◎Tangshan
“I don’t ask you to have a lot of big names, I just ask you to have a rigorous and reasonable plot. This is a spy war drama, not an urban brainless romance drama.”
“Good guy! There are so many reversals in “Infernal Affairs” that I feel like I’m watching “Infernal Affairs”. Everyone doesn’t feel ashamed to show up with three identities.”
……
On Douban, the hit drama “Infernal Affairs” can be said to be full of negative reviews.
At least in one point, the performance of “Infernal Affairs” is phenomenal, that is, with only one script, it offsets the full attention before the release, allowing Jin Dong, Wang Zhiwen, Zhang Zhijian, Wang Likun, Tiao Ni… so many good actors efforts were in vain.
To be fair, the 9-16 episodes of “Infernal Affairs” are fairly stable, but unfortunately most viewers can’t support it for so long; as for the patient viewers, if they persist until 22 episodes, I’m afraid they will abandon the show. “Infernal Affairs” is like the kind of steamed stuffed bun mentioned in the cross talk, the filling is missed in the first bite, and the second bite is missed.
“Infernal Affairs” is an interesting case that deserves to be dissected.
keep up with the trend
“Infernal Affairs” also plays the “three-drama combination” card
“Infernal Affairs” is a combination of spy drama, suspense drama and idol drama. This combination has been popular for several years and its advantages are:
First, risk diversification. If the spy war drama is not filmed well, the suspense drama can make up for it; if the suspense drama is not enough, the idol drama will clean up the mess.
Second, expand the audience. Three birds with one stone meet the aesthetic needs of tragic fans, brain fans and idol fans.
Third, pretending to be innovative. Spy war dramas are difficult to innovate. Adding a little suspense is like innovation. Coupled with idols, it may even cause a sensation.
The three plays have their own characteristics.
Spy dramas must be tragic. There must be a positive heroic image, even if it is not a hero in the sense of revolutionary ethics, it must be a hero in the sense of life ethics. The hero’s appeal is lofty. Through life experience, life perception and self-persuasion, the hero will eventually overcome himself and complete the journey from man to saint. If the spy war drama loses its hero, it will be meaningless to interpret the villain no matter how three-dimensional and complex it is. Because if you don’t add enough trouble to the hero, you can’t highlight the extraordinaryness of the hero’s victory, and the villain will lose the rationality of existence.
Suspense drama must be logical. As a creation of the industrial age, it sells the values of the industrial age—logic is above all else. But this logic is three-dimensional: the cobweb-like logic is complicated but not complicated. It only unfolds on a plane, and the real logic should go deeper layer by layer. From details, to plots, to stories, to myths… A good suspense drama must abide by this rule, otherwise it will give people a sense of “unreal” and “full of loopholes”.
Idol dramas must be chic. It comes from the post-industrial era. With the collapse of the traditional world of black and white and moral discretion, people have to use consumption to confirm themselves. “Who am I” is no longer determined by what I believe in and what I stick to, but by consumption symbols-“Drinking red wine ” and “eat garlic”, “roast duck” and “stinky tofu” spoke of heaven and hell. In the world of consumerism propped up by idols, evil is no longer terrible, what is terrible is “too evil to taste”.
In terms of the combination of the three dramas, there are many successful texts, such as “The Rebel”, “The Wind”, and “The Pretender”. Motorcycles, cheongsams, leather huggers, small mansions and the like (idols), binary opposition narratives plus love stories. Such texts are complex enough for the viewer to ignore their similarity to each other.
The hero can’t stand up
all characters collapse
In the combination of the three dramas, “Infernal Affairs” tries to be “innovative”.
For example: change the binary opposition into three parties (red underground organization, Wang puppet spy agency and Kuomintang spy agency); in the love story, add multiple angles, the hero (played by Jin Dong) and the heroine (played by Wang Likun) both fall in love with the heroine (Wang Likun) ), and the heroine and the supporting actress (Sou Ni) fall in love with the hero at the same time; the histories of the hero and heroine are infinitely complicated, and a family tree cannot be written; posture…
These “innovations” are actually “creating the old”. They are made by referring to various dramas, integrating their advantages and strengths, and stacking them together. It’s nothing more than the fact that the plots of other dramas are reversed twice, and I reversed it eight times; the characters in other dramas have two identities, and the characters in my drama have four kinds… Judging from the results, there are big problems on the contrary, the biggest of which is The problem is: the main character’s hero build fails.
Jin Dong worked very hard, but the “sanctification logic” imposed on him by the script was “patriotism—betrayed by the KMT’s secret service—pursuing history—abandoning the dark and turning to the bright”. Wandering among women, being betrayed by a mentor, being hunted down again and again…Under the pressure of “being pushed by the plot” and “coming out with the play”, there are few scenes that show the characters’ inner hearts.
“Being betrayed by a mentor”, such a big matter, Jin Dong could only look haggard for a few seconds, because Fa Xiao was about to kill his relatives righteously, he had to escape… In “Infernal Affairs”, Jin Dong had to serve the plot, not The plot serves him. Apart from thick eyebrows and big eyes, Jin Dong really couldn’t convince the audience why he took the road of revolution.
The protagonist didn’t stand up, and all the characters collapsed. No matter how hard Wang Zhiwen and Zhang Zhijian tried, they couldn’t turn the situation back. On the contrary, “the harder you work, the more greasy you become.”
In order to highlight the suspense, “Infernal Affairs” has repeatedly broken through rationality. Both the male and female protagonists have received advanced spy training, but today you get me drunk, and tomorrow I get drunk; Escape from surveillance and achieve double harvests in career and love…
It’s fine for suspense dramas and idol dramas to fight each other, but the suspense drama itself is absurd enough: the Kuomintang spy agency and the Wang puppet spy agency fought fiercely, just to grab two yuan. In 1944, currency inflation in the Kuomintang-controlled area was astonishing. The monthly salary of a company-level officer was only enough to buy a pack of cigarettes. Basic supplies depended on supply. What’s the point of printing counterfeit money? It is a waste of intellect to contrive a lavish deception.
Similar unreasonable things abound in “Infernal Affairs”, and many can be picked out in almost every episode.
Reasonable fragments pile up the absurdity of the whole
Compared with spy war dramas and suspense dramas, the idol drama part of “Infernal Affairs” is relatively successful.
Regardless of the various BUGs of the male and female protagonists, the emotional line between the two is fairly complete, and the clichés such as appearance, infatuation, separation, misunderstanding, multiple angles, and willingness to sacrifice are all integrated into it. The better-looking part of “Infernal Affairs” is precisely the part driven by idol dramas, but it is a bit bitter to say: love is professional, and spy is amateur.
But this barely fluent narrative didn’t last long, and the suspense drama quickly overwhelmed the idol drama—the heroine’s history became complicated, sometimes it was Manchuria Ge Ge, and sometimes Ge Ge died early, and she was an impostor. Later, even the “restoration of the Qing Dynasty” was moved out.
In the suspense drama part of “Infernal Affairs”, it is normal to hold it high and put it down gently. It seems that there is a huge conspiracy, but in fact, two or three sentences can explain the cause and effect. Just like a popular science program, it has to go around the most complicated circle, but the cards are nothing more than that. “Infernal Affairs” repeatedly exaggerates the history of the hero and heroine. How much influence does this history have on them? Without this grafted-in, suspenseful plot, wouldn’t the story be able to advance? It reflects the misunderstanding of the director: only seeing fragments, but not the whole.
In the director’s pocket, there seem to be countless details that are regarded as magic weapons. The so-called structure is how to list them to the maximum extent. It seems that the more things are stuffed in, the more “solid”. This kind of “creation” that loses its sense of direction is the result of the marginalization of thought.
It is true that ideas need means to be realized, and ideas without means are groundless chatter. But the value of thought is that it is an integrated experience. Dawkins pointed out in “The Selfish Gene” that evolution is accomplished by one code, one code, and the cost of trial and error is astonishing. If it is realized by a string of codes, the cost of trial and error will be greatly reduced. In other words, if you guess one letter at a time, the probability of guessing “ABCDFE” is less than one in 300 million; if you guess two letters at a time, the probability will increase greatly, and if you guess three letters at a time, the probability will increase further… Human evolution is so fast, Precisely because genes use strings of characters to guess the answer.
Thoughts are important, and while imprecise, it increases the speed of iteration. In other words, genre dramas still need thought, otherwise they will indulge in trivialities.
only stories, stories and stories
Modern society emphasizes professionalism, technology is king, and ideas are considered vague, empty, and difficult to grasp. On the Internet, too many people take pleasure in arguing about mistakes in words and wrong words. The value of life, philosophical thoughts, Humanistic feelings and so on are ignored. We are speeding up into a “new ignorance” – proud of not paying attention to metaphysics and anti-civilization. The so-called self is nothing but a series of objections, refutations, destructions.
Embodied in “Infernal Affairs”, every shot is exquisite, and the actors’ performances are also delicate enough to exhaust ten successes, just to snap their fingers.
How to present the inner state of the characters, the specific and subtle differences between heroes, how much torture a person will encounter on the road of faith, and what are the factors that cause inner conflicts… These places where the director should have worked hard are covered in “Infernal Affairs”. Perfectly shaded, just stories, stories and stories. Stories are everything, and stories are bigger than people. The so-called good story is that the plot has a big reversal, and the result is a wonderful thing that reverses everywhere. But such a strange thing, the quality inspectors, publishers, and propagandists collectively didn’t see the problem, and they even put labels such as “divine drama” and “new flavor of spy war drama” and went out on the street calmly…
A method-oriented society needs to be alert to the predicament of collective delusion. In the name of “experts”, different voices are blocked, and the “circle” only recognizes and brags about each other, and never reveals anything.
As the “inside” and “outside” are separated from each other and are lazy to communicate, it is inevitable that the “inside” will not make progress for a long time, and the taste of “outside” will continue to decline. “Infernal Affairs” is the result of the spy war drama’s superficial climaxes, but the actual innovations are dwindling. It just collapsed too quickly, and some viewers even discarded it after a single episode. The number of playable data is still so luxurious…
On Douban, a viewer wrote: “It’s hard to imagine that such a spy war drama will be seen in 2023.” Yes, we believe that the times are progressing, and we deserve something more advanced, but there is always a The play takes you back in time. Much remains stubbornly in place, even regressing. (Beijing Youth Daily)