When forty-something Liu Tao appeared in the screen with two permed curly low ponytails, the word of mouth for this hit drama called The Starry Starry Night began to go to a weird polarization.
Simply put, this is the story of a working girl at the bottom of the ladder whose family of origin has broken up, reaping the rewards of her own hard work in career and love, and realizing a leap in life.
Obviously, this is not a drama that meets the values and aesthetics of the contemporary people, both in terms of plot and cast.
But at the same time, the ratings of "Starry Starry Night" broke 1 as soon as it started airing, setting a record for the cool cloud premiere of this year's satellite TV, and it is also the first provincial satellite TV drama to break 1 in the ratings this year. In the social network, it is also loved by the "mother generation" - "no mother can escape the Star Ocean", Liu Tao played the heroine Jane Eyre is their earth! Ideal: beautiful, smart and capable. On Weibo, there has even been such a hot search: # Square dance moms want Jane Eyre as their daughter-in-law.
This is a torn phenomenon: on the one hand, the Internet has entered the "Year of the Woman" since 2020, and the mainstream value is that the domineering president = disrespect for women + PUA, and even a woman's bonus points for getting rid of a man and getting divorced in middle age. As a result, Mary Sue, Jack Sue, and Cinderella are being scoffed at and criticized by young people; however, on the other side of the Internet, a group of middle-aged and elderly people are intoxicated by this.
A similar phenomenon has happened before.
In April of this year, the world's online business released an article titled "The Internet's new "ecstasy": my mom, 57 years old, is y involved in the president of the text," and pointed out that, in the case of "tomato novels," for example, the new user can choose the age and gender of the registration, and choose 50 years old or older girls, and then open the home page recommendations. After a girl over 50 years old opens the home page, almost all of the recommended list is the president of the text series. The Department of Chinese Studies at Peking University conducted a survey in 2020: in the group of readers over the age of 50, modern romance is the most popular subject, with a preference as high as 48%, which is higher than that of other age groups.
In other words, while today's young people are trying to get rid of their "relationship brain", middle-aged people are falling into "nymphomania" at a high frequency.
Individual desires, literary works, and the Internet are all mixed up in these rip-roaring magical events, which are funny and sad, and which seem to puncture a reality: Mary Sue obsession is more like a parasitic target, because there is a group of people whose emotions are facing an awkward void, whether on the screen, on the Internet, or in reality.
Why Liu Tao: the middle-aged woman who still fantasizes
Contemporary women promote diversity and "not being defined," but that doesn't include older women.
For young people, seeing Liu Tao, who is 44 this year, in modern 2021 makeup and a double ponytail is roughly the same as seeing Jin Dong step out of a black car with a greasy hairdo and sunglasses - in short, it's corny, awkward, and pretentious.
But you've got to admit that, from Jin Dong to Liu Tao, despite the fact that they've faced the challenges of not being young enough, not being beautiful enough, and not having the acting chops for a long time, they've all had their share of problems with the world.
But you have to admit, from Jin Dong to Liu Tao, despite the fact that they are not young enough to be beautiful, their acting skills are set, their roles are pompous and so on, they still have the charm that young actors do not have.
In today's aesthetically juvenile world, a popular woman's face is probably small and round, with big bright eyes, fair skin, and thick hair.
Liu Tao, on the other hand, has a face that is basically unrelated to "girlishness". The face of the goose egg is diamond-shaped, eyes are not big, but the eyebrows are gentle. In line with the basic aesthetics of the basis, more "wife and mother" feeling - "looks like she rolled up her sleeves to work."
This image was reinforced by a series of characterizations.
The national daughter-in-law in 2000's "Foreign Daughter-in-Law", the understanding Azhu in 2003's "Eight Parts of the Dragon", and the gentle and generous White Lady in 2006's "The Legend of the White Snake" are almost all "virtuous wives" with rough lives but good hearts. 2015's "Luangya Pang" and 2016's "Ode to Joy" exemplify this. The "Ode to Joy" in 2015 and 2016 embodied Liu Tao's valiant and independent side.
This year's "Starry Night" persona can be seen as a combination of a working girl at the bottom of the ladder, a virtuous wife and an elite in the workplace.
As for Liu Tao herself, one of the most widely known experiences is that she flash-married tycoon Wang Ke and retreated at the peak of her career; then when her husband went bankrupt and fell ill, she chose to make a comeback, taking care of her family while earning money to pay off her debts.
Thus, the roles Liu Tao played in those years and Liu Tao's own experiences intertwined to become the ideal type for many traditional middle-aged and elderly women --
both in line with the patriarchal society's expectations of a woman: beautiful but not bewitching, hardworking, patient, knowledgeable, capable, and at the same time, also with a certain amount of And in the end, she became a winner in both career and love.
Why is the middle-aged Mary Sue popular: awkward, middle-aged women trapped in "social expectations"
It's a fact that these days, an average older woman rarely seems to find a projection of her ideal self in movies and TV dramas, and her love and desires are in an even more awkward position.
Grainrain Data counted the number of TV dramas labeled "romance" and "mainland China" on Douban from 2010 to the end of October 2020, and processed them to obtain 873 valid on-screen couples, including one and two, and found that:< /p>
In 2010, the number of couples in a TV drama was 1.5 million, and in 2010, the number of couples in a TV drama was 1.5 million.
In 2010, the common ages of on-screen couples were 30 and 31 for female characters and 36 for males, and by 2020, they had dropped to 23 and 26 for females and 23 for males. In 10 years, the proportion of Chinese couples with both male and female characters over 30 years old dropped from over 50% to 28%.
In these movies and TV dramas, older women can hardly escape the following settings:
Instrumental: The background boards of the major movies and TV dramas are mothers, mothers-in-law, aunts,...... class is polarized distribution, either from the countryside or a small city, low cultural level, patriarchal, and the other. The mother of the XX president's wife and the XX president's mother. *** The same characteristics are eccentric, always some behavior is hateful to the teeth, from the first episode to the last episode are committed to hinder the main man and woman together.
Realistic: Good at careful budgeting and making long-term investments for themselves, their children, and their families. Addicted to the chicken child or chicken themselves, a good hand in the workplace, love field can be wise fight junior, the child field is familiar with the grasp of pedagogy, nutrition, tutorial class learning, school district housing science, fill in the aspiration of science ......
Elite type: The common persona of the big heroine drama, the typical representative of my Tang Jing in "The First Half of Life," Gu Jia in "Just Thirty," and Stella in "Perfect Relationship," all of whom are smart and capable, successful in their careers, and divorced. In these dramas, female viewers fulfill their desire for worldly success, while emotionally disregarding or even rejecting adult men and becoming self-sufficient.
The Rich and Famous: Nowadays, it's getting harder and harder to cross over in the hierarchy, so it's easier to just make stories about rich people. There is such a category of older women, educated, individualized, and capable, but from birth, they start above many ordinary people. As Poisonous Eyes points out, in terms of career lines alone, Starry Starry Night is a step down from middle-class exclusive workplace dramas such as Dulala's Promotion and The Interpreter. The heroine only has a high school education and missed the adult self-test by three doors, but she is convinced that she too can succeed.
In various plots of love, an ordinary older woman has almost no place: the fairy tale drama in the light of the sky and the moon is too illusory, the palace drama in the queen consort, the woman herself is a tragedy; suspense drama in the woman is more instrumental existence; the sweetness of the campus drama belongs to the youth only; the elite in the career drama is originally from the noble middle class, but it's not the best.
So, young people always fall in love in various forms, middle-aged and old women are engaged in their careers, children, mistresses, daughters-in-law, but not love.
But in reality, physiologically, research shows that women between the ages of 41 and 50 have a higher sex drive, and their sexual needs peak at this stage; mentally, women in this age group will have a different understanding and expectation of love than those in their 20s after they have experienced a relationship and marriage.
Kenichi Ohmae, in his book The Low Desire Society, also said, "The reason why Americans are still happy to go to singles bars after the age of 60 is that both men and women have a strong desire to enjoy life again." However, in today's Chinese society, if the middle-aged and the elderly do not fulfill the "social expectations" and express their desires and feelings in an "unregulated" manner, they will easily be accused by the young of being "greasy" and by the middle-aged of being "too old for the old". The old and the middle-aged are accused of being "disrespectful" and "shameless".
From this point of view, the popularity of middle-aged Mary Sue is actually reasonable - this is a large part of the "mothers", never got the ideal mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, and did not become the self. They're becoming self-aware, but they've been stuck in a structure for a long time, so they're disappointed in real life, but they can't quite die, and the Mary Sue may be the only thing they have to look forward to at the moment.
Where have people gone after 35: a huge collective of middle-aged and older people who are "lost in translation"
Nowadays, when we talk about "love", "romance", "desire" and so on,
Cool Cloud data shows that the TV audience of The Starry Night accounted for about 40% of the audience over 35 years old, nearly half. And the post-1990s users on Weibo and B-site, which are the hardest hit areas, accounted for more than 80% of the users.
As mentioned above, although the Douban App, which scored Starry Night, is not as young in age, the 2020 China Internet Media Content Community Model Development Research Report shows that Douban App has the highest proportion of high consumers, 32.35%, and medium consumers, 29.85%, with high consumers also accounting for 13.48% of the total. The proportion of high consumers is higher than that of low consumers, which accounts for 6.72%.
In other words, those who are obsessed with middle-aged Mary Sue and those who spit on Mary Sue are originally from two different worlds.
The former show their aunt's smile in front of the TV, while the latter happily troll by sending pop-ups, videos, and articles. You look at yours, I'm happy with mine.
But the thing is, it's not just about the age-generation gap.
Just looking in the small direction of the middle-aged Mary Sue, you will find that when the screen, even the matter of love has become a youthful special, we seem to tacitly agree that, from the material to the spiritual, should be the "pandering to the youth", "pandering to the power of consumption. We seem to tacitly agree that everything from material to spiritual should be "flattering to youth" and "flattering to consumer power". Others are not within the scope of the discussion: "40-year-old people talk about love, how shameful ah; poor people's love, where the romance ......"
A social network is frequently mentioned in the issue of "35 Where are all the people in the workplace after the age of 35?" The reason for this is not just "what others will say about you", but that society's standard for judging "good" is young.
Society offers a single template for middle age: success. Career success. So if a middle-aged person isn't rich enough to have a social status, they have to try to imitate the young people and make themselves feel like a teenager or a girl.
Last year at the Berlin Film Festival, Jia Zhangke talked about his movie observations in recent years: "There is an unwritten rule in the domestic production world that rural areas should not be filmed, and no one will watch; sick people should not be filmed, and no one will watch; the elderly should not be filmed, and no one will watch."
Scholar Dai Jinhua came to a similar conclusion: "Today's world map is an economic map, and those who don't buy or sell fall off the map. The women who appear in the big screen are women who have the ability and desire to consume." She argues that if, in terms of age, you are exiled from the structure of acquiring knowledge, then you likewise don't exist. So invisibility could be class, it could be geographic, it could be age ......
In response, Dai Jinhua poses a puzzle: in the age of algorithms, things that are suppressed and alternative by big data, such as accounts of hard lives, are unlikely to be quickly ****ed up, and therefore won't be pushed. So does the work itself, provided by users who are lower class, constitute a recreation of their real lives? Or is it the cheesy, exaggerated, and attention-grabbing ones that are actually just reproducing what society today imagines them to be stereotypically like that are what earns them the clicks?
This is the author's independent opinion, and does not represent the position of HuffPost. Please contact hezuo@huxiu.com for authorization
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