I always feel that all the warmth I felt throughout the winter came from “Little Women.”
Although the luxurious lineup has made people have high expectations for it, the experience it gave me is still a surprise and a long-lost one. It blends delicate, warm, passionate, romantic and struggling in such a perfect ratio 2 In an hour and 14 minutes. In the four sisters of the film, you can see too much of the best emotions and vitality of human beings, you can find a part of the real or ideal self, so that after the movie, you will no longer be able to continue to watch and participate They regret and regret their lives.
But at the same time, in too many moments of the film, I will think of another work that is very different from the era, the background to the mood, and the plot: “Jin Zhiying born in 82” (hereinafter referred to as “” Jin Zhiying “”) .
And it seems that in the comments on the two, there is also a connection: In the short Douban short review of “Jin Zhiying”, there is a saying “It is recommended that the majority of sisters take their boyfriends to watch this. After reading everything (yes), I think that the big problem is to break up on the spot. “When” Little Woman “was released last Christmas, many English media criticized” Little Woman “, just because it was a woman. With the perspective and feeling as the center, many male audiences cannot appreciate or even accept the movie.
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The famous writer Hemingway’s evaluation of “Little Women” is “full of sweetness and light (full of sweetness and light) “, Like the color of the timeline in the movie, or the burning fireplace in the March sister ’s house at night;
The description of the plight of contemporary women in “Jin Zhiying” is unabashedly very deliberate-“deliberate” here is by no means a derogatory term, but a kind of urgently needed in such works. Relentlessly true. It is like a proposition essay, which fills the shackles and injustices that women may suffer every age and stage of life, fills the test site into Jin Zhiying’s life, and shines a light on the long-neglected shadows . Zhao Nanzhu, the author of the original novel, said that what he described was the “daily, universal experience that should not be endured” by the women around her, and “the despair, exhaustion and fear that she felt just because of being a woman”.
Zhao Nanzhu
But stripping the different atmospheres of the two, you will find that they really have too much in common.
01
One of the things that touched me a lot is that gender is structurally unfair. The so-called “family” and the ensuing “responsibility” mean how women should completely sacrifice their own future, and different This kind of tragedy is examined and passed on from generation to generation.
As a child, Jin Zhiying watched her grandmother lament that her mother sacrificed her education opportunities for her brother, and like many of us, she would watch the mother devote her time and energy to the kitchen for more than ten years. , Housework and yourself.
She will be puzzled and worried, but because of the naive and blind optimism of young people, she may not be worried about her future too much. As a result, she traveled through the workplace without much awareness and precautions, and entered marriage again.
But reality has gradually started to grow up. The fertility pressure is approaching from all sides of the family and society. The “shared responsibility” and “business as usual” promised by the husband did not occur after her obedience. The future and hopes that belong to the self: Not only is there little hope of returning to the workplace, but even his own preferences, space and getting along with his family have to make concessions for the wife ’s “responsibility” and stand on the edge.
As a woman bound by the same discipline, Jin Zhiying ’s mother-in-law and mother showed two very different postures: apply a set of rules skillfully to suppress the next generation to the greatest extent, or try to empathize Pulling her daughter out of the cycle of tragedy; even in Zhiying ’s own home, only her mother remembers Zhiying ’s preferences and habits, and perceives her small joys and sorrows; After Zhiying became a mother, she understood how painful it was to be “bringing out what she wanted to do” with her monotonous parenting.
The March family in “Little Women” does look warmer at first glance.
Although the family is not wealthy, the father is still on the battlefield in the distance, but there are still a few warm elements in the lives of several daughters: prom, dress, messy dining table full of mess, noisy and joke between sisters … A dance party when Meg sprained his ankle was brought home by Laurie, all the family members greeted the moment they opened the door. The whole picture was the color of the flames in the fireplace. That look.
But everyone who has a little observation of the family daily can quickly understand what kind of hard work is needed to maintain this kind of warmth, especially when the housekeeper is just a mother with no source of income. Jo ’s dislike or even fear of marriage, presumably also partly from the mother, she was immersed in the mother ’s love for herself, and she also watched this love let her burn her energy and spirit without turning back, but did not leave her what. With her clever mind, she would not fail to understand how far this is from her expected life.
But at the same time, my mother is not exactly a step-by-step gear in discipline. She herself may have obeyed the requirements of “Ritual Education” for women, but she had expectations of getting rid of the shackles for her daughters. Not only Jo, you can see a distinct self in these four sisters, which must be inseparable from the mother ’s teaching. For the different pursuits of the four daughters, the mother can see the uniqueness and preciousness of them, and encourage and support without reservation.
02
So, what is the way to rescue women from the “trapped” situation? The “refusal of marriage” chosen by some feminists is a personal solution, but it is far from enough if it is considered from the perspective of social environment. This reminds me of myself written by Michelle Obama in his 2018 autobiography “Becoming (Becoming) “.
Undoubtedly, she is a determined and outstanding feminist, with her own career and pursuit. He graduated from Harvard Law School and later became one of the most promising young lawyers in Chicago’s top law firms. Even the acquaintance with her husband started as his “intern tutor”. But at the same time, she began to understand from a very young age that she wanted to have a family of her own, just like her parents, brother and herself. She also discussed and even disputed with Obama, who was not enthusiastic about it.
On the other hand, she also clearly saw how much time and energy was spent in the kitchen and housework without raising her mother with no work and wholeheartedly raising her. This was something she didn’t want to replicate in her home. However, with the successive births of her daughters Malia and Sasha, she has never been able to fully resolve the contradiction between the time spent working and raising her daughter. But in theory, she understands that to solve this problem fundamentally, what is needed is a change in the level of the social environment. What is needed is the support of women from employers to social welfare parties. This is also her from every job position to becoming the first. A lady never forgot to push hard.
Women ’s needs for love, marriage and children are natural and justified. The environment should ensure that they do not have to choose between these and their own futures, and they are often overlooked in families that respect and pay. Pay. I am very happy that both movies have confirmed the justification of this demand.
Whether or not the ending of Jo and the professor ’s soul mate is the result of the author ’s compromise with Louisa May Alcott for sales and revenue, such a plot does indeed complete the bright and warm background of the entire work.
In “Jin Zhiying”, the theme is expressed by a conflict: when she enjoys a little leisure under the burden in cafes and parks, the young men and women in the workplace scornfully discuss How she “gets nothing for nothing” will regard the status of a full-time mother as aIn order to enjoy the “parasite” of the man’s salary out of thin air.
03
Besides the family, although the social environment in the two films spans a century and a half of time and an ocean, they are both pervasive in creating structural injustice for women. The kind of suffocation you often feel when watching “Jin Zhiying” is its most intuitive embodiment.
For example, when you watched Zhiying in middle school almost hurt by the men trailing on the bus, you were blamed for going out at night; you watched Zhiying ’s father reprimand her on the eve of her graduation and say, “It ’s right to marry a talent Your life “; you look at how much extra effort Zhiying and the female boss and female colleagues in the company have to hammer the glass ceiling above your head; you watch Zhiying afraid of being secretly photographed in the public bathroom so that she can only go home and use it, Like the many moments of fear in your daily life that many opposite sexes can’t fully appreciate.
What ’s more terrifying is that Jin Zhiying ’s “life model” is already a lucky one. And her husband’s empathy for women and his wife is far beyond the average male level. But the so-called “systemic” of injustice can deprive a person of “the ability to do well.”
In the face of colleagues who humiliated his wife, he can still pour coffee into each otherBody; but in the face of the bottleneck to break the prospect of taking parental leave, he can only choose between this consequence and sharing his wife’s hard work.
Among the four sisters of “Little Women”, the most sober understanding of this reality is Jo and Amy; if Jo ’s choice of confrontation discipline can give the audience some excitement, Amy ’s choice is very early In light of the reality of compromise, the “sensible” compromise makes people sad. She understands that art, like all majors, can accept mediocre men, but can’t afford to even reach the top women, so her future and future must be guaranteed by marrying a wealthy husband;
She understands that compared to the beautiful expectations that love is given to sparks and sweetness, for a woman who is not rich in her family, the dry and realistic theme of “economics” must have the highest priority in consideration. After seeing that Big Sister Meg chose true love but suffered from poverty, the weight of her choices was added to the burden of the elderly parents and the sick little sister.
Of course, the ending of her and Laurie, who is rich in love at the same time, continues the warmth of the novel, but the women who have faced this choice in the reality of hundreds of thousands of years are obviously only too slim. May face this kind of luck.
“Little Women” can be said to be a semi-autobiographical novel. On the screen Jo March sat in the office full of men crampedly, and was arrogantly disciplined by one of them. The author must be familiar with the author Alcott.
In fact, even though “Small Lady” is serious, delicate, profound, and rich in emotions, it is no less than many famous works in the same period, but because it rarely adopts a perspective that focuses on female feelings, it has been classified for a long time. It is a “three romance novels” that are not worthy of being taken seriously. Just like the doubt expressed in Jo’s work: Compared with the adventure stories of pirates and knights, who would like to read a novel full of trivial details between sisters? Who would be interested in giving his family breakfast to poor neighbors on Christmas, reading letters from his father’s battlefield, and playing a childish role in a humble little theater?
And this contempt and discipline, even over a century and a half later, still happen today, and it happened to the film and its female creators. Even though Douban, which most respects diversity and progress in the Chinese platform, “Little Women” has received many bad reviews soaked in gender biases, such as “for the Oscar to please women’s rights” and so on. It is customary to blame, and some male audiences said, “Try to hold on to seeing too much dialogue between sisters”, “Why the whole movie is nagging and trivial”, “The expressions and ideas of the characters are confusing”-and women The audience just felt that the passionate emotions of a few sisters with noisy, cheering and tears, and true feelings are a rare and accurate portrayal of themselves; it is not uncommon to even humiliate the various figures of the new power of Florence Pugh who plays Amy.
Although this is already the sixth film adapted from the original novel, Greta Gerwig, who is also a screenwriter and director, has made extremely bold and elaborate changes and creations. She rearranged the original text in a chronological order and arranged it into a clever “X” shape, which paralleled the life of the sisters in the family shelter inside and outside seven years ago, making their choices and emotions unobtrusive and full. The psychology and motives of the two are separated again at the end after converging to a point.
At the same time, some film critics said that after reading her works, they can even understand the core of the characters more than reading the original works, especially the two images that are flattened in other versions of the adaptations, Amy and Beth, the former It will only make trouble out of reason, and the latter is too pure and impeccable; and in Gerwig’s version, Amy is more self-conscious while being sober about the status quo and future, Beth is no longer a perfect saint, but has his own childishness and shyness , But still allows the audience to be moved by her death.
But she has not been nominated for the 2020 Academy Award for Best Director, which has become the most angry and uneven focus after the nomination list was announced. And many people areA closer look at her resume shows that she was nominated for the director’s debut “Miss Bird” two years ago, and is only the fifth female director to be nominated in Oscar’s nearly 100-year history.
Similarly, although youth-oriented works often have female protagonists, their images are often weak, lack of opinion, independent and self-consistent character, receive male gaze and pursuit, and rarely break the ceiling of gender bias, but “Miss Bird” can, from a rare point of view, from the perspective of women, truly and delicately portray the experience of a young girl who crosses the edge of adulthood on family, self, future and love. Including me, many film critics and viewers believe that, like the gender bias from ordinary audiences, it is precisely because of the excellent and fresh female perspective in Gerwig’s works that they are not favored by the Academy Awards that are often unsatisfactory in terms of conceptual progress .
Greta Gerwig and actress Saoirse Ronan of “Little Women” and “Miss Bird” on the set
04
At the end of “Little Women”, Jo told the sisters that they were writing a story about themselves, but did not think that the story would have any future, because it felt “unimportant” and no one else would care. .
Amy told her: “Write it, and the story will become important.”
This proposal also fits the theme of “female” in a broad sense. For a long time, women have not been treated as a three-dimensional, independent personality and pursued image in their works, and their laughter and suffering cannot be taken seriously and listened to. And write them out when they are regarded as “unimportant” and “no one will care”, and it is precisely these works that make some people “unfit” and “uncomfortable”.
This is important.