The online drama "The Long Season" broke down during the May Day holiday, making "suspense", "Northeast China" and "laid-off workers" become hot topics again. Why does the story of the frustrated and failed old man’s revenge for his son impress the current audience? Why are the "old cases" that could not be told and detected 20 years ago repeatedly "cleared up" by film and television dramas after 2010? All history is contemporary history. In the name of suspense drama, people once again feel the social trauma suffered by urban workers in the transitional period of the 1990s.
Looking back on the industrial suspense drama in the 1990s.
"The Long Season" was filmed in Kunming, Yunnan. The biggest label of this drama is suspense drama, especially the director Xin Shuang once created the masterpiece "Hidden Corner" of domestic suspense online drama. This online drama is set in Hualin Iron and Steel Plant, with the case of dismemberment more than ten years ago as a clue, and presents three parallel time and space stories in 2016, 1998 and 1997. There are two generations, Wang Xiang, Gong Biao and Ma dui, who secretly investigate the case of dismemberment, and Wang Yang and Shen Mo, who fall from the youth of the flower season, and show the vicissitudes of life. The highlight of this drama is not only to uncover the mystery of "suspense" at the end of the drama, but also to reproduce the mental pain of laid-off workers who have undergone market-oriented reform like still life sketch.
In 2014, Yinan Diao, the sixth generation director, combined the northern industrial towns with murder and suspense stories, presenting a tense and chilling atmosphere. Then in 2017, the film "Blizzard is Coming", "Detonator" and other works once again started suspense narration with the factory as the background. In 2018, Lou Ye directed A Cloud Made of a Rain in the Wind, and in 2019, Yinan Diao directed The Party at South Station, which represented the 1990s and the beginning of the new century as a "dark" space full of crises and dangers. In this sense, The Long Season continues this narrative type of "industry+suspense+black", turning industrial cities and factory spaces into "scenes" of murder and crime. The typical representative of black and suspense films is Hitchcock’s films in 1950s and 1960s, which are used to show the social emotions of anxiety, nervousness and fear of the urban middle class who don’t know where the danger comes from. These films, which combine the local context with the times and are full of crimes and suspense, show people the humble fate of the little people trapped by the big times, and show how individuals are caught in the black whirlpool of desire in the market-oriented reform in the 1990 s, as well as show people’s floating and fear of the times when they are laid off.
If the market-oriented reform from 1990s to around 2010 is regarded as the transition period of the dual-track reform, then the economic rise of China in 2010 has started a re-examination of the 1990s. For example, the black suspense online dramas Crime Without a Certificate (2017), Chasing the Murder in the White Night (2017), Hidden Corner (2020) and Silent Truth (2020) all happened at the turn of the new century. At the beginning of 2023, The Knockout, an online drama, became a rare TV series that crossed classes and became popular in recent years. This story of the second generation of the factory going to the underworld at the turn of 2000 is like another version of The Long Season. All these show that the police criminal investigation drama, once a realistic theme, has gradually changed into a more Hollywood black suspense drama.
Different from the cultural identity of forging ahead and embracing globalization in the 1990s, The Long Season has a different narrative about the story of laid-off workers in the 1990s: all kind and honest people have been laid off, while the powerful class represented by the factory director (power) and fake Hong Kong businessmen (capital) are bad guys who embezzle and misappropriate public funds. This rewriting shows the rethinking and examination of the narrative in the 1990s after 2010.
From Patricide Culture to Father’s Return
In addition to the "blackening" in the 1990s, since 2010, another cultural symbol is the appearance of an image and the return of his father. Different from the patricide culture in the May 4th Movement or 1980s (denying the previous era), China’s films have intensively told the story of his father’s return in the past ten years. For example, the father of workers in Piano of Steel (2011) and August (2016), the red father in Taking Tiger Mountain 3D》(2014), the right father in Return (2014) and One Second (2020). The father’s story is accompanied by the reconstruction of the father-son order, such as The Wandering Earth (2019), Looking Up (2019), Feng Bao (2021), Me and My Father (2021) and other films showing the story of father-son reconciliation and son inheriting his father’s business. These images of returning fathers play a dual social function. One is to rewrite the historical memory and let the exiled father return to history. Second, the Oedipus complex between father and son has changed into "loyalty and filial piety", which reflects the re-establishment of patriarchal order, which is related to China’s modernization and economic rise. However, this picture of reconciliation between father and son is also full of cracks, which shows the dilemma and drift of cultural narrative.
The Long Season has formed an intertextual relationship with works such as The Piano of Steel and August. "The Piano of Steel" rewrites the image that laid-off workers, as the "eldest son of the Republic" and "the big brother of the working class", were eliminated in the name of inferior and backward labor. The laid-off workers in the film are all "skilled craftsmen" who are hidden and hidden from the people, and they have transformed themselves into skilled workers with clear division of labor and their own duties in the ruined factory buildings. Similarly, the 2016 literary film "August" is also a tribute to the father who experienced the changes in the 1990s: for the father who is engaged in film editing, on the surface, he believes that he can rely on his ability to eat from now on, but in fact he does not want to "lower his noble head". Because he knew that he would lose a stable life and friendship with his colleagues when he changed from a state-owned worker with the main body of the master to a hired worker, and he was greeted by being displaced, swallowing up and trying to earn money. On the one hand, these films regard laid-off workers, losers and people who leave the system as fathers; On the other hand, they perform their father’s duties in movies, such as building a piano for their daughter in Piano of Steel, going out to work for their son to attend a good middle school in August, and the meaning of father’s life in Long Season is to "settle grievances" for his son.
The premature death of the family and the pain of reform
However, unlike the father’s return and the reconstruction of father-son order, The Long Season also tells the story of his son’s untimely death. Such plots have been reflected in Wang Xiaoshuai’s chongqing blues (2010) and Forever (2019) — — The former tells the story of the return of the father who went out to work for a long time, investigates why his son died, and finally finds that the son who lacks fatherly love has committed suicide; The latter is that the son accidentally drowned, his parents were laid off, and the family left the factory and moved to a distant place to start a more difficult life. The same is true of The Long Season, in which the return of father and the death of son become the most prominent mental symptoms. The Long Season focuses on the train driver Wang Xiang, and takes the double trauma he suffered in 1998 as the turning point in his life: one is the accidental death of his son and the death of his wife; Second, I have been laid off from the technology of "loving the factory like home" as a taxi driver. For Wang Xiang, two "homes" died in the autumn of 1998, one was his own family and the other was the home of the unit. Therefore, there are two Wang Xiang in the play, namely, a model worker who was full of pride and sense of justice before he was laid off, and a white-haired little old man who later lost his mind. With the help of Wang Xiang in the two eras before and after, the changes of the times of steel mills and industrial cities with factories as the core in the 1990 s were brought out, and the reform from the 1990 s to the beginning of the new century was expressed as an era of trauma and pain.Present the social crisis and transformation dilemma in the market-oriented reform.
In a word, these film and television works that returned to the 1990s have re-opened the old scars of laid-off workers, showing the new problems brought about by the reform and opening up, and the other side that was covered and suppressed by the reform discourse — — Especially in the process of radical marketization, individuals encounter trauma and fall into a dangerous and uneasy state of mind. These have aroused the resonance of the current audience. At the end of The Long Season, two Wang Xiang met again in the golden cornfield. The old Wang Xiang waved to the train driver Wang Xiang and told himself in the 1990s to "look forward and don’t look back". This train in the "industrial pastoral" scenery is like another parallel space at the fork of history, heading for a future without darkness and blackening.
