From "Wan Wan" to Wang Ma, the way out of deconstruction

The change in the plot from Wang Ma's perspective as a worker to a celestial being has caused dissatisfaction and doubt among the audience. Read this article to find out.

Many years later, when the Wanhe Tianyi guys who have already made movies, entered the mainstream, and even reached the ceiling of “husband feeling”, see the Internet standard process of “Wang Ma” from becoming popular to falling out, will they remember their running under the sunset that day?

It is easy to be a critic of mainstream models and upper-class people, but if you want to enter the mainstream, you have to do it first. Back then, Wanhe Tianyi failed in making big movies, and it took many years to recover. "Wang Ma" is a "worker" who turned into a "capitalist" outside the play. At present, the revelations about the short video drama account Wang Ma @七颗猩 include but are not limited to: interview tricks; "exploiting employees" in the form of long and short weeks, salary of 4,000, bringing your own computer, and 3 days of trial; 0 people from Wuhan Wilderness Culture Media Co., Ltd. participated in the insurance...

So the public was angry, the dragon-slaying boy turned into a dragon again, and the spokesperson for the workers backstabbed the workers. Of course, some netizens pointed out: "Didn't she complain about the novels of domineering presidents? How did she become a voice for the workers?" It's also because the Internet has been too fond of values ​​in recent years, and it often pokes at social emotions and insights into the various aspects of human life. The speed of getting emotional is faster than the speed of Hard Candy reading the whole article.

Wang Ma and the company responded quickly, denying that no one had participated in the insurance program and offering two "benefits": one was to cancel the long and short week schedule and implement a two-day weekend. Although there was a long and short week schedule before, they were all paid; the other was that the salary for current employees and new employees (including interns) would start at 6,000 yuan.

I have no sympathy for capitalists, but I have been in Wuhan for more than ten years and I am sure that Wangma Company reflects the average employment environment here. When you earn 5,000 yuan a month, Wuhan is Wuhan, with endless subways and endless hot dry noodles; when you earn Wangma a month, Wuhan is the thoroughfare of nine provinces, with bright lights, Porsches, and Rolexes.

However, labor-capital conflicts are not my topic. In fact, before this "collapse", the story of "Wang Ma" had already shown signs of fatigue and caused criticism. Ten years ago, Wang Dachui changed his identity every episode and continued the narrative reconstruction of "Report to the Boss". Ten years later, Wang Ma is about to become "Mrs. Li" so quickly. When complaining about this matter is only an emotion, and it is not even a language art, it is really hard to resist favoring the past over the present.

1. Wang Magang

Wang Ma had three pet peeves in her life: one was when someone stepped on the floor she had just mopped. Two was when the food she had just cooked was pushed to the floor by her crazy husband and wife. Three was when someone woke her up when she was just sleeping.

Whenever the hostess woke Wang up because of something, she would stretch in the small nanny room and complain, "Oh, I just fell asleep!" In order to prevent the hostess from mentioning her ex-boyfriend's name in her sleep and angering Mr. Gu, she could even stay by the bed and suddenly wake him up. Wang was very irritable and impatient. Considering that Gu Jingchen did not give her insurance, this emotion made sense.

Aunt Wang has two little hobbies: one is to secretly wear the necklace of the master and then put it back, while her colleague Butler Zhao secretly wears a Rolex.

Whenever the host threw things around in anger, she would take them for herself. Secondly, she would record how many times Gu Jingchen and He Nana repeated their boring lines. "Can't you forget Xiao Beichen?" "Can't you forget He Zhezhe?"

From Wang Ma's daily perspective, the world is a huge "Wan Wan Lei Qing". The master Gu Jingchen's white moonlight is He Zhe Zhe, and the one who accompanies him is his stand-in He Nana; He Nana's white moonlight is Xiao Beichen, and Gu Jingchen, who looks very similar to Xiao Beichen (played by the same person), is her white moonlight stand-in. Rich girl Geng Jiaojiao admires Gu Jingchen and is jealous of He Nana. Gu Jingchen's silly brother Gu Debai always wants to find his brother's weakness and get rid of it, but he always gets the wrong target.

Wang Ma's own love-hate relationship is relatively simple. Butler Xu is her enemy, who likes to deduct her performance and report her. Butler Zhao is her partner and partner, who is a little handsome but has a single-minded mind. Every romantic moment that Wang Ma misunderstands is not when Butler Zhao stands up for her, but when he is angry that he didn't wear shoe covers or broke his Rolex.

From the perspective of narrative mode, "Reborn as a Nanny in a Domineering President's Short Play" has fixed character functions and personalities. Linguist Greimas divides characters into six types according to their functions: protagonist and object, messenger and recipient, assistant and opponent.

Wang Ma is the protagonist and the victim in every episode. The nanny's professional ethics and personal bottom line are the drivers that drive her actions. So every time she interrupts the boss and his wife, she will show her dominant position: "This family will fall apart without me!" Her assistant is housekeeper Zhao, and her enemy is not fixed according to the plot.

The tragedy of Wang Ma is that she becomes a victim of the fight between the crazy husband and the crazy wife. Whenever He Nana gets into trouble, Gu Jingchen will yell, "I want you to be buried with me!" His unreasonableness is no less than that of Chen Pingping who learned of Fan Xian's death in "Joy of Life". Wang Ma's "anti-tyrannical boss" efforts are two-fold:

First, on the behavioral level, she promptly suppressed the hysteria of the host family with a mop and even crazier language. In the episode of substitute literature, Wang Ma directly advised: "Nana is Mr. Gu's substitute, and you are Xiao Beichen's substitute, isn't it even?" Second, on the spiritual level, she firmly resisted all hypocritical behaviors that threatened her own interests. She even packed up and left several times to work as a nanny in other families when she couldn't continue. If there is no place for a nanny here, there will be other places for nannies.

2. From a Worker to a Dragon

The reason why Wang Ma's skit became popular is largely because it caters to people's superficial disdain for the domineering CEO novel model. When she is unhappy, she will directly take action, and even lock Gu Jingchen outside the villa when he is disabled and angry and does not want anyone to help him. You are hypocritical, right? I will never indulge you.

Most of the time, Wang Ma's thoughts are "I'm just an employee, don't get close to me, you lunatic!" Her lower-class identity deconstructs the domineering style of the domineering boss. She serves Mr. Gu a plate of exquisitely arranged beef cubes and covers her bowl with a large piece of steak. The domineering boss satisfies her pretentious lifestyle, and Wang Ma rewards her body and mind after a tiring day.

But the recent creative direction has changed significantly. Many viewers found that Wang Ma's plot has changed from being complained about by a supporting role to being the center of attention. The worker Zhao Guanjia turned out to be the second son of the Li family who turned into a Tianlong. Old fans offered suggestions: "I don't really like watching the plot of Tianlong. When Wang Ma becomes Madam Li, she goes from complaining about Tianlong to becoming a Tianlong. There is no need to watch it anymore."

The dilemma of Wang Ma’s content is that the well-known domineering CEO routine is enough for 20 episodes. Seeking a breakthrough in identity goes against the original intention of the working perspective. Bakhtin believes that the most important part of the carnival is the “contrast between coronation and subsequent de-coronation”, and the core of de-coronation is to deconstruct and subvert the sublimity and authority. In my opinion, vigorously developing the CP of Wang Ma and Butler Zhao and making Butler Zhao rich is a dead end of “coronation”.

Judging from the variability of the narrative rhythm, the online short drama "Never Expected" ten years ago is more flexible and maneuverable. The character "Wang Dachui" is silly and silly, loves to daydream, but is often defeated by the harsh reality. It can be said that this is the origin of the "Wang's Working Universe".

In Wan Wan, the same Wang Dachui can be transformed into a candidate, a teacher, a white-collar worker, an angel in white, a single man, a rich second-generation, a gangster boss, a goblin, the sun god, and even the matchmaker. The roles are diverse, but the identity of the loser and his miserable fate remain unchanged. The connotation of the loser as a cultural role is much richer than that of the "nanny".

On the one hand, it constitutes a "vulgar" and "dirty" online culture, helping netizens overcome and resist the "over-standardization" of modern society and the "elite culture" of the Internet forum era, thus achieving a kind of social criticism; at the same time, for the audience, it achieves cultural intimacy through ritualistic dissemination.

It can be said that young people back then mostly regarded themselves as "Wang Dachui" and did not find it strange. People who watch Wang Ma's videos today basically do not put themselves in the shoes of a nanny. The so-called resistance and dissolution are just emotional catharsis, without the construction of subcultural identity.

I have to say that although "Wan Wan" seemed vulgar at the time, it still had some linguistic skills and left behind golden sentences of the era: "Become a general manager and CEO, marry a beautiful and rich woman, and reach the peak of life", "If you ignore me today, I will make you unable to reach me tomorrow", "The flowers on the river are redder than fire when the sun rises, thank you for your belief in me, leader", "You are still young, you may not have seen so much money, go ahead and spend it boldly"... Recalling Wang Ma's golden sentences, I racked my brains but could only think of "gang mi zhuo", which is simply dry without the context and plot.

3. Where can you complain?

"If you are so good at talking, why don't you just go shoot it yourself?" This is a common comment under many of my articles complaining about air conditioners. Of course, you don't need to know how to cool an air conditioner to evaluate it, but the problem is obvious - complaining is the easiest thing to do on the Internet, and it often cannot construct its own narrative model.

I often doubt that if I really manage those bad dramas, I will probably look for traffic, gather actors, buy big IPs, and spend lavishly on costumes and props, which may make their Douban scores go down. Sometimes I come up with a new and earth-shattering story in my dreams, but a search shows that it has been written to death.

Everyone scolds Jiu Yuexi, but everyone can become Jiu Yuexi. There is nothing new under the sun, and there are only so many popular story templates. We really overestimate ourselves if we want to subvert everything by complaining.

In a nutshell, Tucao is just dissatisfaction with the established narrative mode, but going completely the other way does not necessarily establish a new doctrine. The Wanhe Tianyi team at that time had their own interpretations of many classic narratives.

In "Little Soldier's New Year", Liu Xuande didn't have the patience to visit Zhuge Liang three times, Zhuge Liang had no real talent but was extremely admired; in "Journey to the West", the vicious Monkey King had no intention of respecting his teacher, and Tang Monk was not only narcissistic but also selfish. But in Yi Xiaoxing's movie "Never Expected", it became an ordinary text of a loser chasing love while fighting monsters, which is not even as refreshing as a 10-minute web drama.

It was not until Liu Xunzimo's "Famous" that it could be said that Wanhe Tianyi finally made the kind of movie they had imagined.

Many shining elements of "Wan Wan" can still be seen in the film. The script-killing narrative method is relatively novel, and the revelation of social reality and the thinking of feminism are also relatively in-depth. But there are also some shortcomings. The single scene arrangement of the film is out of touch with the exquisite text. The director wanted to pay tribute to "12 Angry Men" in the storyboard of the multi-person scene, but the connection between the shots was not smooth.

The controversial "Da Ru Zhuan" in the past two months was also considered by netizens as "Liu Lianzi wanted to oppose Qiong Yao but ended up messing up the hierarchy and bullying, and did not learn the love and passion, freedom and anti-feudalism in Qiong Yao's works at all." Because she hated Concubine Ling, she made Ruyi, who was as calm as a chrysanthemum, a spiritual wife. She pioneered the self-brainwashing love brain, and Qiong Yao's heroines were ashamed of themselves.

Liu Xinwu also sneered at Gao E's version of "Dream of Red Mansions" back then, and was so angry that he sneered in the program, saying that Gao was a "palace literati" who was carrying out a cultural conspiracy. As a result, his own "Continuation of the Red Mansions" was almost written into modern prose. When Baochai died, a pair of jade butterflies flew out of her mouth.

Is this butterfly borrowed from the next-door "Princess Pearl"? Daiyu's tears cool and turn into rubies, which is more like Grimm's fairy tales. With such productivity, can the Jia family still have a financial crisis? Just cry and it's over.

If we regard classic texts as classical art, then the successful reconstruction after the complaints is probably like modern art. For example, Impressionism is a complete subversion of the academic school in terms of creative methods and creative concepts. The result is the ultimate presentation of "the truth seen by the eyes" rather than the "conceptual beauty" pursued by classicism. It is regular and has boundaries, and the general public can still appreciate this beauty.

Some contemporary art is a typical example of failed reconstruction, which can easily confuse people and make them feel "I can do it too". It emphasizes the expression of opinions, and the importance of skills is reduced to a very low level. It must be said that this is quite similar to the current emotional output content creation.

Of course, more complaining and anti-XX type Internet creations are more like awkward children. They have provocative attitudes and rebellious behaviors, but one day they suddenly grow up and say: Wow, they are exactly the same as their parents.

Author: Xie Minghong; Editor: Li Chunhui

Source: WeChat public account "Entertainment Hard Candy (ID: yuleyingtang)"