was sprayed at the start of the broadcast, and the old drama bones couldn't be saved
Whatever the audience likes to watch, the producer will shoot. Therefore, the market is flooded with a large number of Xianxia, fantasy, ancient puppets, and Xianyan. When young people are earth-shattering and landslides in order to fall in love, there are very few dramas that focus on the emotional lives of middle-aged and elderly people. Even if there is, it will be criticized by young audiences because some slices are singled out. The drama I'm going to talk about today is such a drama that stepped on the thunder point of young audiences-
The Second Half of My Life
This drama is co-starred by Zhang Guoli, Tong Dawei, Mei Ting and other powerful actors, and is an urban family light comedy, adapted from the novel "Wonderful and Strange Sorrow" by the famous writer Wang Meng. It takes the blind date experience of retired literature professor Shen Zhuoran as a starting point, tearing apart the hidden emotional folds of an aging society.
Shen Zhuoran, a retired literature professor in his seventies, seems to have fallen into an emotional vacuum in his life after the death of his wife. At the behest of his old friend Lee, he embarks on a dramatic blind date journey.
Along the way, he met four blind dates with very different personalities, and the time he spent with them was the biggest madness of the septuagenarian man in the second half of his life. The first paragraph is an encounter with the head nurse. Lian Yilian is gentle and considerate, and her cooking skills are exquisite, which makes Shen Zhuoran rekindle her enthusiasm for life. The two quickly moved in together and even began to plan a wedding. However, the "real estate transfer" clause in the prenuptial agreement is like a basin of cold water, which extinguishes all the warmth.
The second period of chasing love is the soul collision with the female scientist Nie Juanjuan. Nie Juanjuan is intellectually elegant, and she has a strong spiritual resonance with Shen Zhuoran. They discussed quantum physics together, read Neruda's love poems, and interpreted the spiritual love of elderly intellectuals. However, the cruel reality of cancer recurrence made Nie Juanjuan choose not to say goodbye.
The third time was a strong showdown with Lu Yuan, the director of the trade union. Lu Yuan is a retired director of a women's union whose husband died early and has a strong personality. She took Shen Zhuoran to square dance and participate in the choir, and her energetic attitude to life was enviable. However, the "AA system of love" and the "housework division agreement" she insisted on made Shen Zhuoran, who was accustomed to the traditional marriage and love model, feel pressure.
So there is the fourth time I fell in love, and this is comparable to the stand-in complex in a bloody drama. Le Shuishan is a young woman who looks like Shen Zhuoran's deceased wife. She took Shen Zhuoran to experience the nightlife of young people, which made the old man seem to have a second spring. However, when Shen Zhuoran found out that the other party was actually an "emotional parasite", the relationship based on the stand-in complex collapsed instantly.
These four blind dates, like a quadruple door, Shen Zhuoran gradually understood in the emotional trial that old marriage and love are not a copy of young people. Those games about property, health, and dignity are in fact the last declaration of the control of life by the elderly. They don't want to give up the pursuit of love because they are getting older, and they don't want to suppress their emotional needs because of worldly prejudices. Shen Zhuoran's blind date is not only his personal emotional exploration, but also affects the nerves of the whole family.
son Shen Qing, played by Tong Dawei, is a typical urban middle-aged man. He has to deal with the pressure of the workplace, and reconcile the contradiction between his father's remarriage and his sister's opposition. When his father came home with a blind date, behind his forced smile was a deep anxiety about the family order being broken. He was afraid that his father's remarriage would destroy the original harmonious family atmosphere, and he was even more worried that the new family members would take away his father's love for him.
Although the daughter-in-law ostensibly supports her father-in-law's blind date, she is actually carefully calculating the interests of the family. As a junior, like everyone else, she not only longs for her elders to be happy, but also worries about the loss of property. In the daughter-in-law's view, the remarriage of the father-in-law is not a simple matter, it involves a series of practical issues such as the distribution of the family's property and future living arrangements.
The youngest daughter, who is far away in the United States, expressed fierce opposition to her father's remarriage. In her opinion, her father's remarriage was an infidelity to her mother and a betrayal of family traditions. She couldn't accept the change, and she couldn't stand her father's life with other women. The opposition, compromise and support of the children made the Shen family fall into a chicken, fly and dog jump. Between parents and children, between love and family affection, Lao Shen's choice began to become more and more difficult. The broadcast of "The Second Half of My Life" coincided with the node when the domestic drama market fell into "aesthetic fatigue of ancient puppet dramas". The routine production of fantasy fairy tales and sweet pet romance dramas makes the audience eager for the return of realistic themes.
However, the bland response after the show was broadcast exposed the deep dilemma of middle-aged and elderly dramas in market positioning.Although the average daily viewing time of middle-aged and elderly audiences is as high as 7.0 hours, which is the main audience group of TV dramas, capital has been chasing young audiences for a long time.
Middle-aged and elderly dramas are in a weak position in terms of investment and publicity. In the eyes of capital, middle-aged and elderly dramas lack commercial value and cannot attract the attention of young audiences, so they are unwilling to invest too much resources and energy. In addition, the solidification of creative thinking is also a major dilemma faced by middle-aged and elderly dramas. The existing middle-aged and elderly dramas are mostly trapped in the routines of "complaining" and "dog blood": mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflicts, inheritance disputes, and twilight love is stigmatized. This kind of creative inertia is not only far from reality, but also reinforces social prejudices.
When "The Second Half of My Life" tried to present elderly marriage and love in a relaxed and humorous way, it encountered market cognitive barriers because of breaking through the convention. The audience's expectations for middle-aged and elderly dramas seem to be still stuck in the bitter scenes of the past, and they feel unfamiliar and uncomfortable with this novel way of presentation.
The lag of cultural concepts is also one of the reasons for the dilemma of middle-aged and elderly dramas.In society, there is a prejudice that "old people are not serious" and "twilight love is a joke", which leads to the long-term suppression of the emotional needs of the elderly.
The incident of a 40-year-old man being deceived in online dating in Yiyang, Hunan Province was ridiculed by the whole network, and the middle-aged and elderly fans were ridiculed after the Internet celebrity "Xiucai" overturned, all of which reveal the systematic neglect of the elderly in society. In "The Second Half of My Life", Shen Zhuoran's opposition from his children and the strange vision of society are actually artistic projections of the predicament of reality. To break through this dilemma, it is not something that a good screenwriter can solve. At least for the moment, the subject is completely unsolvable. Because no matter how you shoot, there are people who stand at different angles to be yin and yang. Even getting pregnant and giving birth at the age of 0 can detonate social news, not to mention the topic of a sixty-year-old man looking for true love.
In fact, in today's accelerated aging, we need to re-understand the emotions of the elderly. Similar dramas, even if they are social hotspots, can also reflect the emotional desires of the elderly group from a certain angle, and also ask the civilization temperature of the whole society. When we complain about this kind of drama, do we also have prejudice against elderly marriage? Are the emotional needs of older people also being neglected? Perhaps, just like Shen Zhuoran's solo dance in the twilight in the play, elderly marriage and love is not an imitation of youth, but an elegant curtain call of life in the long river of time.
