "Mama is Superman", the workload is extremely intensive, almost close to the limit of a mother. After filming that day, Hu Ke rushed to Gulangyu Island, where the program was recorded, and it was already more than 3 a.m., and that night, Sha Yi discussed this matter with her "relatively fiercely." "He felt I shouldn't have spent that much time working, he first thought I was tired and hard, but he didn't think it was that long with the kids. During that time I was very devastated, I never knew what I was going to do, didn't I go to work? ”
Hu Ke told Sha Yi at that time: "This matter itself is not hard, but your attitude makes me very hard." The clip of the two people arguing was broadcast on the show, which also caused a heated discussion among netizens - for many women, the topic of whether to emphasize family or work is the confusion they are experiencing at the moment.
In terms of Hu Ke's experience of having two children and taking into account the work of actors, "balance is a very ridiculous thing", and his energy is limited, and he will lose the other. And for women who put their energy into the family, "no one gives a reward to women, and it is a matter of course to do a good job, and it will not give you a bonus or commendation." Therefore, it is better to pay so much in the family than to work outside the home, and to get recognition at the value level." This is also the common dilemma faced by professional women.
Many of the lines in the drama "Revolutionary Road" can hit the audience because it understands the nature of the marital relationship, which is also the internal reason why the creator can still win resonance by adding jokes on his own.
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