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Stills from the movie "Catching Dolls", photo: Film and Television Information

This article was first published on FT Chinese and is slightly modified for publication here. Original title: "Catching Dolls": Pain points and controversies related to education, parenting and class.

"Catching Dolls" keenly captures many painful issues in reality, such as education methods, parent-child relationships, and success standards. However, due to a certain sophistication and trade-offs, the film's reflection ultimately loses its strength, and the film is full of paradoxes and controversies. The second half of the article will discuss the three most striking points of the film that almost no one discusses.

By Fei Fei Ma, FT Chinese columnist

In the 2024 summer movie theaters, "Catching Dolls", starring Shen Teng and Ma Li, has been a hit in terms of box office, topic and discussion. Of course, the popularity is also accompanied by huge controversy.

For a "comedy" starring the "Shen Ma combination", which has dense jokes, directly touches on real-life issues, and carries the genes of black absurd tragedy, it is inevitable that it will be popular and controversial. Because the issues that the film attempts to explore, such as education, life (success), class, parent-child relationship, etc., are directly related to the present and hit the pain points. There is indeed a gray area that can be discussed, so it is inevitable that it will cause different interpretations and controversies.

Personally, after watching "Catch the Doll" for the second time, I feel that it is a movie with very obvious advantages and disadvantages, but I would like to focus on the several paradoxes in this movie and try to analyze why it has caused such a huge controversy——Movies are a representation of social reality, and so are “impressions after watching”.

The Contrast between Pretending to be Poor and Really Fearing Poverty

The first paradox of the movie is the paradox of stance.

Simply put, "Catching Dolls" tells the story of how the richest man in Xihong City pretends to be poor to raise a child. Here, it is necessary to review the "Xihong City Universe" of Happy Twist:

In this film series, the protagonists are always "little people" - even though Charlotte (Charlotte's Troubles, 2014) and Wang Duoyu (The Richest Man in Xihong City, 2018) had briefly been so-called successful and rich, they finally chose to "return" to their identity as little people and return to ordinary life.

In these works, wealth and fame are certainly desirable, but the whole movie is still telling the audience: A gentleman loves money, but he must get it in a proper way. There are always some things in this world that are more precious and important than money.

The minor characters played by Shen Teng, especially Wang Duoyu, are decent minor characters despite their many shortcomings. They shine with humanity (the aura of the protagonist) in times of crisis. It can be said thatStanding on the standpoint of the little people and the masses is one of the most important creative labels of Happy Twist(The Lone Moon is a semi-exception).

Rich people and powerful people often appear as negative characters, such as the corrupt district chief in "Charlotte's Troubles", the corrupt vice chairman of the boxing world and his son who defeated the boxing champion by fake punches and bribing referees in "The Shameful Iron Fist" (2017), and the dandy man who relied on his father's power to bully his companions and deceive women in "Half a Comedy" (2019).

Among ordinary people, the ugly behavior of servility and fawning on the superiors for money and success is always "mixed" into Happy Twist-style satirical jokes.

But this time, "Catching Dolls" tells a story about a real rich man pretending to be poor. Although this rich man started his life in poverty, his success is also "the fragrance of plum blossoms comes from the bitter cold."

So the question is: the story of rich people training "successors" may make ordinary people look up to them with envy, but how can ordinary people empathize with them? It's like in reality, a rich man can casually raise his hand and give his children "a small goal", but that is a "world beyond the reach" that ordinary people can never achieve in their lifetime.

Therefore, the story that Shen Teng (who plays Ma Chenggang) must not play out is a real-life version of a rich man's successor training plan; he can only play out a middle-class family's "catch doll" story - the urban middle-class group who are willing to spend dozens of dollars to buy a movie ticket to enter the theater, and they are also the main audience force in China's current film market.

But a paradox also follows. Has anyone ever seen a story in social news about Chinese rich people pretending to be poor to raise children? This is the first misalignment between the movie script and social reality. As for China's urban middle class, their mentality of "catching children" is exactly the same as that of Ma Chenggang and Chunlan, but the "steelmaking" method is almost impossible to be "pretending to be poor".

Because the overall context of the times is to admire the strong and fear the weak. If a family is really poor or even just "appears to be poor", it will cause huge psychological pressure on both parents and children, and their self-esteem and face will be frustrated, and even lead to discrimination, humiliation and bullying, as shown in "Catching Dolls".

How do more typical Chinese middle-class families push their children to compete? They compete for school district housing and schools, interest classes and tutoring classes, vacation destinations and international summer camps; they also compete with their parents, their original families, houses, cars, appearance, conversation and temperament.

The most typical film and television representation of Chinese middle-class parents is probably Gu Jia in the hit drama Nothing But Thirty in 2020. In order to get into a top kindergarten, she took out a loan of tens of millions to buy a "school district house". In order to train her son to be an elite and enter a prestigious school, she enrolled him in equestrian classes, programming classes and other classes. The most popular and hotly discussed plot of her is that she was ashamed to carry a Chanel bag among a group of ladies carrying Hermes, and she was embarrassed to show her bag even in group photos.

Is this similar to the best-selling book "I'm a Mom, I Need a Birkin" (2018) written by Veneste Martin, a PhD in anthropology at Yale University? This constitutes the second misalignment between the film text and reality.

Therefore, theMa Chenggang seems destined to be "designed" to be a combination of paradoxes and contradictions. He has the heart of a middle-class parent who wants to raise a child, but he pretends to be poor and catches a child while wearing the "cloak" of a rich man.——Because, without this, it is impossible to create the exaggerated effect required for comedy, it is impossible to create dramatic conflicts, and it is impossible to get "laughs" from the jokes. Yes, many of the so-called laughs in the play come from how real rich people pretend to be poor.

In this way, starting from "Charlotte's Troubles" in 2014, to "The Moon Walker" in 2022, and then to "Catching Dolls" in 2024,Happy Twist's big-screen protagonist - or more precisely, China's current top comedy star Shen Teng, has gradually transformed from a "little man" to a "little man who becomes a hero", and then finally stood on the "peak of fame and fortune" and became the "real richest man".Doesn’t this also coincide with the ten-year journey to fame of the actors themselves and Happy Twist behind the screen?

When the rich pretend to be poor to create many laughs in a movie, it is inevitable that it will cause psychological discomfort to some viewers, because it will be considered offensive to the poor (ordinary middle class) - although, the urban poor played by Ma Chenggang in the film are not actually the target audience of the film. Therefore, a highly praised comment about the film on social media is:In the movies, rich people pretend to be poor, but we are really poor.

In the case of the "rich pretending to be poor", since the ordinary middle class cannot put themselves on the side of the powerful rich, it is easier for them to put themselves on the side of the weak "poor". Especially in today's economic downturn.

Lack and insecurity are the biggest psychological labels of the so-called "poor people". However, when the period of rapid economic development is over, the sense of scarcity and insecurity have also become the common psychological labels of the ordinary middle class today.Otherwise, the idea that "the end of studying is to take the civil service exam" would not have become popular. In this year's college entrance examination application, all schools and majors that are more likely to get a "iron rice bowl" after graduation have seen a large number of high scores, far exceeding the admission score records of previous years. What China's middle class is most worried about is class slippage, so they work hard to get their children and themselves.

From this perspective, "Catching Dolls" is actually very sensitive in capturing the atmosphere of reality, and it is indeed easy to arouse widespread attention and discussion. However, in order to "perform", and because of various pros and cons and the current situation, it can only "calculate" the characters and plots that are now full of contradictions and paradoxes.

The difficult-to-reconcile relationship between "parental love" and "successor"

Before writing about the third paradox, it is necessary to first talk about why "Catching Dolls" caused such huge controversy and how to view these controversies?

Regarding the original intention of creating "Catching Dolls", the two directors (who are also the screenwriters of the film) said this in an interview with the media:"It is difficult to define the right and wrong relationship between parents and children in their mutual influence on each other's lives. On the one hand, children should understand their parents' good intentions when striving for independent growth space and life choices; on the other hand, parents should also grasp the scale of planning their children's lives and influencing their growth, and should not completely restrict and kidnap them in the name of love."

Obviously, the director wants to promote some kind of reconciliation between Chinese parents and children through the film, and to bridge the conflicts and differences between generations after a series of dramatic conflicts and sudden awakenings.

However, how a film is perceived and received by the audience is not determined by the creator's original intention.

On the one hand, as the director wishes, many middle-class parents can sympathize with their parents' painstaking efforts to forge ahead. After all, individuals under the structure of the times are indeed too easily "swept away" and go with the flow. However, they can also reflect on the sense of propriety and boundaries in parent-child relationships and educational methods from their absurd and extreme practices.

On the other hand, for those viewers who put themselves in the shoes of the son Ma Jiye (played by Xiao Bochen and Shi Pengyuan), the father Ma Chenggang is a "creepy" and thorough "villain": he raises his children as "tools (successors)" in the name of love, imposes his own life goals on his children, and does not hesitate to engage in all-round deception, various forms of control PUA, and "forcing them to endure hardships."

Therefore, there will beSo many viewers commented that this movie is a "horror movie".The emotional responses and interpretations of these audiences essentially convey a contemporary mood among today's young people. Behind the emotions are engraved the collective memories and even collective traumas they have experienced together.

Under such a group's "reflection after watching", the Chinese father played by Shen Teng "actually" did not seriously and clearly apologize to his son after the "truth was revealed", and was thinking about forcing another gift on Ma Jiye - a younger brother and sister. This plot was also interpreted by many viewers as "the trumpet is useless, so I will get a third one to continue practicing so that I can inherit the family business." Therefore, in the eyes of this part of the audience, the values ​​of the movie text of "Catching Dolls" are negative, confining, backward, and forced to be "family-friendly", which should be strongly criticized.

Although I personally still think that the film text of "Catching Dolls" is still very critical in terms of value expression, especially in the ending song. But it was only when I watched the film for the second time in the theater that I really listened to the ending song from beginning to end and read all the lyrics carefully.

I think the following excerpts of lyrics can clearly represent the creator's value orientation:

I don’t want to be a kite/I want to be the wind/Don’t mind me/No matter where I go/I’ll go recklessly/My heart will beat and I’ll get hurt/Don’t cry, applaud me/That’s the love I want/Don’t do good for me/Please applaud me/The light that is not in the plan/is worth bravely going to...

You see, in terms of parent-child relationships and educational views, the creators’ values ​​are actually consistent with those of those who criticize them. So why is the “difference” between the two sides so huge from an objective perspective? I’m afraid it’s because,This part of the audience will not allow the "father" to not be completely portrayed as a villain in the main film and not receive real punishment in the ending.

However, the director would never allow the "pillars" of Happy Twist, the Shen Ma duo, to play a pair of outright villain parents, and even the relevant film authorities would not allow "villains" to become the protagonists of a movie.The director did indeed use a "family-friendly" ending to deliberately "save" the screen image of the Shen-Ma duo.

They actually arranged for Ma Chenggang and his wife to "admit their mistakes and repent" - according to their mother Chunlan (played by Ma Li), just after Ma Jiye discovered the truth. They finally accepted that their son followed his wishes and went to the Sports College with high scores from Tsinghua and Peking University, instead of continuing to forcefully control his life. Mentally, they also accepted their son's ideal of only wanting to be a long-distance runner, and would sit in front of the TV to watch the live broadcast of the marathon he participated in.

Turning a black comedy into a tragedy would certainly be more critical and powerful, but the reality that "Mr. Donkey" (2016) had good reviews but failed at the box office may have dulled the sharpness and edge of Happy Twist in the film market.

Therefore, the ending design of a movie is often not simply determined by the will of the director. Fortunately, although the ending of "Catching Dolls" seems to be "calculated", it is also in line with Chinese social sentiments and Chinese ethics. In life, most Chinese parents, even if they have more or less the shadow of "Ma Chenggang", it is probably difficult for their children and even the society to completely regard their parents as complete "villains". What's more, the director wants to promote mutual understanding and reconciliation between generations, and his original intention is still good.

The misalignment between "ideal ending" and "harsh reality"

Next, let’s talk about the third paradox of the film.

In the film, Ma Chenggang's views on education, success (life values), and class seem to be completely rebelled against by his son Ma Jiye.Studying is no longer about "changing destiny" or "buying a big house with a swimming pool for my parents". The goal of life is no longer to "not work for others, but let others work for me", but to bravely pursue the "light that is not in the plan".——These are, of course, good things, but if you think carefully about the following details, you may feel that the other side of this "idealized ending" is actually the cruel reality gap.

First of all, Ma Jiye in the movie is indeed "qualified" to completely rebel against the "highly customized" life schedule his father gave him. Because as the son of the richest man, he does not have to worry about falling into the specific life difficulties and upward paths that ordinary people need to face. But if it were really in the real life of ordinary people, I am afraid that 99.99% of parents and children would choose to enter Tsinghua University or Peking University with high scores instead of going to sports schools.Ma Jiye's resistance represents more of an "ideal", a moment of release that most audiences can only enjoy in the cinema.This is another awkward misalignment between film and reality.

What is the harsh reality that most people in society have to face? This is exactly what is shown in the movie:

The rich man's behind-the-scenes manipulation allowed a girl with uncoordinated limb movements and a body proportion that was not suitable for being a professional dancer to be "specially recruited" into a professional dance academy in advance. But this was turned into a "laughing point" in the film.

In order to get his son out of the "difficult situation" of picking up bottles to fill the financial hole as soon as possible, the rich man can "arrange" a "match" that is destined to make the audience angry to the point of throwing bottles with a wave of his hand. Not only is this manipulating the audience's emotions, it is also suspected of manipulating the authenticity of the game (suspected of corruption in the football world) - and this point, of course, was deliberately downplayed in the film.

The audience only saw the rich family happily having fun on the court, enjoying the "rich family special" of picking up bottles, and experiencing the "family happiness" that only the rich can enjoy. The stadium cleaners, on the other hand, helplessly sighed to "us" behind the screen:These days, even picking up a bottle requires connections.

It was also the first time that I discovered that in the film series of Happy Twist, the abuse of money and power was not presented in a sharp and satirical way. Perhaps this is because the protagonist who abuses power is played by Shen Teng.

In "Catching Dolls", one of the names that makes me feel particularly uncomfortable is "Young Master"——All the "extras" around Ma Jiye called him "Young Master", and Ma Chenggang's eldest son Ma Dajun was called "Eldest Young Master" by them.

I have no objection to rich people hiring others to provide them with various services - but it should only mean a difference in the social division of labor, and should not mean a difference in people's social status and dignity.I don't agree with this view of class.

The advantage of this movie is that it reflects on many problems existing in the current education concepts, parent-child relationships, and success values. However, it does not make any form of irony or reflection on the three "privileged" details mentioned above, let alone criticism.

perhaps,This lack of irony towards reality is the greatest irony. It means acquiescence, compromise, sophistication, and loss - the loss of the power of irony and anger. So I think the shortcomings and advantages of the film are very obvious.

What is even more ironic than this irony? The vast majority of viewers also ignore their existence. Perhaps this is because it fits most people’s “cognition” of the privilege of money—it is a generally accepted “reality” and “psychological reality”.

To some extent, the controversy and extensive discussion caused by "Catching Dolls" may be much more profound and broad than the film itself. This is a good thing after all.