Ah Shui
When participating in the Backstreet Boys cruise tour, Satya was crowded in a group of girls in cool clothes. "Most of the time she was watching the boys on the stage playing games and catching fleeting eye contact." She can't swim, and her favorite boy band member Nick Carter is an Aquarius and loves water. Satya, who is afraid of water, once imagined that when he was a child, he had to be taught by Nick to learn how to swim.
Satya, a 25-year-old Pakistani girl from San Francisco, fell in love with a backstreet boy in her early teens. At the age of thirteen she created the Backstreet Boys website, where she wrote and posted news about the boys every day after school. The writing training that started early and continued helped her become a writer in the future, but her infatuation with boys did not end with the end of adolescence.
Satya, a San Francisco native, fantasizes about Nick from the Backstreet Boys teaching her how to swim.
On a cruise ship, Satya finds herself in a strange state. On the one hand, she was excited about her summer vacation with the Backstreet Boys. At the same time, she felt pressure. Part of her soul was squeezed out of her body, watching herself and the enthusiasm of the girls around her as an observer (there were also a few male fans). ).
Australian director Jessica Lesky's documentary "I Used to Be Normal: A Boyband Fangirl Story" took four years and four female boyband girls Fan chat. Like Satya, each of them has experienced the out-of-body fanaticism in adolescence. They are aware of their fanaticism, observe it, accept it, and then accept themselves. They precipitate this fanaticism into a connection with themselves and create a connection with themselves. The decision will be kept forever, will remain until death.
A video of 16-year-old Yelif, a girl from Long Island, New York, crying and yelling while watching the One Direction live DVD went viral on YouTube. She told Leschi years later that she was "like a bomb that exploded when I heard One Direction's name."
Yelif's reaction to watching One Direction's concert DVD
Susan is 64 years old and from Melbourne. When The Beatles performed in Australia in the 1960s, she and thousands of fans went to where they were staying. The night before her public meeting, she and her friends stayed outside the hotel and sang all night long. Australia's conservative media called the largest public gathering in the country's history a "stain" and asked what the parents of these children were doing. Susan's mother was angry with her daughter for this.
Filmmaker Susan, 64.
Sydney native Darla, 33, was perfect for Take That. She is a brand planner by profession. She explained to Leski the secret of the boy band's success on a blackboard, which is the kind of analysis that the media is accustomed to: the role of each member (mysterious, cute, paternal, sexy). , non-existent type), the best age of members (17-21 years old), it is best to sing love songs but not involve sex, etc. When giving a PPT presentation to a large company with a market value of billions of dollars, Darla used personal goods and put Gary Barlow's singing into the background music without anyone noticing. Darla shows off to the camera what it's like to hear Barlow sing. With a happy look on her face, she explains the boy band's secret: they bring pure joy to anyone who hears them.
Darla's Perfect Reception Chorus
Director Jessica Lesky has captured a captivating story. Fascination and fanaticism are often synonymous with irrationality and danger. Although young women who are obsessed with boy bands are not that dangerous, they cannot escape being labeled as "abnormal, childish, stupid, and pathetic." The 16-year-old Yelif, who was the first to appear, perfectly interpreted these labels. She has braces, wears tacky clothes, and smiles like a nymphomaniac. Yelif despises boys of the same age and considers one-dimensional boys to be his favorite people, more than his parents and older brothers.
Yelif
If it weren't for this documentary, we would rarely have the opportunity to see these female fans of boy bands. They are not at all what we think they are. The long-term unrequited emotional devotion to their beloved boy band not only did not turn Satya, Susan, Yelif, and Dara into failed adults, it also allowed them to retain more poetry than ordinary people.
First of all, they are not unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality as people speculated. The youngest Yelif also knew that she was chasing a dream that could never be realized. Except in her dreams, she doesn't get the chance to eat soup with the One Direction members and play hide-and-seek in the woods (her fantasy). When she was eighteen years old, she took off her braces, taught herself guitar, started regularly posting cover songs on YouTube, and tried to write her own songs. She knows better than adults that the stage of life she is in is a special moment when adults think she is immature, her childhood is over, and the window to pursue her dreams without distraction is about to close.
The eldest Susan is a film producer and has a son and a daughter. She never forgot what Beatlemania meant to her life: a carefree time, a love regardless of cost or reward.
Whenever something goes wrong, Dara will habitually look for answers from the boy band. When she is frustrated, she will ask herself, what do you want? The answer is the same every time: "I want to have fun, to express myself, to collect all the little things in a box like reception choir merch."
Darla plastered the room Photo collage of the reception choir
Like other standard documentaries, director Lesky mentions the social environment of the four female fans in their star-chasing era. Melbourne in the 1960s was very conservative, and young women had little choice about their future. Susan's parents did not allow her to go to university to study medicine. In New York, the United States, at the beginning of the 21st century, Yelif was also rejected by her parents from attending her favorite art university on the grounds that she had "no future."
But Leschi doesn't spend as much time on the difficulties of adolescence as a young woman's repressed need to express love and sex. She chose to give the microphone to the interviewees as much as possible during the hour and a half, listening to them describe their obsessions and growing with them. The crowded scenes of star chasing scenes in the film do not contain any sense of ridicule.
"Being a normal person is boring. It only means that you don't resonate with the world." This is Dara's view. Darla is very handsome, and she did something even more handsome, printing "BOYBND" on the license plate . Wherever she drives, she gets mixed reviews, but she will never be ignored.
Darla puts "BOYBND" on her license plate
Being different forces these four women to be constantly introspective, analyze the origins of their obsessions, and try to find ways to make peace with it. For a long time, Dara and Satya did not dare to disclose their identity as fans of the boy band to others, for fear of being preconceivedly labeled and classified as someone other than their own.
They are indeed abnormal. There is always a group of abnormal people in the crowd who are willing to release their useless passions in the subculture and burn their youth many times more than their peers. After seeing the many dark sides of fandom culture, "I Used to Be Normal" made people feel great, as if they knew another secret to happiness.
How many people can be like 64-year-old Susan, who said with a smile that her life has not been wasted, and one experience will lead to another. "Because of the Beatles, I will always be closely connected with my younger self."
"Because of the Beatles, I will always be closely connected with my younger self"
Editor in charge: Chen Shihuai
Proofreader: Xu Yijia
