Talk about my views on Jing M.Guo's film Childhood, from the perspective of social influence and film art, say it at will.

Tiny Times: Inverted Baby Diseases and Nipple Movies

Xiao, Yang Li/Wen

Xiao, Master of French Literature, Charles de Gaulle University, France, is a teacher at the College of Literature, Northeast Normal University. Yang Li, a film scholar, the founder of China Film Encyclopedia and a professor at Northeast Normal University, mainly studies European film history, film theory and image aesthetics. He is the author of the Chinese translation of Mysterious Cultural History, Lionel's Past, Close-up: Abbas and His Movies, etc.

1 and two kinds of "small" in the small age

The problem of small age is not the "smallness" of the times, but the "smallness" of psychological age. This is not to say that it is a story of young people, but with a young mind. The film not only shows a "juvenile world" composed of teenagers (there is only one father image in the whole film), but also shows that the world view of constructing this world is also juvenile. For example, the film portrays Gong Ming as a successful person, but through him, the important quality of a successful businessman is understood as that there is always a plan B, which is more like a teenager's imagination of a successful businessman. Another example is the climax of the movie. M-girls run on the viaduct with fashion in hand, and Qi Xin works together to save a fashion show, which is the highest contradiction in the film. For a movie, such a simple climax, even in a "romantic film", is a relatively low psychological age.

Another kind of "smallness" is the "smallness" of space, which is the miniaturization of communication space. Although Tiny Times has many characters, they all live in a circle. In reality, the relationship between people is divergent, open and linear, while in the tiny era, people are surrounded, closed and circular. In the last scene of the film, almost everyone appeared. They not only know each other, but also influence each other. That "telephone misunderstanding" typically expressed the plot characteristics of this "mini-space": Lin Xiao dialed Jane's mobile phone, and the person who answered the phone lived in Gu Yuan's house. The next day, Jane called Lin Xiao, but he wanted to tell Nanxiang about Gu Yuan. Nanxiang ran out to meet the sword, followed by Lin Xiao, and finally they met. This is a typical "small age" relationship and narrative way: all the characters gather together to form a closed small world, and their stories can only be unfolded in complicated relationships. This is a kind of "dance floor narrative". Everyone seems to be on the dance floor. The whole story is that they keep changing partners. This model is common in romance novels and Korean dramas, and it is not new. Its function is to overhead reality, form a pull-away effect and create romantic love stories.

In order to overcome this "smallness", Jing M.Guo needs to supplement some kind of "big", and this "big" is first of all the big Shanghai. Alan Badiou believes that excellent films can combine "vast space" (city-state in ancient Greek drama) and "closed space" (cellar in Sartre's drama), and American westerns are more universal in view of the nature and national territory in the west (vast space). In the novel, Shanghai became the representative of "vast space", and Jing M.Guo kept describing Shanghai, which eased the narrowness of the small world and played down too many coincidences among the characters. The sentences in the novel also unconsciously echo the contrast between "vast space" and "micro space". For example, "his solitary lamp by the window at the moment is like a distant and lonely planet in the silent universe", or "we are all little stars", and so on. What about in the movie? The existence of Shanghai not only failed to play the role of "vast space", but also destroyed the fairy tale effect of "miniature space". The audience can't connect this too romantic, luxurious and pure fairy tale world with the familiar reality in Shanghai. If we downplay the realistic background like Meteor Garden (also produced by Chai Zhiping) and let the story take place anywhere, the effect may be better, instead of continuing to strengthen the texture of Shanghai as suggested by some film critics. Shanghai is not only a real real space, but also a bustling metropolis. Unlike a small town, it can provide rationality for this "micro space".

The central figure in Tiny Times is a young girl. The film imagines the main space of a girl's life as an exclusive closed structure. They only care about friendship, love, work and other practical problems. More interestingly, the film portrays the girl's outstanding temperament as various types of "personalized romanticism": the rich second-generation Queen Fan (Gu Li), the simple darling girl (Lin Xiao), the best beauty of the literary fan (Southern Hunan) and the ears of the anthomaniac girl (Tang). Their boyfriends also represent all kinds of boyfriends that girls fantasize about: spoony rich boy (Gu Yuan), gentle and considerate sunshine boy (Jane) and talented handsome boy (ornaments), ruthless male boss () and bad boy () and strong and healthy boy (). This "classified list" method is another "big" constructed by Jing M.Guo to overcome the "small". This creative feature can be called "hidden writing".

Step 2 collect idiots' works

Gong Ming likes to collect all kinds of crystal cups. This expresses two points. First, he has a hobby of collecting, which is different from the general collection behavior. For him, collecting is more important than collecting things. The second is that he collects shiny things, which is different from the compulsive collection called "compulsive hoarding" in psychology. He collects shiny, beautiful and expensive things, while hoarding can collect garbage and waste products.

Jing M.Guo's novel writing is this kind of "mystery writing". The most obvious thing is to collect brand-name luxury goods, and offline are all brand-name fashion, cosmetics, jewelry, famous cars and luxury houses. Many people criticized him for advocating money worship. In my opinion, this certainly expresses the worship of money and material things, but we should also see that he has turned this collection and listing into a creative method to attract readers. Jing M.Guo's writing features even include collecting and listing all kinds of beautiful, shining and precious things. In this sense, he not only collects luxury goods, but also collects themes, such as campus romance, feud between giants, business wars in the workplace and so on. In romance novels, he collected scenes such as robbing girlfriends and boyfriends, terminal illness, rare blood group, secret blood relationship and so on. Cultural symbols such as Zhang Ailing, Annie Baby, Jude Law, Li Qingzhao and Lady Gaga were also collected. Mo Yan, Transtrom and Shakespeare are also mentioned in the film.

Writers need to collect materials when creating, but this kind of "stubborn writing" is different. We can use two similar behaviors to deeply analyze the motivation of this "collector addiction", one is the competitive bird collection in the "courtship show", and the other is the "colorful winter banquet" of American Indians.

Australian bowerbirds collect bright and shiny objects such as flowers, snail shells and stones to attract females when courting. Crows also collect shiny things such as coins and glass to attract females. This is the behavior of animals competing for mating rights, and females will choose males who can collect beautiful things to mate. This kind of collection is to attract attention and gather bright and shiny things together. Jing M.Guo collects brands, bridges, themes and cultural symbols in his works. These things don't form a unified whole, but pile up together. This kind of collecting behavior is important for his creation. He attracts readers by collecting these glamorous things, which is why he has so many fans.

Let's talk about "winter banquet to show off wealth", which is a ceremony to show off wealth. Rich people in Indian tribes also collect all kinds of precious and beautiful things. They will exchange these good things with the poor as gifts at festivals and banquets held in winter to gain status and dignity. Rich people will also show off their wealth at ceremonies and destroy many of their good things at banquets. Some people will kill their slaves, and northern Europeans will kill their precious dogs. This kind of collection is not to express possession, but to please the poor in exchange for status and dignity. A rich writer like Jing M.Guo should not show off his collection superficially, but give precious symbols as gifts to readers and audiences. As Baudrillard said, symbols also have exchange value. Jing M. Guo weaves the collected brand symbols into stories and gives them to readers as gifts, so that they can share the pleasure of owning symbols in exchange for their respect and recognition.

Therefore, all kinds of brands, symbols and bridges collected in the small era mainly play the role of temptation, showing off and pleasing.

However, this "collector-obsessed writing" encountered problems in the film. Jing M.Guo likes to collect glittering things, such as crystal cups, glass houses, bright Christmas trees and gorgeous fireworks, which make Shanghai look like gold powder. In addition, he also collected all kinds of light in movies, but this collection caused contradictions in movies. Simply put, saturated light and various reflective materials produce light pollution, soft and distorted sunlight and dazzling background lighting, which conflicts with the characters to be displayed. This typical wedding photo studio-style lighting has destroyed the original fairy-tale atmosphere and fantastic characters because of overexposure. Film is an impure art, it does not need to collect and list this addition, but needs to subtract impure things from images and sounds. The excessive use of light in the tiny era makes the picture appear radioactive blur from time to time due to diffusion, which will also make the audience uncomfortable. The scene of Lin Xiao and Gong Ming getting on the elevator is an obvious example.

3. Inverted infantile disease

The characters in Tiny Times are expensive, fashionable and fit, but not suitable. Their emaciated bodies are out of harmony with these completely adult brand clothes. Especially, the immature bodies and faces of Gu Yuan and Zhou Chongguang are wrapped by the over-adult fashion, forming a hidden, imperceptible and unclear sense of division. Tiny Times begins with the stage (high school graduation performance) and ends with the stage (fashion show). These two stages depict the hero's change from teenager to adult, which is the core content of Tiny Times: bid farewell to teenager and enter adulthood. Therefore, the film describes a vague period between teenagers and adults. This article is not about teenagers wearing adult clothes. This is just the appearance, but the guilt between teenagers and adults, which is why many adult audiences think that the movie looks fake and unreal.

The whole movie is constantly releasing this sense of perversion: children playing with adult life, just like "playing house", or adults playing with children, will form this kind of perversion, which is called paradoxical infantilism in psychology, also called adult infant syndrome. I think this kind of perversion infantilism is expressed in the movie text of Xiao Dai. There are two kinds of mental illness, one is an adult baby, which means that adults play babies, and the other is a sissy baby, which means that adults play opposite-sex babies. Freud also mentioned this phenomenon when he studied the development of children's sexual psychology, and called this psychological phenomenon "sexual psychological infantilism". The main characteristics of this disease are coquetry, willfulness, narcissism and blind self-confidence.

Let's use two behaviors in the film to further analyze this abnormal condition. The first is a beautiful boy sticking out his tongue, and the second is a kiss between girls. Zhou Chongguang is a typical beautiful boy. When he takes photos in magazines, he makes various expressions in front of the camera, one of which is sticking out his tongue. From the micro-expression, sticking out your tongue can be explained in two completely different ways. One is that children will stick out their tongues to please each other when they are spoiled, naughty and good-tempered, which comes from the behavior of sticking out their tongues when babies explore the outside world. The second is that adults apologize for doing something wrong, eliminate embarrassment and relieve anxiety. If the former tends to children's body language, the latter is adult's subconscious action. Besides, girls kiss. On Christmas Eve, four girls drank wine on Guli's balcony, and Guli kissed Lin Xiao. I want to emphasize that they are kissing each other's lips. You may say that this is a completely subconscious action, and there is no need to make a fuss. But I think this action, like Zhou Chongguang sticking out his tongue, is by no means a dispensable and meaningless subconscious action. On the huge poster of the movie, there is a photo of Guli kissing Lin Xiao. Kissing between the same sex is a special kind of kiss, and there are two completely different explanations. One is the behavior of expressing friendship between children, and the other is the sexual activity of adults. Direct lip-to-lip kissing is only at some time and place, and it is meaningless for close friends to kiss like this. However, even for close friends, this mouth-to-mouth kiss seems too close. "five

Although these two actions have no influence on the plot, they are of great significance to the interpretation of the whole film. Zhou Chongguang is an adult, but his outstretched tongue obviously conforms to the meaning of naughty children in the first floor, and the kiss between Guli and Lin Xiao is not a sexual activity, but a manifestation of childhood playmates' friendship. Obviously, these two behaviors constitute a "perversion" with their age. But I think the film is deliberately strengthening these two movements, so that these two obvious and abrupt movements release ambiguous information without providing a clear explanation. Therefore, "Tiny Times" expresses some intentional ambiguity through "perverse childishness", which not only blurs the boundary between teenagers and adults, but also blurs the boundary between sex, but does not show any position. The blurring of these two boundaries is also the result that the modern entertainment industry is bringing.

The perversity and naivety of this kind of childhood expresses the potential division and contradiction of teenagers' spiritual world in the face of adulthood: the adult world is a gorgeous and dreamy stage and a beautiful trap. The protagonist wants the adult world to accept and identify with himself, but he can't hide his fears and doubts about reality and the adult world. They constantly define the life of adults, claiming that they "work hard in great disappointment" and use these to build nothingness.

4, pacifier movie

In this sense, Tiny Times is a kind of "nipple movie" or "psychological weaning movie". Anthropological research has found that pacifiers bring more comfort to babies. When babies cry, pacifiers can calm them down immediately. Tiny Times is such a film that can provide psychological comfort to teenagers. These teenagers are physically adults, but psychologically they are still in adolescence. They have to face the reality and life of adults, but psychologically they are afraid of and reject the adult world. As the novel says, "I really want time to stop here forever" and stop growing. On the one hand, they want the world to admit that they are adults and can take responsibility independently, on the other hand, they keep making mistakes because they are naive. If the friendship and unity between girls are the representatives of adolescence, then exclusive romantic love is the symbol of entering the adult world. Tiny Times seems to be about friendship and love, but it also tells the mutual test, contradiction and even conflict between friendship (adolescence) and love (adulthood). The film not only expresses this "growing pains", but also soothes the panic, anxiety and even pain of these "transition people" who have to bid farewell to their youth and enter the adult world.

Modern people are willing to revel in the naive "little times" when they fall asleep with pacifiers. The movie became a pacifier, which played a role similar to "comforting the baby" to sleep. However, many people think that modern people's obsession with "nipple culture" is the performance of people degenerating into animals, which reduces human rational ability for thousands of years to pure animal sexy knowledge. This view is one-sided, and "nipples" will not disappear because of social prejudice. It either appears in the form of a movie or in another way. With the acceleration of the pace of life, the increase of work pressure and the intensification of social competition, young people unconsciously pursue the entertainment consumption of "nipple culture", alleviate or escape the realistic pressure, and can easily get happy reading and watching movies without thinking, and may even find more equality and comfort in these imperfections.

Tiny Times is not an independent film, but a derivative product, which is unique in creating obvious "focus effect" and polarized evaluation. The audience response mode of Tiny Times highlights the special audience of "fans". There are two differences between fans of Tiny Times and ordinary audiences. First, they are familiar with the whole cultural products of their childhood, reading novels, watching TV plays, and being familiar with stories and characters. Secondly, they have unconditional admiration and trust for the director, and then they are full of illusions about the characters. These two qualities, which the ordinary audience does not have, have created a new phenomenon of film interpretation: model splicing.

5, vermicelli stitching

From the narrative point of view, Tiny Times has many plot breaks. For example, Lin Xiao's interview, the film constantly played up this important plot from the beginning: receiving the admission notice, catching the elevator, waiting in line, constantly seeing people frustrated, buying coffee and so on. After these preparations, the audience was full of suspense and expectation for this interview, but the film didn't explain it, just gave a result directly. The acquaintance between Lin Xiao and Zhou Chongguang is strange. Lin Xiao will get an interview notice on the first day of school. At that time, southern Hunan had been holding a magazine with Zhou Chongguang as the cover, and Zhou Chongguang was widely publicized in the street. Later, Lin Xiao even pulled Zhou Chongguang out of the pool at a magazine reception. She doesn't know it's Zhou Chongguang. Should she wait until Kitty introduces her? "Tiny Times" not only has "perverse childishness", but also presents some kind of "ideographic schizophrenia" because of its chaotic logic and broken plot.

However, fans can turn a blind eye to these defects, fractures and melodrama, and their "fan paranoia" will creatively sew up those chaotic characters, broken fragments and broken plots. In the face of ordinary movies, the audience can only rely on movies to construct the plot, while in the face of Tiny Times, its fans fill, explain and repair the movie through plots (novels and TV dramas) outside the movie.

The film grammar summarized by Hollywood after many years is to sew the plot and action closely together through rigorous shots and seamless editing, so that the audience can immerse themselves in the story effortlessly. The audience is God, and we can't let them face stories and characters that are hastily completed or full of loopholes. "Tiny Times" shows us an effort entirely from the audience, that is, fans exert their creativity to make up for the mistakes and mistakes of the work and try their best to complete the whole work in imagination. This kind of "fan splicing" is an unexpected movie-watching phenomenon brought to us by Tiny Times. Of course, this is not limited to small times. With the emergence of more and more movies from popular culture, there will be more and more fans, and their creative splicing will continue to appear.

The fantasy of fans not only has sewing function. Amid unanimous criticism, fans of Tiny Times launched a spectacular counterattack on the Internet, and they launched an irrational attack on film critics. In a sense, this attack is not aimed at an individual's behavior, but at the "fragile revolution" of conservative values. This out-of-control and fanatical fan image is often described as a morbid and abnormal "other". Intellectuals often play the role of "demonizing fans" because they need fans as the other to alleviate the inner anxiety caused by popular culture.

However, Julie Zhan Sen believes that the phenomenon of fans actually implies the significance of the bottom groups to modern life. "A fragmented and incomplete modern society has produced a fragmented and incomplete modern self, and fandom, especially the' transitional' Fandu, is defined as a form of psychological compensation and an attempt to make up for the lack of modern life." The so-called "fandom". 7. Being a fan allows ordinary people to gain self-comfort in an isolated, one-way and atomized modern life. Therefore, fans are not only a title that obliterates individuality, but also an identity stage for young individuals to struggle. They may be pregnant with danger and disorder, or they may become victims of offsetting social anxiety with hobbies and personalities. Fans are born to defend stars, just like victims, but this sacrifice is often used by business and politics.

Therefore, there is no need for fans in the small era to swear, and it does not mean that fans will accept the content of the movie indiscriminately. They may just be looking for a kind of identity and using movies to comfort themselves. According to D. W. Winnicott, fans like a star or movie, but only regard them as transitional objects in their growth. Their love for stars is similar to their concentration and illusion when playing ball. They don't really think their favorite stars are great, and they don't leave them behind psychologically. "The object that fans like is also a transitional object, which plays a bridge role between the fans' self and the external object world. "The work provides a place for fans to take a nap, helping them to relax, maintain mental and spiritual health, cheer up and solve their own problems in life.

However, a pacifier movie like Tiny Times, which suffers from perversity and naivety, cannot be said to be a work in the artistic sense, but can only be called a spiritual commodity. Its comforting function and social effect can't hide its essence as a bad film. Tiny Times is an artistic failure, just like many failed films in China, but we can't completely ignore the failed films. No film is expected to fail at the time of creation. "Bad works" also includes efforts and rationality to create perfect works, but this rationality has failed. There are many reasons for the emergence of domestic "bad films". For us, it is important to analyze how and why those rationalities failed, to analyze the symptoms of representative "problem movies", to analyze those low-level jokes, gorgeous loopholes, out-of-tune audio-visual language, artificial sensationalism ... "Bad movies" are also valuable, at least providing us with "text pathology"

Editorial introduction

Yang Li, a film scholar, the founder of China Film Encyclopedia and a professor at Northeast Normal University, mainly studies European film history, film theory and image aesthetics. He is the author of the Chinese translation of Mysterious Cultural History, Lionel's Past, Close-up: Abbas and His Movies, etc.