Post-The Rebel rambling
Sep. 19th, 2021 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomiI have finished watching The Rebel and I have VERY LONG, spoilery, (repetitive, ill-informed) thoughts as below. (Draws considerably on sakana17’s excellent discussions of the drama which I have not yet managed to comment properly on, but go read them if you haven’t already.)
It has not escaped my attention that when I started watching this drama, a couple of months ago, my view was “this is such a propaganda piece, I wonder if it’s even morally okay for me to watch it at all,” and now, due to events in the interim, I can’t help thinking “thank goodness they put so much propaganda in, maybe having this drama on their resumes will help the actors stay a little bit safer.” I hate all of this, in all aspects.
I still have very mixed feelings, although they’re not exactly the same mixed feelings I had when I started watching. I really, really wish I could read what the History of 21st-Century Chinese Dramas, 2080 Edition will have to say about it, when everything is clear.
We all know that the quasi-danmei dramas like Guardian deliberately skirted the edges of what they could get away with re m/m; I wonder whether some of the same behind-the-scenes push and pull went on with The Rebel? Not in the m/m sense (although the director did not miss a trick drawing out the chemistry in all Zhu Yilong's scenes with the superb Wang Yang), but in the sense of “what is the Party going to want” versus “what will make this more human/real/complex/dramatically satisfying.” One would like to think that they were working toward that end, maybe they were all simply joined in the desire to celebrate the CCP, most likely the truth is somewhere in between. Has this been written about (in general) somewhere?
One thing that does suggest to me that there was some push-and-pull is the...imbalance...it’s not actually very well done as propaganda in some ways. The outright CCP-banzai (ironic) scenes are extremely clunky (the radio speech scenes in Hong Kong, Lin Nansheng joining the party etc.). I feel as if the propaganda is not actually all that skillful throughout the rest of the show, either? The CCP people are morally good by the show’s standards, but also not terribly competent (I wonder if they had to achieve a tricky balance of “these fictional people are heroes of the CCP” with “but we can’t actually ascribe heroic deeds of real CCP people to them without disrespecting the historical figures”?). On the whole the people who actually get done what they’re attempting are Wang Shi’an and Meng Annan, neither of them set up to be ideologically admirable.
And there are strange exceptions here and there to their Party propaganda. Lan Xinjie doesn’t care; she cares about her son and about Lin Nansheng (not romantically, I think); she doesn’t believe in anybody’s Cause. (I will give the drama credit for not for one minute slut-shaming her as a dancer in Shanghai or a girl who goes with Western soldiers in Chongqing; it’s accepted that she does what she has to do to survive and it’s not shameful for her, and in fact Lin Nansheng defends her honor in so many words. When he marries her, he’s not saving her soul from a life of iniquity, just giving her a safer official status.) She dies because the situation is fucked up, not out of any political commitment. And I’m still amazed they slipped in a “good Japanese” in the person of Mrs. Fukuyama, without making her secretly evil or having her put to death by her countrymen, etc.
Also, obviously the Japanese are the main antagonists for much of the show, but they’re just cardboard bad guys: the emotional force of conflict is with Chen Moqun and Wang Shi’an, and that was a brilliant, brilliant choice in writing/directing (not to mention casting two absolutely terrific actors without whom it would have fallen flat), and I want to know how that intersected with the propaganda needs.
Except for Lin Nansheng before he meets Zhu Yizhen and during his final meeting with her, almost no one is openly who they are, ever. Lin Nansheng meets her first in the guise of Xu Liwen, and then he is increasingly drawn into the Communist side until he becomes the secret Youchai; at the very end he’s “Teacher Zuo” for a while. All the Communists function undercover in some way—Lao Gu and Lao Ji, of course, Zuo Qiuming in Hong Kong, Meng Annan and Zhu Yizhen as the Shens (and of course Meng Annan is playing two roles on top of each other, three if you consider he didn’t even start out as Meng Annan in the first place). Wang Shi’an is an obsessive keeper of secrets. The closest to being exactly who they are, all the time, are perhaps Chen Moqun and Lan Xinjie, and they suffer for it.
One phrase that runs through the whole thing is 活着, to survive—Zhu Yizhen says it to Lin Nansheng after the shootout when her young comrade dies, Zuo Qiuming says it to him when he’s miserable and defeated in the Hong Kong hospital, and Lin Nansheng says it back at least once although I can’t remember where—maybe by Zuo Qiuming’s gravestone? It’s also the phrase Chen Moqun clings to in his last days, saying “what I need is to survive” to Wang Shi’an in one of their sub rosa conferences, and to Lin Nansheng in their last confrontation as well. (Hard not to think of it in context as a view taken on life in current China, but they probably didn’t have that in mind.) It came back to me, although possibly not as the show intended, at the very end, Lin Nansheng quietly teaching first graders in a fishing village, living on. (After forty-three episodes of terrible things, what actually made me cry was seeing Lin Nansheng as the gentle schoolteacher, with the soft hair and the pure white robe and the warm, tired, older face.)
The ending is so strange. I find it hard to believe that Zhu Yizhen could be alive (if they hadn’t shot her, yes, but otherwise it’s just too improbable). Lin Nansheng loses everyone, and it’s hard to tell whether they meant “Communism is worth it, it doesn’t matter who dies” or “look at the heroic sacrifices this generation made so we could have what we have now” (I think that’s the line Zhu Yilong himself was taking in interviews), but...it all feels like so much fumbling in the dark that it’s hard to think of it as worth it. That’s another thing, the little home movie at the end just...feels as if there was not accord among the directors/producers; it doesn’t make sense. I think it would have been infinitely more effective just to end on Lin Nansheng’s painfully smiling face. (I mean, suggesting that Lin Nansheng dies, or hallucinates, without making it back to Shanghai to see the CCP triumphant feels like it invalidates everything. Which might be more to the point historically (congratulations, Lin Nansheng, you have been spared living through the worst atrocities of Mao) but is not what the show wants to say, surely). Maybe, as a straight-up happy ending, it’s an image of how Lin Nansheng found Zhu Yizhen in Shanghai and they did their Party duty there and then came back to the village and lived happily after as schoolteachers. It’s so strange.
When they were students, Lin Nansheng had a crush on/idolized Zuo Qiuming, and ZQM thought he was adorable. When they meet in Hong Kong, it’s kind of reversed: ZQM is really strongly drawn to grown-up Lin Nansheng, shattered as he is, while LNS cares about him a lot as a friend but doesn’t have room for that kind of almost-obsessive love when it’s all taken up already by Zhu Yizhen and Chen Moqun.
It sucks that Wang Shi’an didn’t get a proper ending scene (a death scene or otherwise), what a waste. I wonder if they planned his ending before they realized that Zhang Zixian was going to knock it out of the park that way. Self-indulgently, if I were the scriptwriter: Meng Annan isn’t killed in his fight with Lin Nansheng, just knocked out, and he comes to when Wang Shi’an and his men come into the store. The goons get sent away to chase outside, “we’ll check that they’re not hiding in here,” and Meng Annan and Wang Shi’an have a tense conversation that turns into another fight, Meng Annan determined to kill him (and make it look like Lin Nansheng did it?) in revenge for Chen Moqun. “You betrayed him and in the end you killed him, if not for you it would be him here as station chief now.” “Why you? what was so special about you and Lin Nansheng, what did you have that I don’t have, why was it never me?” In the end they end up killing each other, either deliberately or in an accident similar to the one that kills Meng Annan on screen.
Chen Moqun’s whole existence bends the propaganda weirdly out of shape. While Wang Shi’an is also compelling, because every time Zhang Zixian is on screen it becomes a first-person narrative from his perspective, he’s clearly intended to be villainous. It’s much harder to figure out what is happening with Chen Moqun, in terms of both the show’s intentions and how they turned out.
Some of it may just have been the production deciding “Wang Yang and Zhu Yilong are electric together on camera, let’s run with that,” but—he’s a villain, but he’s also an intensely important part of Lin Nansheng’s emotional landscape. He’s originally responsible for Lin Nansheng’s presence in Shanghai at all and for his acquaintance with Zhu Yizhen, and he continues to loom large, present or absent, right up through his death in Lin Nansheng’s arms; we are essentially called on to feel sympathy for him because of the way he’s forced into going over to the Japanese and also, in a way, for his desperation to get out at the end. In both cases his mantra is “survive” again, and he is judged harshly for it—look at Lin Nansheng in the Hong Kong hospital, speaking Japanese (very badly, but still more than Chen Moqun is willing to do) and making surface-level nice with the Japanese officers, for which the narrative does not blame him, unlike its condemnation of Chen Moqun. His whole storyline is a series of bad choices in a sense, from his tenure as station chief on, but in many cases he doesn’t really have any good ones; and his larger-than-life personality influences pretty much everything that happens in the whole drama, directly or indirectly, through his effects on Lin Nansheng, Lan Xinjie, and Meng Annan. I don’t know, I really don’t.
Leaving aside the difficulty of writing a fic that does justice to the historical/political situation (as opposed to straight-up interpersonal stuff, which has already been done and well)...I still kind of want Wang Shi’an redemption fic [assuming it’s possible to agree on what “redemption” means in this context, because I don’t mean “seeing the Communist light”. Genuinely helping people who need help and not harming people who shouldn’t be harmed?]. One of my favorite MDZS/CQL fics is a canon divergence in which Jin Guangyao is trying really hard to be evil and circumstances conspire against him to redeem him almost against his will, and though the settings are not comparable—and it’s not necessarily a good idea to even try to compare fantasy-ancient-setting with 20th-c politics setting—that’s kind of what I’d like for Wang Shi’an.
If I were making excuses for him, I might say: it’s clear to him early on (in his life, I mean, not in the drama) that he’s never going to be the favored one, he’s never going to have the charisma and power of a Chen Moqun, no one is going to give him the plum assignments or pluck him out and dote on him the way Chen Moqun does with Lin Nansheng and Meng Annan. And he says to himself, well, I have to look after myself, my own position, because no one else is going to. And that becomes his motivation and his motif. And there’s probably a strong strain of it’s-not-fair in there, because he’s not incompetent or average—when he becomes station chief, especially after Gu Shenyan is gone, you can see him develop a calm, poised, unreadable surface distinct from the sulky whiny short-tempered deputy chief he was; he’s intelligent, quick-thinking, resourceful, even brave in his own twisted way, and when he does deliberately show favor to someone they respond with loyalty (poor Zhang-mishu). He’s the antithesis of Lin Nansheng in some ways, because Lin Nansheng’s devotion is to his ideals at the cost of self. (But everyone gets other people hurt and killed, it’s just okay if you’re doing it for the Communist cause, oy veh.)
The thing is that Wang Shi’an is genuinely a horrible human being in many ways, but Zhang Zixian’s performance makes it clear that “horrible” and “human being” are both in there and you can’t ignore either component.
The acting is absolutely fucking superb across the board. In particular, Wang Yang (Chen Moqun) and Zhang Zixian (Wang Shi’an), in their very different ways, both give stunning, career-defining performances as complex, fucked-up, fatally flawed, fully realized human beings. (Zhang Zixian in particular—the kind of thing that we admire in ZYL as well, and that most actors don’t even attempt—every expression and microexpression, gesture, stance, inflection precisely tuned to express this unique character, so that the content of the lines and the overall blocking are only, like, 35% of what you get. Watching him would be a masterclass for anyone.) I kind of feel for Tong Yao (Zhu Yizhen) because it’s a very thankless role compared to the other major parts: she’s basically Communist ideology in the form of the love interest, and although the actress is obviously good, the part has to be played very straight and there just isn’t that much there. Zhu Zhu (Lan Xinjie) has a little more to work with, and although I hate plot lines which rely on either child cuteness or child death to make their points (not from any personal trauma, I just find it manipulative and sentimental), she did as well with it as anyone could and really made Lan Xinjie believable, sympathetic, and free of stereotype.
The (drama-version) role of Lin Nansheng was written with Zhu Yilong in mind from the start, if I remember correctly, and it obviously plays to all his strengths: the sense of innocence which is a baseline in pretty much every role he plays, subtle physicality which speaks volumes, tears without melodrama, rare and brilliant smiles, physical and emotional agony convincingly put across (and of course breathtaking good looks, even when he’s five kilos too thin). (In a way I’d actually like to have watched the drama without ever having seen him in other roles; I think after seeing him as Shen Wei, Wu Xie, etc. it’s easy to start taking for granted how good he is and how subtle and detailed his work is, and fail to give him enough credit because it’s “Zhu Yilong doing his thing” without remembering how extraordinary that is.) I still think the role is limited by having the ultimate right answers spelled out for the character (in the end), but his work is beautiful and he has no trouble at all living up to the top-level actors he’s working with. I really really want to see what he’s going to be doing two or three decades from now, playing the complex character roles in his turn (assuming that he doesn’t get fucked over by politics, knock wood, or destroy his health in the interim); that’s going to be fascinating.
It has not escaped my attention that when I started watching this drama, a couple of months ago, my view was “this is such a propaganda piece, I wonder if it’s even morally okay for me to watch it at all,” and now, due to events in the interim, I can’t help thinking “thank goodness they put so much propaganda in, maybe having this drama on their resumes will help the actors stay a little bit safer.” I hate all of this, in all aspects.
I still have very mixed feelings, although they’re not exactly the same mixed feelings I had when I started watching. I really, really wish I could read what the History of 21st-Century Chinese Dramas, 2080 Edition will have to say about it, when everything is clear.
We all know that the quasi-danmei dramas like Guardian deliberately skirted the edges of what they could get away with re m/m; I wonder whether some of the same behind-the-scenes push and pull went on with The Rebel? Not in the m/m sense (although the director did not miss a trick drawing out the chemistry in all Zhu Yilong's scenes with the superb Wang Yang), but in the sense of “what is the Party going to want” versus “what will make this more human/real/complex/dramatically satisfying.” One would like to think that they were working toward that end, maybe they were all simply joined in the desire to celebrate the CCP, most likely the truth is somewhere in between. Has this been written about (in general) somewhere?
One thing that does suggest to me that there was some push-and-pull is the...imbalance...it’s not actually very well done as propaganda in some ways. The outright CCP-banzai (ironic) scenes are extremely clunky (the radio speech scenes in Hong Kong, Lin Nansheng joining the party etc.). I feel as if the propaganda is not actually all that skillful throughout the rest of the show, either? The CCP people are morally good by the show’s standards, but also not terribly competent (I wonder if they had to achieve a tricky balance of “these fictional people are heroes of the CCP” with “but we can’t actually ascribe heroic deeds of real CCP people to them without disrespecting the historical figures”?). On the whole the people who actually get done what they’re attempting are Wang Shi’an and Meng Annan, neither of them set up to be ideologically admirable.
And there are strange exceptions here and there to their Party propaganda. Lan Xinjie doesn’t care; she cares about her son and about Lin Nansheng (not romantically, I think); she doesn’t believe in anybody’s Cause. (I will give the drama credit for not for one minute slut-shaming her as a dancer in Shanghai or a girl who goes with Western soldiers in Chongqing; it’s accepted that she does what she has to do to survive and it’s not shameful for her, and in fact Lin Nansheng defends her honor in so many words. When he marries her, he’s not saving her soul from a life of iniquity, just giving her a safer official status.) She dies because the situation is fucked up, not out of any political commitment. And I’m still amazed they slipped in a “good Japanese” in the person of Mrs. Fukuyama, without making her secretly evil or having her put to death by her countrymen, etc.
Also, obviously the Japanese are the main antagonists for much of the show, but they’re just cardboard bad guys: the emotional force of conflict is with Chen Moqun and Wang Shi’an, and that was a brilliant, brilliant choice in writing/directing (not to mention casting two absolutely terrific actors without whom it would have fallen flat), and I want to know how that intersected with the propaganda needs.
Except for Lin Nansheng before he meets Zhu Yizhen and during his final meeting with her, almost no one is openly who they are, ever. Lin Nansheng meets her first in the guise of Xu Liwen, and then he is increasingly drawn into the Communist side until he becomes the secret Youchai; at the very end he’s “Teacher Zuo” for a while. All the Communists function undercover in some way—Lao Gu and Lao Ji, of course, Zuo Qiuming in Hong Kong, Meng Annan and Zhu Yizhen as the Shens (and of course Meng Annan is playing two roles on top of each other, three if you consider he didn’t even start out as Meng Annan in the first place). Wang Shi’an is an obsessive keeper of secrets. The closest to being exactly who they are, all the time, are perhaps Chen Moqun and Lan Xinjie, and they suffer for it.
One phrase that runs through the whole thing is 活着, to survive—Zhu Yizhen says it to Lin Nansheng after the shootout when her young comrade dies, Zuo Qiuming says it to him when he’s miserable and defeated in the Hong Kong hospital, and Lin Nansheng says it back at least once although I can’t remember where—maybe by Zuo Qiuming’s gravestone? It’s also the phrase Chen Moqun clings to in his last days, saying “what I need is to survive” to Wang Shi’an in one of their sub rosa conferences, and to Lin Nansheng in their last confrontation as well. (Hard not to think of it in context as a view taken on life in current China, but they probably didn’t have that in mind.) It came back to me, although possibly not as the show intended, at the very end, Lin Nansheng quietly teaching first graders in a fishing village, living on. (After forty-three episodes of terrible things, what actually made me cry was seeing Lin Nansheng as the gentle schoolteacher, with the soft hair and the pure white robe and the warm, tired, older face.)
The ending is so strange. I find it hard to believe that Zhu Yizhen could be alive (if they hadn’t shot her, yes, but otherwise it’s just too improbable). Lin Nansheng loses everyone, and it’s hard to tell whether they meant “Communism is worth it, it doesn’t matter who dies” or “look at the heroic sacrifices this generation made so we could have what we have now” (I think that’s the line Zhu Yilong himself was taking in interviews), but...it all feels like so much fumbling in the dark that it’s hard to think of it as worth it. That’s another thing, the little home movie at the end just...feels as if there was not accord among the directors/producers; it doesn’t make sense. I think it would have been infinitely more effective just to end on Lin Nansheng’s painfully smiling face. (I mean, suggesting that Lin Nansheng dies, or hallucinates, without making it back to Shanghai to see the CCP triumphant feels like it invalidates everything. Which might be more to the point historically (congratulations, Lin Nansheng, you have been spared living through the worst atrocities of Mao) but is not what the show wants to say, surely). Maybe, as a straight-up happy ending, it’s an image of how Lin Nansheng found Zhu Yizhen in Shanghai and they did their Party duty there and then came back to the village and lived happily after as schoolteachers. It’s so strange.
When they were students, Lin Nansheng had a crush on/idolized Zuo Qiuming, and ZQM thought he was adorable. When they meet in Hong Kong, it’s kind of reversed: ZQM is really strongly drawn to grown-up Lin Nansheng, shattered as he is, while LNS cares about him a lot as a friend but doesn’t have room for that kind of almost-obsessive love when it’s all taken up already by Zhu Yizhen and Chen Moqun.
It sucks that Wang Shi’an didn’t get a proper ending scene (a death scene or otherwise), what a waste. I wonder if they planned his ending before they realized that Zhang Zixian was going to knock it out of the park that way. Self-indulgently, if I were the scriptwriter: Meng Annan isn’t killed in his fight with Lin Nansheng, just knocked out, and he comes to when Wang Shi’an and his men come into the store. The goons get sent away to chase outside, “we’ll check that they’re not hiding in here,” and Meng Annan and Wang Shi’an have a tense conversation that turns into another fight, Meng Annan determined to kill him (and make it look like Lin Nansheng did it?) in revenge for Chen Moqun. “You betrayed him and in the end you killed him, if not for you it would be him here as station chief now.” “Why you? what was so special about you and Lin Nansheng, what did you have that I don’t have, why was it never me?” In the end they end up killing each other, either deliberately or in an accident similar to the one that kills Meng Annan on screen.
Chen Moqun’s whole existence bends the propaganda weirdly out of shape. While Wang Shi’an is also compelling, because every time Zhang Zixian is on screen it becomes a first-person narrative from his perspective, he’s clearly intended to be villainous. It’s much harder to figure out what is happening with Chen Moqun, in terms of both the show’s intentions and how they turned out.
Some of it may just have been the production deciding “Wang Yang and Zhu Yilong are electric together on camera, let’s run with that,” but—he’s a villain, but he’s also an intensely important part of Lin Nansheng’s emotional landscape. He’s originally responsible for Lin Nansheng’s presence in Shanghai at all and for his acquaintance with Zhu Yizhen, and he continues to loom large, present or absent, right up through his death in Lin Nansheng’s arms; we are essentially called on to feel sympathy for him because of the way he’s forced into going over to the Japanese and also, in a way, for his desperation to get out at the end. In both cases his mantra is “survive” again, and he is judged harshly for it—look at Lin Nansheng in the Hong Kong hospital, speaking Japanese (very badly, but still more than Chen Moqun is willing to do) and making surface-level nice with the Japanese officers, for which the narrative does not blame him, unlike its condemnation of Chen Moqun. His whole storyline is a series of bad choices in a sense, from his tenure as station chief on, but in many cases he doesn’t really have any good ones; and his larger-than-life personality influences pretty much everything that happens in the whole drama, directly or indirectly, through his effects on Lin Nansheng, Lan Xinjie, and Meng Annan. I don’t know, I really don’t.
Leaving aside the difficulty of writing a fic that does justice to the historical/political situation (as opposed to straight-up interpersonal stuff, which has already been done and well)...I still kind of want Wang Shi’an redemption fic [assuming it’s possible to agree on what “redemption” means in this context, because I don’t mean “seeing the Communist light”. Genuinely helping people who need help and not harming people who shouldn’t be harmed?]. One of my favorite MDZS/CQL fics is a canon divergence in which Jin Guangyao is trying really hard to be evil and circumstances conspire against him to redeem him almost against his will, and though the settings are not comparable—and it’s not necessarily a good idea to even try to compare fantasy-ancient-setting with 20th-c politics setting—that’s kind of what I’d like for Wang Shi’an.
If I were making excuses for him, I might say: it’s clear to him early on (in his life, I mean, not in the drama) that he’s never going to be the favored one, he’s never going to have the charisma and power of a Chen Moqun, no one is going to give him the plum assignments or pluck him out and dote on him the way Chen Moqun does with Lin Nansheng and Meng Annan. And he says to himself, well, I have to look after myself, my own position, because no one else is going to. And that becomes his motivation and his motif. And there’s probably a strong strain of it’s-not-fair in there, because he’s not incompetent or average—when he becomes station chief, especially after Gu Shenyan is gone, you can see him develop a calm, poised, unreadable surface distinct from the sulky whiny short-tempered deputy chief he was; he’s intelligent, quick-thinking, resourceful, even brave in his own twisted way, and when he does deliberately show favor to someone they respond with loyalty (poor Zhang-mishu). He’s the antithesis of Lin Nansheng in some ways, because Lin Nansheng’s devotion is to his ideals at the cost of self. (But everyone gets other people hurt and killed, it’s just okay if you’re doing it for the Communist cause, oy veh.)
The thing is that Wang Shi’an is genuinely a horrible human being in many ways, but Zhang Zixian’s performance makes it clear that “horrible” and “human being” are both in there and you can’t ignore either component.
The acting is absolutely fucking superb across the board. In particular, Wang Yang (Chen Moqun) and Zhang Zixian (Wang Shi’an), in their very different ways, both give stunning, career-defining performances as complex, fucked-up, fatally flawed, fully realized human beings. (Zhang Zixian in particular—the kind of thing that we admire in ZYL as well, and that most actors don’t even attempt—every expression and microexpression, gesture, stance, inflection precisely tuned to express this unique character, so that the content of the lines and the overall blocking are only, like, 35% of what you get. Watching him would be a masterclass for anyone.) I kind of feel for Tong Yao (Zhu Yizhen) because it’s a very thankless role compared to the other major parts: she’s basically Communist ideology in the form of the love interest, and although the actress is obviously good, the part has to be played very straight and there just isn’t that much there. Zhu Zhu (Lan Xinjie) has a little more to work with, and although I hate plot lines which rely on either child cuteness or child death to make their points (not from any personal trauma, I just find it manipulative and sentimental), she did as well with it as anyone could and really made Lan Xinjie believable, sympathetic, and free of stereotype.
The (drama-version) role of Lin Nansheng was written with Zhu Yilong in mind from the start, if I remember correctly, and it obviously plays to all his strengths: the sense of innocence which is a baseline in pretty much every role he plays, subtle physicality which speaks volumes, tears without melodrama, rare and brilliant smiles, physical and emotional agony convincingly put across (and of course breathtaking good looks, even when he’s five kilos too thin). (In a way I’d actually like to have watched the drama without ever having seen him in other roles; I think after seeing him as Shen Wei, Wu Xie, etc. it’s easy to start taking for granted how good he is and how subtle and detailed his work is, and fail to give him enough credit because it’s “Zhu Yilong doing his thing” without remembering how extraordinary that is.) I still think the role is limited by having the ultimate right answers spelled out for the character (in the end), but his work is beautiful and he has no trouble at all living up to the top-level actors he’s working with. I really really want to see what he’s going to be doing two or three decades from now, playing the complex character roles in his turn (assuming that he doesn’t get fucked over by politics, knock wood, or destroy his health in the interim); that’s going to be fascinating.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-19 01:28 pm (UTC)Yeah. I'm not sure how much new (or new-to-me) C-ent stuff I'll be consuming for a while. Maybe it's a cop-out but I don't have the emotional bandwidth for all the background baggage. My heart aches for everyone negatively affected by these decrees and it absolutely breaks for the creatives.
no subject
Date: 2021-09-19 10:14 pm (UTC)yeah, I don't think it's a cop-out at all, the situation is scary and depressing, and all the information is speculation. I am likely to keep on reading fic etc., but having finished this drama I don't know that I'll be picking up a new one for a while. Let's just hope it's a passing stage.
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Date: 2021-09-19 10:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-20 11:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-09-19 11:15 pm (UTC)maybe having this drama on their resumes will help the actors stay a little bit safer.” I hate all of this, in all aspects.
Ugh. I have been thinking the same thing. It's awful.
Has this been written about (in general) somewhere?
I don't have an answer for this, but I'm also very curious. A downside of Chinese media is that we don't get good behind-the-scenes "what were they thinking when they did this" articles. The Dramapotatoe blog's first impressions of the show implied it did nothing different from others of its genre, and I'd heard that AvenueX's YouTube review said more or less the same thing.
it’s not actually very well done as propaganda in some ways
That's my feeling. As propaganda, I can't quite imagine how it would inspire anyone to join the CCP. Although they are presented as noble, they also do ruthless things and they all die (except for Lin Nansheng, maybe). I feel it's more patriotic ("admire the sacrifices of those in the past") than propaganda, except for those few clunky scenes.
On the whole the people who actually get done what they’re attempting are Wang Shi’an and Meng Annan, neither of them set up to be ideologically admirable.
That is an excellent point I hadn't considered before now. This is fascinating to me. And it's not like their deaths are the narrative's final judgment on them ("they may have been successful but look at their fates") because everyone else dies, too. They don't meet a worse fate than the supposed heroes of the story, if the story can be said to have any heroes.
I will give the drama credit for not for one minute slut-shaming her as a dancer in Shanghai or a girl who goes with Western soldiers in Chongqing
Yes!! The closest it skirts to it is the conversation Wang Shi'an and Secretary Zhang have about her before the marriage, but in context I felt the show didn't agree with their assessment & the scene was presented to show how Wang Shi'an and Secretary Zhang are making assumptions about both Lin Nansheng and Lan Xinjie in trying to explain the marriage. And I really liked how the show presented Lan Xinjie doing what she needs to do and not acting for any higher cause.
And I’m still amazed they slipped in a “good Japanese” in the person of Mrs. Fukuyama, without making her secretly evil or having her put to death by her countrymen, etc.
I can't get over this. During my rewatch, I carefully paid attention to see if I'd missed a throwaway line hinting at a grim ending for her, and there isn't one. And all the scenes where she's talking with Zhu Yizhen that initially felt like they were leading up to her being a spy or discovering the truth -- on rewatch they felt a bit sad. Mrs. Fukuyama seemed lonely and wanting to support the young Lin couple.
The ending is so strange.
It is! I've watched the ending several times now, and it gets stranger every time. I can't settle on one interpretation of it (I'm fine with that).
When they were students, Lin Nansheng had a crush on/idolized Zuo Qiuming, and ZQM thought he was adorable. When they meet in Hong Kong, it’s kind of reversed: ZQM is really strongly drawn to grown-up Lin Nansheng, shattered as he is, while LNS cares about him a lot as a friend but doesn’t have room for that kind of almost-obsessive love when it’s all taken up already by Zhu Yizhen and Chen Moqun.
Yes! I love this. It fits so well.
I wonder if they planned his ending before they realized that Zhang Zixian was going to knock it out of the park that way.
Although I have *lots* of questions I would love to ask the script writers, if I could only ask one, I'd ask about Wang Shi'an's unsatisfying off-screen death. I heard somewhere that even Chinese viewers were commenting on it, wanting to know why they were robbed of the death scene Wang Shi'an deserved.
“You betrayed him and in the end you killed him, if not for you it would be him here as station chief now.” “Why you? what was so special about you and Lin Nansheng, what did you have that I don’t have, why was it never me?” In the end they end up killing each other, either deliberately or in an accident similar to the one that kills Meng Annan on screen.
Ahhhh, this is great! That would've been an excellent ending for them both. I love the idea of Meng Annan getting revenge for Chen Moqun. And oh, Wang Shi'an! "why was it never me?" Oh, ouch, perfect!
Chen Moqun’s whole existence bends the propaganda weirdly out of shape.
I agree entirely. When I started watching the show, I thought I could envision what kind of villian Chen Moqun would be. The show completely upended all of my expectations.
we are essentially called on to feel sympathy for him because of the way he’s forced into going over to the Japanese and also, in a way, for his desperation to get out at the end
This was such a surprise to me. Honestly, as I was watching Chen Moqun's story evolve, I had moments of asking how the censors let it pass. The story condemns him, but not as definitively as I thought it would after he collaborates with the Japanese. Part of it may be the nuances Wang Yang brought to the performance, and part of it is because of his emotional importance to Lin Nansheng.
And he says to himself, well, I have to look after myself, my own position, because no one else is going to. And that becomes his motivation and his motif.
I absolutely believe this as Wang Shi'an's backstory, and I would love to see/know his history. There are only the tiniest clues in the drama.
I was rewatching episode 37 recently and picked up on a great bit between Chen Moqun and Wang Shi'an when they meet in the hotel. When Chen Moqun asks what the bureau's situation is and says he can give Wang Shi'an some suggestions, Wang Shi'an responds with "You don't need to know about that" and "I will deal with them myself." Exactly the kind of dismissive things Chen Moqun said to Wang Shi'an when Chen Moqun was station chief.
I agree with everything you say about the acting. I was even more impressed with Zhu Zhu as Lan Xinjie on rewatch, because she gave Lan Xinjie a presence/aura of strength and resilience that went a long way to making the character more than what the script was saying at times. I think Tong Yao did as much as she could with Zhu Yizhen, and I felt her best scenes were with Lin Nansheng.
The (drama-version) role of Lin Nansheng was written with Zhu Yilong in mind from the start, if I remember correctly
I vaguely remember reading this, too, but I wish I could find the source now, to see if there was any more context.
it’s easy to start taking for granted how good he is and how subtle and detailed his work is
I think so, too, and I was disappointed to come across one early review while the series was airing in China that said Zhu Yilong didn't do anything new or remarkable in the role. I disagreed with that review even before finishing the series. Lin Nansheng is not like any other character I've seen him portray. On rewatch, the whole arc of when Lin Nansheng is Mailman and has to maintain his Colonel Lin persona among the Nationalists really impressed me. He's amazing to watch -- as are the other actors! And it's so small feat for Zhu Yilong to hold his own among them.
And oops, this comment got very long!
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Date: 2021-09-20 11:26 pm (UTC)A downside of Chinese media is that we don't get good behind-the-scenes "what were they thinking when they did this" articles.
Yeah, this is why I was thinking that I really want to read something from the future when (knock wood) things have changed and it's possible to look back with all the information. For good or ill, the behind-the-scenes must be fascinating in so many ways.
I really liked how the show presented Lan Xinjie doing what she needs to do and not acting for any higher cause.
Yes, absolutely. I didn't like the Zilu plot, but I will give the show credit for not going the "I will avenge him by becoming a devout Communist" route. And as you say, the actress really did a beautiful job.
During my rewatch, I carefully paid attention to see if I'd missed a throwaway line hinting at a grim ending for her, and there isn't one. ... Mrs. Fukuyama seemed lonely and wanting to support the young Lin couple.
I'm glad you did this! (I watched in Chinese and I missed A LOT of fine detail and got some things wrong completely, so I wouldn't have been surprised to learn that I'd missed something about Mrs. Fukuyama.) She did seem genuinely fond of Zhu Yizhen (and teaches her the embroidery she uses later in spycraft). Mrs. Fukuyama also reminded me so much of my mother-in-law that I'm especially glad she didn't turn out evil, oh dear ;)
Honestly, as I was watching Chen Moqun's story evolve, I had moments of asking how the censors let it pass.... Part of it may be the nuances Wang Yang brought to the performance, and part of it is because of his emotional importance to Lin Nansheng.
Yes, because Wang Yang's performance is so powerful and resonant, Chen Moqun's importance to Lin Nansheng is unshakably there on the screen, it's not just a matter of a mentor figure who then becomes an antagonist but much more complicated and transforming. (I can't even imagine what the censors made of it, oh dear.)
Wang Shi'an responds with "You don't need to know about that" and "I will deal with them myself." Exactly the kind of dismissive things Chen Moqun said to Wang Shi'an when Chen Moqun was station chief.
This is a fantastic observation. Wang Shi'an is absolutely petty enough to have done this on purpose, and it's also such a good reflection on appearances and ability.
On rewatch, the whole arc of when Lin Nansheng is Mailman and has to maintain his Colonel Lin persona among the Nationalists really impressed me.
Yes! He makes Lin Nansheng's multiple layers of personas/feelings/reactions so very clear.
And oops, this comment got very long!
<3 <3 <3
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Date: 2021-09-20 08:59 pm (UTC)This, very much. It's hateful.
Re: the propaganda in this show, I also thought it was very odd. Someone shared this article (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1211168.shtml), which seems to imply that it landed better for Chinese audiences (certainly the show did very well there), but I'm not sure this is a hugely creditable source.
(After forty-three episodes of terrible things, what actually made me cry was seeing Lin Nansheng as the gentle schoolteacher, with the soft hair and the pure white robe and the warm, tired, older face.)
Right there with you. But that's usually the kind of thing that gets me going.
Lan Xinjie has ended up one the people who surprised and pleased me the most while watching. Not that I'm done entirely yet because I got bogged down with RL stuff and didn't have the brain to deal with a show that's 90% misery even if I did thoroughly spoil myself on purpose so I wouldn't be too tense while watching.
I agree that the acting is what drew me into it in the first place. I didn't think I wanted to watch the show at all, given the premise and when it's set, but they're all so very good in it that once I'd started I couldn't de-ice myself again. It's just such a good example of what a great ensemble cast can do. I don't think I'll ever not pay the most attention to Zhu Yilong when he's in something, but this gave splitting my focus a very good run.
or destroy his health in the interim
Man, I've been watching some Cloudy Mountain bts and it all looks, uh, somewhat terrifying. And he's so very dedicated to pushing himself. I, too, would very much like to see what a decade more of experience could do to his already impressive acting skills.
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Date: 2021-09-20 11:33 pm (UTC)Yes, in a way I guess we are just not the intended viewers, but I'm curious about how Chinese viewers actually felt too (another thing we'll never know until far into the future, I suppose).
Right there with you. But that's usually the kind of thing that gets me going.
Lin Nansheng's schoolteacher version also appears after a big tonal shift, and I'm sure it's deliberately done but it got to me ;(
Lan Xinjie has ended up one of the people who surprised and pleased me the most while watching.
Yes! It's such an unexpected arc. (I'm also sorry we never got to see Lan Xinjie and Zhu Yizhen encounter one another...).
It's just such a good example of what a great ensemble cast can do. I don't think I'll ever not pay the most attention to Zhu Yilong when he's in something, but this gave splitting my focus a very good run.
My thoughts exactly. I wouldn't have watched it in the first place if not for Zhu Yilong, and he absolutely lived up to expectations and then some, but I am so glad I got to see Wang Yang and Zhang Zixian give these astonishing performances.
And he's so very dedicated to pushing himself.
I am hoping that sometime soon someone will get it through his head that "being professional on set" can mean "preserving your health so that you can have a longer career" too...sigh.
I, too, would very much like to see what a decade more of experience could do to his already impressive acting skills.
Something to look forward to (knock wood)!
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Date: 2023-11-28 03:51 pm (UTC)The outright CCP-banzai (ironic) scenes are extremely clunky
Yes! I thought most of the propaganda scenes were pretty terrible, especially in comparison to the subtlety and intelligence of the rest of the show. I suspect it's probably true that those scenes played better for Chinese audiences in a broad sense, the same way lots of incredibly clunky American propaganda plays well for the kinds of American audiences who either already agree with it or just don't tend to analyze things much or take art that seriously. But for anybody who's actually looking for nuance and persuasiveness, those scenes just do absolutely nothing.
(If nothing else, I would have really expected some amount of show-don't-tell with regard to what good the communists were doing for the people, rather than just what the good characters were doing for communism. Instead it was just some vague speeches about ideals, and a lot of focus on the heroicness of being martyred to the communist cause.)
And there are strange exceptions here and there to their Party propaganda.
That's a good point, and now that you mention it, I feel like Lin Nansheng himself was a pretty strong exception, because he was acting on his conscience and doing good long before he switched sides, and he was actually really hard to convert -- he had to witness and experience a lot of pretty extreme stuff first. How many other good people never got that far?
One phrase that runs through the whole thing is 活着, to survive
This really stood out to me too, especially at the end of Chen Moqun's arc. In some of the earlier scenes, the injunction for people to just focus on surviving felt a bit... not glib exactly, but like just sort of a platitude that I couldn't imagine would mean anything to the people it was addressed to. (Lin Nansheng says it to Lan Xinjie, too, after her son dies, which was one of the places where it felt a little out of place to me, since she clearly had no reason or desire to go on living at that moment.) But it took on a lot more significance when it was about characters themselves confessing that they were just trying to survive.
It sucks that Wang Shi’an didn’t get a proper ending scene (a death scene or otherwise), what a waste.
Yes, I thought the same thing! He's such a prominent character throughout the series and then just gets offhandedly mentioned to have died offscreen! The only thing I could figure was that it was a kind of... confirmation of his triviality, like in spite of his managing to rise to power it ultimately didn't mean anything or grant him any true importance. But from a narrative standpoint it just felt weird that he never got an actual ending. Maybe, as you say, the problem was that they didn't know until they were already filming that Zhang Zixian would bring so much to the role.
Wang Shi’an is also compelling, because every time Zhang Zixian is on screen it becomes a first-person narrative from his perspective
This is such a great description of the effect he has -- I hadn't thought about it that way, but yes, it absolutely feels like that, and I have no idea what Zhang Zixian is doing to make that happen.
Chen Moqun’s whole existence bends the propaganda weirdly out of shape [...] he continues to loom large, present or absent, right up through his death in Lin Nansheng’s arms; we are essentially called on to feel sympathy for him because of the way he’s forced into going over to the Japanese and also, in a way, for his desperation to get out at the end [...] His whole storyline is a series of bad choices in a sense, from his tenure as station chief on, but in many cases he doesn’t really have any good ones
Yes! On the one hand, he's a very unsympathetic character because he really never shows kindness or compassion toward anyone, not even the people who help him -- but he also seems dead sure that ruthlessness and suspicion are the only way to survive, and the way he recommends this worldview to the young men he regards as promising seems to suggest it might be a lesson he learned the hard way. And he is surrounded by people who are scheming or just waiting for the opportunity to get him out of the way. Like you said, he makes a ton of bad choices, but in several places the narrative sets him up so that none of his options are good (at least if he wants to live). Of course Wang Yang's performance goes a long way toward making him come across as complex and human, and thus at least partly sympathetic rather than just terrible. But the production does seem to go ahead and run with that, which is rather curious given the subject matter!
every expression and microexpression, gesture, stance, inflection precisely tuned to express this unique character, so that the content of the lines and the overall blocking are only, like, 35% of what you get
Truly my favorite thing to see in an acting performance, and yeah, The Rebel had quite a bit of this, especially from the actors you mention. (I also thought Lao Gu was excellently realized, even if his role was less complex since he had to be pretty much purely good. A character with no bad traits could have easily fallen very flat, but I thought he came across as quite human too, despite being incapable, by narrative function, of making mistakes or getting anything wrong.)
In a way I’d actually like to have watched the drama without ever having seen him in other roles; I think after seeing him as Shen Wei, Wu Xie, etc. it’s easy to start taking for granted how good he is
I wondered about this as well. For me, this wasn't that much of a stand-out role for him, but it's hard to tell if that's simply because he wasn't doing anything I didn't already know he could do, so I was just taking him for granted, as you say -- just "Zhu Yilong doing his thing." I did feel like his role here, similar to Zhu Yizhen's as you mentioned (and also Zuo Qiuming's), lacked complexity due to the way he always had to be good and right, even while he was working for the "wrong" side. His performance was good, but I think the role itself was sort of limiting.
I really really want to see what he’s going to be doing two or three decades from now
Very much agreed on that!
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Date: 2023-11-29 01:31 pm (UTC)If nothing else, I would have really expected some amount of show-don't-tell with regard to what good the communists were doing for the people, rather than just what the good characters were doing for communism. Instead it was just some vague speeches about ideals, and a lot of focus on the heroicness of being martyred to the communist cause.)
That's a very good point. I really wonder if there's anybody studying these things--the styles and methods of patriotism/pro-Communism that are adopted, and allowed, in dramas, movies, etc., how much depends on the censorship of the moment and how much on the director and other people involved, how "patriotic" scenes in Chinese dramas/movies differ from the ones in their American counterparts etc. etc., you'd think it would make an enlightening field of study, but maybe the information just is not available (unless you're inside China, in which case it probably just is not safe).
And you also make such a good point that it takes a _long_ time for Lin Nansheng to reach the point of conversion to Communism, what, almost 3/4 of the drama? It's not an immediately obvious good.
The only thing I could figure was that [Wang Shi'an's offscreen death] was a kind of... confirmation of his triviality, like in spite of his managing to rise to power it ultimately didn't mean anything or grant him any true importance.
Oh, I never thought of that and it makes good sense! Unsatisfying narratively but perhaps quite realistic in a way...
but he also seems dead sure that ruthlessness and suspicion are the only way to survive, and the way he recommends this worldview to the young men he regards as promising seems to suggest it might be a lesson he learned the hard way.
Oh wow, now I want someone to write fic about this! It's funny how little we know about the backstories of any of the major characters.
(I also thought Lao Gu was excellently realized, even if his role was less complex since he had to be pretty much purely good. A character with no bad traits could have easily fallen very flat, but I thought he came across as quite human too, despite being incapable, by narrative function, of making mistakes or getting anything wrong.)
Yes, absolutely--in part, I think, because his "goodness" can be quite ruthless in pursuit of his "admirable" goals as well; and also, for instance, because the chatty kindness he often displays is often a mask over his machinations, so that we know he's not necessarily trustworthy in every sense.
Agreed that in a way the role is a limited one for Zhu Yilong--I think the part of his performance I enjoyed most was the last Shanghai arc, where Lin Nansheng himself is playing a role in many ways and you can see the different layers of his mind working. (Okay, that and his scenes with Wang Yang, oh dear.)
Also, I don't know if you are disposed to read fic for this show or not, but there is some good stuff; among genfic achray in particular wrote me a spectacular Wang Shi'an fic for Yuletide a couple of years ago, and also a long crossover with LTR, which really should not work as well as it does (https://archiveofourown.org/works/35505844 and https://archiveofourown.org/works/34852285?view_full_work=true respectively).
Lovely to talk with you about all this <3
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Date: 2023-12-02 06:50 am (UTC)