text | Ah sneeze
The following content contains spoilers, please read with caution
The Taiwanese drama "She and Her Her" begins with a workplace sexual harassment incident that gradually escalates to a serious level and eventually turns into an attempted rape. Danny, a returnee from overseas played by Wu Kangren , initially gave people the impression that this person did not have much sense of boundaries. He would walk directly into the heroine Lin Chenxi's office to grab a useful pen without saying hello, and would touch the heroine's waist seemingly casually at the reception. But after the heroine clearly reminded him, he not only failed to restrain himself, but intensified his behavior. In just half an episode, he had gone from forcibly kissing the heroine to knocking the heroine unconscious and attempting to rape her.
When Wu Kangren interpreted this role, he very cleverly gave him a lot of smiles. This contrast made this character even more terrifying. Although the role of Danny does not play much in the whole drama, it actually plays a role as a fuse. Wu Kangren fulfilled this role well with superb acting skills.
Faced with the violation, Lin Chenxi resisted in a "textbook style". The anti-wolf spray carried by and the pen on her desk became the weapons to help her escape, but on the way out of the company and driving home, Lin Chenxi encountered a car accident. When she woke up, she found that she was living a completely different life from the one described in the first episode of the drama:
First of all, it was the place and time, from November in Taipei to May in her hometown of Yilan; at work, Lin Chenxi was no longer a well-paid headhunting consultant, but became the director of a local kindergarten. Teacher; her long-dead father and brother are miraculously still alive, but her boyfriend’s mobile phone number has become empty, and her boyfriend himself has disappeared. However, there is a police officer Xiao Liu who accidentally appears in her life and looks exactly like her boyfriend... Faced with these incredible things Due to the changes in the discussion, her family and psychiatrist told Lin Chenxi that because she had a car accident a while ago, the sequelae caused her to suffer from various memory confusion and amnesia. The things she thought had happened were just dreams that combined and distorted reality.
Which side is the real world? This question has not yet been answered, and the screenwriter quickly raised a second question. A murder occurred in a local nursing home in Yilan. The deceased was an old man who lost his ability to move due to a stroke. Who would kill such an old man? Zhuang Zhou dreams of a butterfly or Zhuang Zhou dreams of a butterfly, and what is the truth hidden behind the murder? These two suspenses have become the engine that drives the development of the entire drama. What brings these two seemingly unrelated suspense together is Lin Chenxi and her past.
This drama uses constant flashbacks of school scenes to explain to the audience what happened to Lin Chenxi in middle school. It is worth mentioning that the young actor Lin Yilan played the role of Lin Chenxi with Tiffany Hsu. Like Tiffany Hsu, Lin Yilan is also of mixed race, and both of them also have European-style three-dimensional facial features. The crew's careful consideration in casting ensures that the audience will not feel like they are out of a drama due to cross-editing during the movie watching.
As Lin Chenxi gradually regained consciousness, in the seventh episode, we finally understood that everything that happened to in May in Yilan was actually a world she dissociated from due to mental trauma, and it had never really happened. Through the memories of Lin Chenxi’s student days, we can see that What left serious trauma to Lin Chenxi was that she was raped by the tutor Xie Zhizhong in her third year of junior high school, and the way the school and parents handled the matter - don’t make a big deal out of it and stop pursuing it.
At this point, the character of Lin Chenxi is truly complete. In the eyes of outsiders, she is outstanding, capable and glamorous, but only she knows that a casual hug from her boyfriend, the flash of the camera, and the inadvertent hearing of the song played when the crime occurred will drag her thoughts back to the scene of the violation. For a long time, she has been in a state of "living with injuries and pretending to be fine". This kind of character setting not only shows the ability of sexual assault victims to heal themselves, but also makes people realize that treating the mental trauma after sexual assault may be a long process.
This sexual assault case is the key to unlocking the suspense of the entire drama. After knowing Lin Chenxi's past, and looking back at the dissociated world that occupies most of the entire drama, we can see some shadows of "Mulholland Drive". dissociating is like a dream. It combines some of the most profound memories in Lin Chenxi's mind, and at the same time shows her true desires and secret fears in her heart.
For example, in reality, she cut off contact with her family for more than ten years because of the way her parents handled the sexual assault. When her father and brother died, she did not return home. But her heart is not as strong as she appears. She still longs for the company of her family, but while she cannot forgive her parents, she is also escaping from that traumatic memory. Such a twisted mentality eventually evolved in the dissociated world. She suffered memory damage due to a car accident and completely forgot about the sexual assault incident. Her family did not want to mention it, so the family of four lived an ordinary life together.
This exactly reflects the complexity of the influence of the original family on a person. But if you choose to forgive or reconcile against your will for the sake of a seemingly complete family, it will not really have any effect. Lin Chenxi said, everyone has the right to grieve for the fact that they have never received the love they longed for from their parents, and they have the right not to downplay or discount the hurt they have suffered.
In a world of dissociation, can Lin Chenxi really forget about sexual assault? The existence of the murder in the nursing home proves that she has never forgotten the incident subconsciously, and has never forgiven the perpetrator, because the person killed in the nursing home was the teacher who raped her, Xie Zhizhong. The two suspects that the police investigated were the ones who more or less failed to meet her expectations after the sexual assault incident. They are Yan Shenghua, the senior sister who was also sexually assaulted by Xie Zhizhong but did not speak out about the incident with Lin Chenxi, and her father who asked Lin Chenxi to deny the sexual assault in front of the teacher at school. In reality, Lin Chenxi's younger brother died in a car accident while going to find Xie Zhizhong. In the dissociated world, it was his younger brother who ultimately killed Xie Zhizhong. The real murderer is a good person, but the person who cleared the suspicion is an accomplice to some extent. This seemingly inverted view of good and evil is the simplest thought in Lin Chenxi's heart. She wants to take revenge on the perpetrator. She is full of resentment towards her senior sister and father who did not stand up to help her.
After Xie Zhizhong’s death, Lin Chenxi, who had separated from the world, was not completely liberated. In the eighth episode, three young men and women were knocked down one by one by the elderly Mrs. Xie. The seemingly anti-intellectual plot actually corresponds to the fact that when the Lin and Xie families confronted each other shortly after the sexual assault, Mrs. Xie was in complete control of the situation. At that time, her weapon was the sexual shame that society has attached to women for a long time. Three people can't beat an old woman. The unreasonableness of this plot is the same as the difficulty faced by Lin Chenxi when he wanted to sue after being sexually assaulted.
In addition to the main line of Lin Chenxi, the screenwriter also presented a lot of sexism and stereotypes about women through the various experiences of her two female friends , such as the unfair treatment that women may encounter due to pregnancy in the workplace, and the harm caused by the spread of private videos in intimate relationships. It can be seen that the screenwriter has included as many difficulties as possible that women will encounter in reality in the limited plot.
In the last episode of the play, the screenwriter used the words that the heroine wrote to herself in her diary to comfort and encourage Lin Chenxi outside the play. This intention is good and worth repeating, but just like the ending, the entire show also stays within a very safe range, at a level where most people cannot say it is bad.
From the perspective of feminist issues, "She and Her Her" actually does not give anything more profound. It is more about putting the gender issues that the audience, especially female audiences are already familiar with, into the shell of a dissociated world to present them, that is, retelling things that have appeared many times in the news and hot social events. From the perspective of the viewing of film and television works, the screenwriter chose to use two lines of mental dissociation and homicide to unravel a sexual assault incident. It gave me the feeling that the screenwriter also knew that without these two suspenses, the story itself would not be richer than " Fang Siqi's First Love Paradise " written by Lin Yihan .
Although "She and Her Her" is not perfect, it has still gained people's recognition after it was launched. On Douban, with the increase in the number of viewers, the show has risen from 8.2 when it was first released to the current 8.6. This recognition of may not be limited to the drama itself. To a greater extent, it is an affirmation that film and television works have paid attention to sexual assaults with a high rate of hidden crimes in reality.
In recent years, some film and television works focusing on such themes have emerged around the world, such as the 2017 domestic movie " Carnival " and the 2019 American drama " Unbelievable ". This may give people the feeling that there are "too many" such works. But compared with those who choose to remain silent and pretend to be okay after being sexually assaulted due to various pressures, and compared with film and television works that set misogyny and male gaze as the default state, and beautify sexual harassment as a normal pursuit, there are still too few dramas like "Her and Her Her".
Editor: Wang Haiyan/Typesetting: Feifei/Reviewer: Tongtong
(Excerpted from the WeChat public account Sanlian Life Weekly, Ah ZzzZ/Text )
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