news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

introduction:The movie "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" sets up two life worlds 20 years apart: the original world of 1999 where the characters live and the future world of 2019 where they accidentally fall into. The sinister future world and the unexpected appearance after growing up make the three boys try to turn the tide by themselves in 1999. In a sense, repeated physical travel is an adaptation and rehearsal for the historical other and the adult world. Director Li Yang has repeatedly presented the protagonist's difficult adulthood moments in previous works, thus forming an authorial style with distinct personal characteristics. However, from the first scene of the film that deviates from the laws of physics, the audience is deliberately reminded of the fictional nature of the things in the film. There seem to be some issues worth analyzing in this image that is a mixture of strong fiction, high concept, typification and individuality. For example, what is the relationship between the cinephilic elements used by Li Yang and the science fiction style, and what is the expressive impulse behind it? For example, why does the loneliness of the grassroots boys in Li Yang's works last forever? How do they imagine love? Note: This article contains some plot spoilers.

Genre and Science Fiction: The Big Other and the Urge to Rewrite the Present

In "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", two contradictory voices become a question in the story, one voice is "hating the future" and the other voice is "facing the future", and the "medium" of both is "the present". In the animation "The Adventures of Li Xianji", is Li Xianji going back and forth in the mental scenes that are difficult to distinguish between reality and illusion in order to pursue or escape? 15 years after the birth of the animation, this film once again proves that Li Xianji's troubles did not end with fighting games, and did not get the final answer in his aging. We are surprised to see that the two pills in "The Matrix" continue to work, and in this film they are transformed into specific antitheses: grow up or not grow up, become bad or not bad, be together or not, live or die.

In the film "Barbarian Invasion", which also has the nature of a meta-film, Chen Cuimei noticed that the "present" that is always abandoned by the image should be alive, so the protagonist chewed the pill calmly, and no surprising events happened. In this film, the living material daily life and physical and mental feelings act as the medium of travel. The so-called "sci-fi sense" is like the Dadaism of the past, calling on various elements to show the super ductility of the medium, and then showing a virtual body technology that breaks through the wall.

The monk holds a "pill" in his hand, and the heroine eats it (the picture is a still from the movie "Barbarian Invasion")

The repeated use of montage to imagine the process of human flesh breaking through the wall is also beyond the core setting of the art form in "The Adventures of Li Xianji", which seems to represent the impulse of "rewriting". Today, director Li Yang tries to further expand the ambition of rewriting by using the intersection of two-dimensional and three-dimensional, which also reminds people of the passionate graffiti or scene collage in works such as "Leto" (also translated as "Midsummer"), "The French Dispatch", etc. Among them, "The French Dispatch" uses a large number of frozen two-dimensional scenery and moving people throughout to metaphorically represent the protagonists' identity as "writers".

MV-style graffiti in the movie "Leto"

Graffiti on the face of the protagonist played by Maggie Cheung at the end of the movie "The Dark Knight"

The 2D image style of the movie "The French Dispatch" that imitates newspapers

The audience may feel a slight sense of show-off - the author's narrative voice seems to float above the subjective perspectives of Wang Zha, Wang Chengyong and Paopao from time to time. In addition to inspiring the three people in the story to transform the objective world and prevent the regression of experience and memory, this voice also provides the audience with a kind of truly heterogeneous imagination of the big other - its existence may also imply the problem of artistic limits faced by most soft science fiction (or pseudo-science fiction) works, that is, what is under the skin of science fiction that controls the direction of the story.

One of the classic products of the Hollywood film industry since the 1970s is the "high concept" movie, including the DC and Marvel Universe series, the "Lord of the Rings" series, the "Mad Max" series, and most science fiction films represented by Nolan's and Villeneuve's films. They follow the "big investment, big production, big marketing, big market" formula for box office success, and are characterized by efficient and creative narratives, and an image style that emphasizes star effects and audio-visual spectacles. Science fiction movies often need to build a worldview that is different from daily life and exists independently, and perform audio-visual conversion on it. If the cost of audio and video production is relatively limited, the original script is almost the only way to maintain the "high concept", which is the key to soft science fiction narrative. In recent years, some small-scale science fiction movies that have emerged with the "science fiction fever" in China have followed this creative idea.

In this kind of soft science fiction works where creativity is paramount, the author’s, or the other’s, opinions and motivations are as influential as Thanos’ snap and the “time clamp movement” in “Tenet”, and even have the power to destroy the world at any time. Some viewers believe that the films of directors Kong Dashan and Li Yang use the shell of science fiction to express the author’s purely personal attitude. The male protagonists imagined by the two authors are mostly closed-minded and paranoid, believing in a certain kind of constant “pure love” and going through fire and water for it. In “Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department”, this constant concept was even refined into the “poetic heart” of cosmism. This is not unlike the narrative logic of the Japanese “world system” works that emerged in the 1990s. Japanese scholar Uno Tsunehiro pointed out that this is centered on the relationship between the protagonist and the other half he cares about, directly connecting small daily problems with abstract and grand global crises, and abandoning all the specific social descriptions in the middle.

It should be noted that although pseudo-science fiction can achieve unique narrative concepts and filmmaking methods, it also lays the hidden danger of "authorial dictatorship". The most dictatorial part of "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department" is to set Tang Zhijun's passion for exploring the universe as a self-evident spiritual instinct. The character's thinking and personality are completely contrary to the "high concept". The story also focuses on showing how Tang Zhijun made all kinds of jokes and encountered all kinds of absurd things during his travels due to his marginal personality, rather than explaining his logic of action. This has become a religious expression of "believers get happiness". At the end of the film, the author destroyed the games and wanderings in the mountains and wilderness with a dimly lit and slightly tilted speech. The truth that should not be spoken not only failed to be digested by the archetypal narrative of "Journey to the West", but was repeatedly rendered through the metaphor of "donkey and carrot", writing and reading poetry, and other overly literal or one-dimensional images and scenes. As a result, the truth was told in a corny way, and the motivation for the story could only be maintained by symbolic myths called "science fiction" or "poetry".

A clip of Sun Yitong reciting a poem in the movie "Cosmic Exploration Editorial Department"

Li Yang also admires this abstract universe of symbolic systems, but compared to Kong Dashan's foolish and wise expression of sincerity, his attitude is more cynical. Starting from "The Adventures of Li Xianji", he tried to use the gimmick of science fiction in a cinephilic way. Strictly speaking, he used science fiction, games, martial arts and other elements equally as cinephilic elements. He grafted in the plots of old-fashioned genre films, such as the villains controlling the armed people through money and technology and then ruling the world, explaining the combat force with the effect of toxins, and the rich body shapes and skill points in the fight, the pop portraits of politicians such as Bin Laden and famous movie stars Angelina Jolie, the national memory of the 1990s, the TV series "I Love My Family" and the Japanese comic "Movie Girls", etc. The transformation of "Safe Escape from the 21st Century" from the 4:3 frame of the old TV to the wide frame was originally an old screen manipulation technique, which switched the tense of the movie in a bloated and cumbersome way. Fortunately, Li Yang timely questioned the big Other's control over the image (although questioning does not mean overthrow): in the show-off editing that reflects the three boys' passionate fitness to defeat the ultimate boss, he used the line of the female character Liu Lianzhi, "useless montage", to complain about montage itself. This line disrupted the rhythm of the narrative, and slightly deliberately revealed the doubts about the "autonomy of the work". The hypnotic termination-like prompt sound suddenly awakened the audience from the myth of the screen.

The character who looks like Angelina Jolie in the animation "The Adventures of Li Xianji"

It can be seen that the expression of this film at least reflects on the internal power issues in "The Adventures of Li Xianji". It certainly continues the worship and exhibition of science fiction symbols, but appropriately incorporates seemingly clichéd and self-ironic genre and anti-genre discourses. The abuse of narrative power seems to amplify the expression, allowing the body to shuttle through the video game like a film history museum, but can the character and psychology of the protagonist exist independently of the overflowing visual symbols? Do symbols deepen the religious nature of art by delegating power to the author and disempowering the audience? Perhaps this is a serious and important issue for all "author films".

Axiom or Cynicism: The Making of a Grassroots System

There is a difference of more than ten years between the creation of this film and The Adventures of Li Xianji, but both emphasize the finiteness of the social clock, and the characters' value judgments on the "present" are not limited by time. The setting of "time difference" gives Li Xianji unlimited tolerance, and a year or two seems to be a blink of an eye, wasting life but staying young forever. The more grassroots, the more touching, and the so-called forever young and always full of tears, this belief once went beyond the two-dimensional world in the 2010s, and achieved the grassroots male glory of Bai Ke as the three-dimensional spokesperson in "Never Expected". In a sense, this portrait has also become a spiritual profile of contemporary young men.

Similarly, in "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century", Wang Zha, Wang Chengyong, and Bubble traveled from 1999. They are 18 years old in their 38-year-old bodies. They are teased by the two heroines Yang Yi and Liu Lianzhi for "not growing up". The author even concretizes Wang Zha's middle school thinking with a cartoon image of a pitiful brain. However, the fragmented editing and the image of the middle school boy who "hates the future" itself somewhat suggest that the author is not concerned about the direction and ending of the time-travel story, nor the axioms and justice that serious creators like to repeatedly question. The collage of elements and multiple time and space narratives of this film are very similar to the 2022 film "The Blink of an Eye", which tries to answer the question "What kind of life do you want to live" in an almost kitsch expression. However, Li Yang did not introduce existentialist discourse similar to "The Blink of an Eye", and the relationship between the characters in this film is also simpler. The three boys and one girl in 1999 provide the public with a transparent and clean emotional structure. The only complicated thing is the assumption of an "unclean" future, which is fissured into various aspects, including Liu Lianzhi's bureaucratic workplace, Wang Chengyong's conscience-breaking job as a killer, Yang Yi's tragic fate of selling his body and becoming addicted to drugs, and so on.

Stills from the movie "The Universe"

Under the precondition of routine, what Li Yang promotes is cynicism that integrates mass nature. Borrowing the definition of Ansgar Allen in Cynicism, most of the contemporary "ordinary people" are modern cynics. Compared with the "uppercase" attributes of criticizing hypocritical morality and pursuing "real life" under the perverse behavior of ancient cynics, modern cynics correspond to the "lowercase" characteristics of insight, contempt but inability to break through the system. The ending of this film seems much more optimistic than "The Adventures of Li Xianji", but precisely because the rules of narrative still respect the author's decision-making power under the consciousness of "author film", considering Li Yang's own love for Japanese two-dimensional culture, considering that the setting of this film shares the same set of stories with the "world system" works that connect tiny and precious daily life through pure love and fight against the crisis of the grand abstract world, we should see that the "world system" expresses the consistent rejection and neglect of "social intermediaries".

Stills from the "world-themed" animated film "Your Name"

Although the film extracts many nostalgic objects from the end of the last century, such as subculture elements such as "Movie Girl" and Street Fighter game consoles, as well as old-fashioned bicycles, middle school classrooms with huge "quiet" characters posted on them, and other memories of the times, the author does not refer to the life time and space of the characters as a specific historical process from the perspective of "social mediation". In other words, the function of these nostalgic objects is to evoke memories of the original taste of youth, rather than to strongly refer to the relationship between themselves and social reality. Then, Li Yang's imaginative arrangement of the fate of Wang Chengyong's father, making him travel to 2019 with the three boys, and setting up the various unbearable experiences of the heroine Yang Yi in 2019, does not carry any soothing power that touches reality. Otherwise, this dry story of "female degeneration" and "father's illness" should more or less complete the detailed cause and effect.

According to Freud, modern cynicism continues to play the role of a mentality that cannot face trauma in a "depressive state". Further analyzing the protagonists in Li Yang's works, Li Xianji is a melancholic player immersed in private memories. Endlessly playing games is his way of isolating himself from the world. The experience points accumulated in the crazy level-breaking process even completely make him lose the possibility of sharing time with his loved ones. Wang Zha, Wang Chengyong and Paopao also have this kind of cynicism that is out of tune with the world, but unlike Li Xianji's self-pity that everyone is drunk and I am the only one awake, it is just because they have not been beaten and are more innocent. They found that the world 20 years later is not as beautiful as it is now, so they took the initiative to claim the identity of grassroots men and outlined the life concept of "sharing and co-governance" from the common name of grassroots, in order to move painlessly into the ranks of adults. It can be seen that Li Yang is not satisfied with telling the story of the self-defense of lonely boys, but warmly portrays the mutual assistance and friendship of grassroots boys like "three cobblers" spanning 20 years, as if this is a proof of the protagonist's growth.

The objects and methods of these passionate grassroots boys' rebellion are somewhat humorous, either summer homework or equally naive rivals. Even the rescue operation to prevent the spread of toxins to the world is achieved by "making steel with primitive methods" and relying on quick-made tendon meat. The film adopts the strategy of using comedy to dissolve the solemnity of grand battle goals or life creeds. For example, the three people want to change the fate of their relatives and friends but suffer setbacks. The lottery buying incident also reveals fatalism. Even if the protagonist wins unexpectedly in the time travel and game, his posture is quite embarrassed, which makes people feel full of passion and implies the dwarfing of personal heroism.

Trailer for the movie "Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century"

However, the practice of using the idealism of "sharing and co-governance" to fill the character's inner "depression" (or the loneliness of the middle school boy) still exists without breaking away from cynicism. Because the core discourse of the film is destruction, it is the process of destroying order. Destruction brings relaxation and pleasure, but it also causes the grassroots youth to be deprived of their core dreams and imaginations - sunny days, ponds, catching shrimps, cotton candy... The author uses the impulse of destruction to remember and maintain them, rather than building a bright future for each character. Watching the works of Han Han, Pang Ho-cheung, and even Fruit Chan and Wang Shuo, the audience will also feel this kind of cynicism that is not hateful. It is better to say that half of the viewing experience of such works is completed in the world outside the theater. The more people cannot "lie flat", the more they need a time and space confusion, the more they doubt the way of survival of adults, and the more they are happy to see the campus love 20 years ago use "don't go bad" as an almost empty self-encouragement. The logic of this film is not to preach, let alone to present an objective axiom that is worth copying into reality - after all, "going bad" is such a moralistic accusation. On the contrary, this film creates a cynical moment for the grassroots literary and artistic group that is slowly being hammered by life. It is entirely built up of personal emotions, but behind it is a group consciousness similar to the empathy of the times.

This is also the part where the film is not satisfied with the "world system" expression. Although it avoids talking about specific reality, it still calls for interaction inside and outside the screen through passionate audio-visuals. Furthermore, when the audience listens to and even endures the author's words and the grassroots passionate dreams of the protagonist, they invisibly enjoy the "privilege" of napping that is difficult to achieve at ordinary times. This should be unreasonable and completely external to the operation of life. The crucial and static "present" strengthened by the dynamic character crossing is also an emotional container that the film has concluded with itself as a scale. Perhaps this is why the end of the story is set in the subtle year of 2019.

Li Yang critically inherited the mentality of Han Han and others, trying to overturn the cynical quote in See You Tomorrow that "children distinguish between right and wrong, adults only look at the pros and cons" by having a grassroots boy save the world. Although from the story point of view, at best he made Riding the Wind and Breaking the Waves more passionate, for the young people at that time, this inheritance path seemed legitimate and even worthy of praise.

Movie poster of "Riding the Wind and Waves"

The Dilemma of Substitution: Sexual Imagination of “Who” and Virtual Partner

The biggest setback that “grassroots male-oriented” works are facing at the moment may be feminism. The popularity of the 2023 movie “Barbie” and its gender politics confrontation with “Oppenheimer” have proved the influence of such a viewing perspective. Here, we temporarily put aside the judgment or prejudice of feminism itself and see whether the personal narrative in “grassroots male-oriented” works sets a threshold for different gender groups to participate.

As a classic representative work of the "grassroots male style", "Never Expected" contributed a line with a strong sense of déjà vu: "I remember running under the sunset that day, that was my lost youth." Who is "I"? In a more specific context, the image of the first person emerges - "It won't be long before I will get a promotion and a raise, become the general manager, become the CEO, marry a white, rich and beautiful woman, and reach the peak of my life." In comparison, Li Yang's "The Adventures of Li Xianji" and "Bad Future" are both slightly more narrative. Although they are filled with the self-expression of the Beijing-accented boys Li Xianji and Sun Bai from beginning to end, their lyrical objects are not the stereotyped gender symbols of "white, rich and beautiful women", but specific names such as Wang Qian and Zheng Xiaoyan.

Stills from the comedy short film "Never Expected"

However, the grammar of the image still subtly distinguishes the subject and the object. The animated image of Wang Qian is characterized by extremely flowing long hair and skirt, while the love scenes of Zheng Xiaoyan and Sun Bai highlight the white shirt, double ponytails, superimposed filters and blurred hazy faces. Their bodies are almost selected in a componentized form. The author especially likes to cut off the heads of Wang Qian and Zheng Xiaoyan. Their primary function seems to be to leave a sound rather than an image. This psychological montage editing seems to be to highlight the male protagonist's private aftertaste of adolescent love. In contrast, the male protagonist's face is often full of expressions, especially close-ups of their eyes and eyebrows.

Li Xianji and Wang Qian in the animation "The Adventures of Li Xianji"

Zheng Xiaoyan, the female protagonist with a hazy face in the movie "Bad Future"

Synchronized with the above images are a large number of monologues beginning with "I see" and "I think". From this, we can see that whether it is "time difference" that compresses one and a half years into five minutes, or "heart-to-heart communication" between Sun Bai and Zheng Xiaoyan, behind the setting of electronic games and body travel, there is essentially a pre-modern "1:1 sound and picture" subjective narrative rhythm. The girls named Wang Qian or Zheng Xiaoyan have never existed in reality. It is more appropriate to regard them as virtual partners wrapped in hormone frosting - anyway, their appearance time is counted in minutes. Their real role is probably to recite their destined lines and become the most high-sounding reason for the protagonist to play games crazily or defeat the whole world. Even though Li Xianji knew that "the reappearance of People's Park actually has nothing to do with Wang Qian", he was willing to travel through countless universes for the girls' words "I like all of you". The main body of the image is the never-absent hormones and the trajectory of the male protagonist's movement. The resonance of many male viewers in the barrage on Bilibili and the film reviews on Douban indirectly proves the effectiveness of the author's above treatment. Most of the top ten film review titles used Chinese curse words with great pride, and praised that "a very pure man must find a very pure girl."

Douban movie review page for the animation "The Adventures of Li Xianji"

If we must elevate all the efforts made by Li Xianji and others to the pursuit of the meaning of life, Wang Qian and others symbolize the "original intention" of a middle school boy who is not tainted by society. Because the "original intention" is precious, they must be beautiful and perishable, so as to provide grassroots youth with a sense of pain and story that they regret. The campus love described by the author is actually quite ordinary and easy to be substituted by most individuals, but this symbolic method with strong sexual imagination is obviously too weird and alienating for female audiences. Women must imagine their own absence and admit that the heroine's body has left the "real life" and "real world" that the ancient cynics yearned for too early, so that the melancholy male intellectual in the film can continue to narrate himself in Beijing accent.

Here, "grassroots male movies" exist as an art genre, just like "chick flicks" (or "chick flicks" in English). The original context of using "chick" to refer to women is discriminatory, as it compares women to babies who lack knowledge and insights and need to be protected. Postmodern feminists do the opposite, believing that this word affirms the objective existence of femininity and female needs. "Chick flicks" have gradually developed into a genre of movies with women as the screen protagonists and women as the target audience. The protagonist's loneliness, material consumption and happy ending love have become classic narrative elements of this type of movie. We can also regard the "grassroots male series" story as its mirror version and gender-transformed version. The development of the grassroots male's life experience has enabled this word to develop a positive subject consciousness from the original discriminated context. Therefore, the "grassroots male series" story is not actually too persuasive and destructive, because the middle school youth knows that their paranoia is mostly due to the desire to relieve sexual anxiety, and the artistic imagination under sexual anxiety is a compensation for the inherent deficiencies of reality. Ultimately, "grassroots male films" and "chick films" create an anti-realistic life that belongs to a small group of people.

Bai Baihe became the representative screen image of China's "chick flicks" in the 2010s (pictured is a still from the movie "Love Is Not Blind")

The reason why they belong to a small group of people, rather than a monolithic gender group, is because "grassroots men" and "chicks" summon different subjects in different images. Compared with the relatively mature and highly accepted "chick movies" that have their own specific forms in different cultures around the world, whether "grassroots men's movies" summon "youth" at the experience level, "lower class people" at the economic level, or "incels" (involuntary celibates) at the sexual relationship level has become a variable in the corresponding subject matter. The problem is that if Li Yang, who has become famous as an independent animation author, not only regards movies as a cultural form of capitalist industry, but also as an applied medium with autonomous rules, if he agrees that "grassroots men's movies" and "chick movies" use similar fictional grammars and oppose the "reality" that is too conservative and stale, lacking humor and imagination, he should pay attention to the overly poor organizational form of female characters in his past grassroots men's stories.

"Safe Evacuation from the 21st Century" also has a completely outdated "rescue prostitute" story. The heroine Yang Yi and the past Wang Qian are indiscriminately forced to serve as virtual partners of grassroots men, waiting for the male protagonist to stretch out his 21st century electronic body to rescue him. Fortunately, we also see the addition of a new character Liu Lianzhi in this movie. She conquered the grassroots youth Wang Zha with the power of a punch into the meridians. More importantly, the existence of Liu Lianzhi has somewhat changed the inherent trajectory of the story and the monophonic boy's self-narration. Under her ridicule, "not growing up" is no longer a "lonely and unique" grassroots boy medal, and the "grassroots male series" movie is finally not just an introverted and closed language system.

references:

1. Cynicism, by Ansgar Allen, translated by Ni Jianqing, Commercial Press, 2023 edition.

2. "Imagination in the Age of Ages", [Japanese] Uno Tsunehiro, Hayakawa Shobo 2011 edition.