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He took off Kong Yiji's gown, but he hasn't become Camel Xiangzi yet.

Cover I Movie "Reverse Life"

Author I Li Dongyang

Report I Li Dongyang's circle of friends

How much malice can a movie receive?

Xu Zheng's "Reverse Life" set a vivid example.

In addition to the limited supporters, the voices of critics are particularly harsh: "Consuming deliverymen, consuming suffering", "Poor people spend money to watch rich people make movies"......Even a "laugh out loud" trailer poster before the film was released could become the target of criticism. Little did people know that this was also a kind of irony in the film.

Image source: Movie "Reverse Life"

Even though the movie "Reverse Life" formed the most profound reflection with the reality of the sensational "Hangzhou takeaway driver kneeling incident", the public still could not tolerate the existence of this movie.

From the online broadcast incident of "Lost in Russia" to his involvement in Zhang Ting's "MLM scandal" with his wife Tao Hong, to a large extent, Xu Zheng's own reputation has to some extent backfired on "Reverse Life".

With a box office of 224 million yuan in 6 days after its release, compared with the box office performance of Xu Zheng's previous films, "Reverse Life" has obviously failed commercially.

Based on the principle of "no comment without knowing the full story", I went to the cinema to watch this movie yesterday.

My conclusion is,This is a qualified and even excellent commercial film, but as a film it has shouldered public expectations and social missions that it should not have.

The answer to this question has to go back to the movie itself, which is about whether "Reverse Life" is a bad movie or not.

Wang Shuo said: "The most shameless, sinister and vicious praise in the world is to use the hardships and sufferings of the poor as inspirational stories to fool the lower classes."

I agree with this deeply, and I think this sentence can be used as a criterion to measure whether this movie exploits suffering.

Why do the public have such a strong desire to express their opinions about this movie?

One important reason is that what the movie describes and portrays is too close to life. Unlike the exciting dramas that focus on the upper class that can only rely on imagination, we can see and come into contact with deliverymen every day, and even we ourselves or our relatives and friends are deliverymen.

Image source: "Reverse Life" official blog

So that everyone is qualified to take the "photos" of life and start comparing them with every frame in the movie.

But everyone forgets that this is a movie, not a documentary.

In order to dramatize and create dramatic conflicts, it can of course give Gao Zhilei, played by Xu Zheng, a class of misfortunes such as layoffs at a large factory, the collapse of P2P, his father's stroke, and his daughter's admission to an international school. In order to shape the rich personality and behavioral motivation of the characters, it can also arrange a child with leukemia for Lao Kou; make up a friend who had an amputation because of his transfer of orders for "order king" Dahei; a group of stereotyped "bad" former colleagues...

Image source: Trailer of "Reverse Life"

There is some falsity here due to the extreme character images, but this does not affect the expression of the theme of the film -It points to a social and class problem.

The black humor of Gao Zhilei being optimized away by the program he wrote, the APP "Smile Certification" that accompanies the entire first half of the film, and their entire site staff desperately trying to deliver orders as quickly as possible are all driven by the "algorithm".

Image source: Trailer of "Reverse Life"

The film vividly displays the fragility of a class's decline, presents the public's discrimination against deliverymen, and makes the most ruthless criticism of "alienation of people by algorithms."

But for well-known reasons, the scale of the film is limited to this. The second half of the film hides the more core social contradictions by magnifying the "individual badness". Gao Zhilei and his colleagues did not get rid of the algorithm in the end. Instead, they developed a small program to improve the delivery efficiency to alleviate the algorithm's exploitation, and finally used sublimated family affection and friendship to appease the angry audience.

Whether from the dramatic level of the film or the critical intensity, such an evasive approach is obviously problematic. The creators cannot be unaware of this, but this is also an important reason why this film can be presented to us.

You see, isn’t this another black humor reflection of reality in the movie?

Answer the question at the beginning: Is "Retrograde Life" a bad movie?

To quote Wang Shuo's point of view, the film does not praise the hardships and sufferings of deliverymen, nor is it an inspirational story. It is just a naked presentation and mockery of reality.

As a realistic film, it did what it could and it is excellent enough.

“You have taken off Kong Yiji’s gown, but you have not yet become Camel Xiangzi.”

This is a line from "Reverse Life".

Camel Xiangzi believed until his death that he was poor because he did not work hard enough to pull the rickshaw, but the middle class people always understood the crux of the problem.

Those who don’t own a house worry about housing prices, those who own a house worry about school places, and those who have school places worry about retirement... The British magazine "The Economist" said that "China's middle class is the most anxious group of people in the world."

And this anxiety is often based on a middle-class sense of ritual.

To establish an invisible and intangible identity, there must be a tangible and measurable sense of life ritual.

Image source: TV series "The 1st Shop of Coffee Prince"

Because of the pursuit of ritual, the life of the middle class has become a gorgeous pile of foreign terms:

It is going to Sam's Club or Costco to buy food for the family after get off work on Friday; it is laying out a checkered napkin on the grass in a suburban park, enjoying the whole wheat sandwich you made yourself while admiring the flowers; it is having a brunch with Monocle and KINFOLK on the weekend morning, painting an oil painting in a workshop, and watching a performance in a small theater...

Gao Zhilei in "Reverse Life" also has his own stubbornness as a middle-class person: even if he was fired by a big company, he still wanted his daughter to go to an international school with a tuition fee of 200,000 yuan a year; even if the takeaway was overtime, delivered to the wrong place, or fined hundreds of yuan due to complaints, he still drank a cup of bitter coffee to relieve his sorrow...

Although they have been "expelled" from the middle class, they still have to maintain the "style" of middle-class life.

This is not a problem just for Gao Zhilei alone, but a problem for a group of "Gao Zhilei".

The huge social mobility and the fragility of the middle class itself make people like Gao Zhilei suffer unbearable class pain.

"Reverse Life" intentionally or unintentionally reproduces and despises occupational discrimination in this society: except for the deliveryman group, almost all other characters in the film look at the profession of "deliveryman" with tinted glasses.

Whether you admit it or not, this is indeed the norm in reality. Few people try to understand this group of people. Even though most people say "respect", "you deserve to be a delivery boy for the rest of your life" is still the most vicious curse to many people.

Image source: Trailer of "Reverse Life"

Just like Gao Zhilei’s father’s anger at the beginning: I worked hard to raise you to go to college, not to let you deliver takeout.

People imagine that being a delivery man must be unhappy, hence the criticism of the poster of "Life in the Past".

People imagine that being a delivery man must be a helpless choice made after hitting rock bottom in life, hence the criticism of "Backward Life" for exploiting suffering.

In reality, the middle class is constantly using various means to distinguish themselves from the aunties dancing in the square, the nouveau riche with logos all over their bodies, and the "low-level" deliverymen.

But the movie arranges Gao Zhilei to complete the identity transformation from middle-class to delivery man.

So we see on the big screen that they are the same as those people who call themselves “cows and horses” in the office.

A delivery man, like the former "programmer" Gao Zhilei, is just a profession and a job, nothing more.

They are even more loyal and sentimental than the so-called "white-collar workers".

At the end of the film, Gao Zhilei's father changes his attitude towards his son's career, and Gao Zhilei himself gives a speech at the company headquarters as a delivery man: "We have worked hard enough, so we deserve respect and a better life."

You can understand this as the film's helpless compromise in the face of reality, but I would rather believe that this is a vindication of the delivery worker group by the film.

Gao Zhilei finally took off Kong Yiji's gown and completed another irony of reality:

Isn’t it a form of discrimination that the “condescending” gaze on the suffering of delivery workers, which is carried away by cheap “compassion” in society, is actually another form of discrimination?

Film is the art of creating dreams through light and shadow, and its essence has been entertainment-oriented since its birth.

But in Japan and South Korea, the orientation of movies has gradually shifted from dreaming to realism.

In 1988, the "Advance Screening System for Film Scripts" was abolished, opening the door to the return of the era of realism in Korean films.

A large number of realistic films such as "The Attorney", "Hope", and "The Crucible" even influenced the changes in Korean laws and systems.

Image source: Movie "The Crucible"

China, which is deeply influenced by Japanese and Korean film culture, naturally has the same requirements for domestic realistic films.

Especially since Xu Zheng's previous work "Dying to Survive" explored profound real-life issues such as the price of life-saving drugs and the allocation of medical resources, the public naturally had the same expectations for "Reverse Life".

But it would be unfair to Xu Zheng as a filmmaker to discuss these issues without considering the social and legal factors.

If you know a little about the background of "Dying to Survive", you will find that what is amazing is not the movie, but the prototype Lu Yong.

Both helping leukemia patients and forcing the amendment of relevant legal systems were accomplished by Lu Yong in reality.

What "Dying to Survive" did was adapt his story into a very good commercial film and put it on the big screen.

Source: Stills from "Dying to Survive"

But this is commendable enough. It has brought marginalized groups outside the mainstream public opinion into the field of public opinion, and triggered public reflection on the modern medical system and social fairness and justice.

There is a consensus that a group’s social discourse power corresponds to its social identity.

From this perspective, in addition to completing its own commercial entertainment mission, "Dying to Survive" also has the additional mission of "speaking and raising questions" for a group of marginalized groups.

Correspondingly, deliverymen are clearly the "silent majority" in the current mainstream public opinion field. This is precisely the core essence of German scholar Elisabeth Noel-Neumann's "spiral of silence" theory - there are many criticisms and debates about deliverymen on the Internet, but few voices from the deliverymen themselves.

In addition to its entertainment function, "Retrograde Life" has already accomplished its mission of giving voice to a group of people.

"Reverse Life" is brave enough to raise questions.

Solving social problems is a society's mission, not this movie's, much less Xu Zheng's.