Why are all women in ethical dramas suffering from marital crisis?

Family ethical dramas reflecting modern people's concept of marriage and love have come out in droves, occupying a large share of the current movie and TV drama market. Among these popular culture products, which are often pejoratively called "mother-in-law dramas," director Shen Yan's works have been able to create a wave of ratings frenzy every time, attracting the attention of the general public as well as heated debates, and winning numerous awards. For the sake of space, we will focus on his two divorce dramas, "Divorce in Chinese Style" and "My First Half Life," which is currently on air.

Gendered imaginations of family space

Middle-aged housewives evolve to keep up with their husbands

One thing that is often overlooked in all the buzz and media coverage is that many scholars have pointed out that, starting in the Republican era, more than 50 percent of divorce suits are filed by women in real life. More than fifty percent of divorce proceedings in real life have been initiated by women. Xu Anqi, director of the Family Research Center of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, has even criticized the stereotypes that "divorce is the privilege of men with superior resources," "it is a deprivation of disadvantaged wives and a way for a third party to enjoy the benefits," and so on, on the basis of analyzing the information from the fifth national census and the latest sample surveys. and other stereotypes have been criticized.

However, ignoring this huge difference between reality and imagination, popular culture products, as always, portray women, especially middle-aged women, as "divorced" and "abandoned" complainants and losers who, once "laid off," are "laid off. "Once they are "laid off", if they don't try to change themselves to improve their self-quality, it is impossible for them to be re-employed, i.e., to return to their families (including remarried families). Therefore, divorce movies and TV dramas are often regarded as textbooks of women's self-evolution, which urge them to keep on strengthening and upgrading themselves in order to keep up with the world's most demanding women. Therefore, divorce dramas are often regarded as a textbook for women's self-evolution, urging them to continue to strengthen themselves and upgrade themselves in order to keep up with the pace of men and get rid of the fate of the "unemployed".

The two hit realist urban dramas mentioned above are no exception. Though thirteen years apart, there is no major change in gender consciousness, and the central thread is the same: both are about how a divorced woman faces a mid-life crisis caused by her husband's advancement, and how to re-invent herself, which reflects the changes and dilemmas of gender roles and even class identities in the dramatically changing contemporary Chinese society.

Song Jianping, the husband in 2004's "Chinese Divorce," played by Chen Daoming, was originally an excellent surgeon at a large state-owned hospital. Although he was good at his job, he was not well paid, so he switched to a privately owned US hospital, became an attending surgeon, and then worked part-time as a vice-president, and saw his financial income rise dramatically, bought a house and a car, and became a member of the emerging middle class in Chinese society.

In contrast, Lin Xiaofeng, a former elementary school teacher, "voluntarily" chose to give up her job because her husband was unable to take care of the family after he went to work for a foreign company, and "returned" to her family to take care of her children and household chores, but was unable to adapt to her role as a full-time housewife ("Mrs. Song"). However, she is unable to adapt to the change of identity and psychological gap after becoming a full-time housewife ("Mrs. Song"), and thus faces an emotional breakdown and marital dilemma.

"Chinese Divorce," along with other hit dramas such as "Come and Go" (1998), which was based on Ji Li's best-selling novel, is often regarded by the media as a representative work of "middle-class divorce," which shows the relationship between a man who has successfully transitioned into the middle class in the post-reform and opening-up market economy and a middle-aged woman who is lagging behind the demands of gender roles in the new middle-class family. The differences and contradictions between middle-aged women whose gender roles are demanding, thus leading to a shaky middle-class marriage in transition.

In response to this "middle-class divorce" problem, such movie and TV dramas and other popular culture products (such as "The Art of Wife Warfare", "How to Make a Man Love You for a Lifetime" and other best-selling books, as well as "How to Create the Perfect Woman for a Successful Husband" clubs) tend to propose solutions that are often rejected by the middle-class family. The solution is that women who have been "over-liberated" need to return to the home, not only to continue to take care of household chores and emotional labor, but also to re-learn how to manage the consumption activities of the middle-class family, enhance their own tastes, and create a comfortable space inside the home. image of upwardly mobile class. In this gendered imagination of domestic space, the middle class, in contemporary Chinese society, has gone far beyond the reference to a specific social class and has become a rose-colored picture of the good life in modern society modeled on Europe and the United States.

The downward spiral of the new middle class

The ****-birth relationship between the home and the workplace

In contrast to this "homecoming" argument, "The First Half of My Life," adapted from the original novel by Yishu, shows the following The story of Luo Zijun, a full-time housewife, who was divorced from her husband Chen Junsheng and had to return to the workplace to find her "self", is an inspirational story for women. On the surface, this narrative of women's self-improvement seems to have made considerable progress over "Chinese Divorce," but it's worth noting that whether it's "returning home" or "leaving home," the choice isn't up to the woman.

Although taken from a Hong Kong story written by Yishu, My First Half Life has been localized by the cast and crew, transplanting the story of a middle-class family to the 21st century in the magical city of Shanghai, and accordingly, replacing the protagonists of the new era with the tired and anxious middle class of the city. Represented by the "scum" Chen Junsheng on screen, this group of young new middle-class people who have become white-collar workers through their personal endeavors are not living the good life they had imagined before, but have to stay alert all the time in order to adapt to the environment of a foreign company where every second counts and crises abound. The only way they can ensure that they don't get out of the next round of competition is to spend most of their time and energy in the workplace, which of course reflects the worries and fears that blocked upward mobility channels and the gradual solidification of class in the global recession have brought to the younger generation of wage earners.

This growing sense of insecurity has led to the homogenization of the workplace and the family in the competitive ethic of the neoliberal economic model, and that's why we hear Luo Zijun's resounding quote, "The home is a gladiator's arena, and it's either the winner who wins, or the blood is spilled on the spot." If you replace the word "home" with "workplace," this statement should hold true for Chen Junsheng.

In "Chinese Divorce" and "Come and Go" a decade or so ago, the upward mobility of middle-aged men benefited from the domestic flat system, which transformed the social and cultural capital and connections accumulated in the previous system into resources for upward mobility in the new private enterprises, and even in their family life, thanks to the implementation of the "one family, two systems": Wives (such as Duan Lina in Coming and Going) tend to retain their positions within the system and work in state agencies, maintaining a stable social status and a relatively flexible work schedule that allows time to take care of the family, thus ensuring that their husbands have no worries when they enter the private sector to make money at sea.

In contrast, "my first half life" Chen Junsheng Li represents a much younger generation in the neoliberal globalized economic model of the primitive accumulation process. He comes from an ordinary family in a foreign country, his education is not particularly high, and he doesn't have any overseas experience, so his upward trajectory can only be achieved by sacrificing his personal life and putting in a lot of labor hours, and if he makes a slight mistake, he may fall from the clouds and become a member of the city's huge ant tribe again.

As shown in the movie, Chen Junsheng's travel record is three hundred and sixty-five days a year, with more than two hundred days of business trips, and only less than twenty days when he can go home on time without working overtime. Such a tight work schedule may of course be a dramatic exaggeration, but in recent years reports of white-collar white-collar workers dying of overwork have not been uncommon, confirming that white-collar workers under the global flow of capital are faced with oppression and the squeezing of their living space, and showing that the operation of the capitalist economic system requires not only a large amount of occupational labor, but also a large amount of love and dedication in the name of family space. It also shows that the operation of the capitalist economic system requires not only the accumulation of a large amount of professional labor, but also the unpaid and invisible domestic, managerial, nurturing, and emotional labor paid in the name of love within the family space to ensure that the reproduction of social relations and labor force can be carried out smoothly. Of course, for female white-collar workers, Tang Jing, the class dilemma coupled with the constraints of traditional gender expectations, will face an even more incomplete breakout.

Since it is positioned as an ethical marriage and family drama, My First Half Life does not touch on these acute social issues, but instead projects the class conflict as a simple gender conflict once again, using divorce to stimulate middle-aged women's self-evolution, emphasizing the fact that women come out of their families, but only to improve their "selves" as paid nannies, and learn to understand the challenges of the workplace. The divorce is used to stimulate women to evolve themselves, but only to improve their "selves" and become paid nannies, and to learn to understand the difficulties of their husbands in the workplace, and then return to the family with a more "good-looking posture", and to combine Luo Zijun's simple beauty, Tang Jing's independence and competence, and Ling Ling's understanding: to be self-improving, but not too much, in order to become the perfect and scarce model of a new-age housewife in the workplace, as He Han says: "You can replace anyone, and then make it so that no one can replace you."

And the only one who can train and raise such a perfect product is He Han, the trendsetter in the globalized knowledge economy and the perfect representative of the new patriarchy: high IQ, high value, accompanied by a higher economic and social status, plus the international background of a "returnee". With his international background, He Han is a powerful and omnipotent person, equivalent to the role of the "heavenly warrior" in Greek drama. In the collective absence of the Women's Federation and the neighborhood committee, He Han is a combination of a domineering president and a caring sister, who uses almost supernatural power to "rescue" housewives and working women in the last minute (Luo Luo's "Last Minute Rescue") when they are desperate. The last minute rescue" (Luo Zijun's custody lawsuit, Tang Jing's Carman's bill, etc.).

This clever combination of the currently popular "divorced housewife's comeback" and "bossy president falls in love with me" narratives neither touches on the unequal division of labor between the sexes within the family, nor does it delve into the ****-birth relationship between domestic work and workplace work. Instead, it once again puts in two separate spaces, thus evolving the conflict between inside and outside the family into a never-ending battle between the sexes between men and women, and displacing the anxiety and shadow of the middle class into a gender narrative of how middle-aged housewives can improve their own combat power and fight against their "mistresses" in a strict manner. In this way, the profound changes that Chinese marriages and families have gone through in modern history have done nothing but provide a steady stream of soap opera material and tutorials on the evolution of women.