This article was first published on the public account "Cinematik"
Author ✎Gu Caocao
Edit✎ Wendao
These days, a film actor who does not cooperate with streaming media to make a TV series is not a qualified producer. "Sister Stone" Emma Stone and Jonah Hill can be regarded as catching up.
One is to sprint to the second Oscar queen with the new film "Favorite", and the other is to lose weight and has just released the directorial debut "Mid 90s". The two Netflix's new sci-fi drama "Mad Men", which starred together and acted as the executive producer, was finally launched last Friday amidst the expectations.
I have been looking forward to it since the establishment of the project, and took advantage of the Mid-Autumn Festival holiday to finish the whole season in one breath. Fortunately, it looks good as I expected.
At the beginning of their debut, Emma Stone and Jonah Hill once collaborated in the youth comedy "Super Bad". At that time, Emma Stone, who was still dyed red hair, got the role of the schoolgirl, and Jonah Hill was of course a fat guy in all sorts of situations in the gangster comedy.
But no one thought that more than ten years later, the two would actually play a pair of abnormal men and women who believed in the destiny in the chaotic universe in a science fiction psychodrama.
According to the original character setting, Anne played by Emma Stone would never meet Irving played by Jonah Hill.
Annie was unemployed for five months and couldn't pay her rent. She was so poor that she had to steal money to buy a pack of cigarettes.
As for Owen, he is the fifth young master of the Milgrim Group. There are a lot of servants to wait for a meal at home.
But Owen from childhood mental disorders (Psychosis), often have an imaginary brother issued a directive to him and let him complete the task of saving the world.
He left his wealthy family to live alone, but lost his job. For money, he decided to participate in the drug trial of NPB Company.
And Annie, who was already addicted to the company's Type A drug, also tried every means to mix into the laboratory as a test drug, and was put in a group with Owen.
The NPB company's experiment called ULP is dedicated to using three courses of ABC drugs to completely overthrow the conversational psychological diagnosis and treatment model, and fundamentally cure the psychological/mental diseases of modern people.
People taking these drugs will fall asleep and experience hallucinations in their minds.
Course A represents " Agonia " (severe pain at death). The person taking the drug will experience the most painful thing in his life again in the illusion, helping to find the disease.
It was during this treatment that the audience discovered that what made Annie so self-defeating was the death of her sister. The sisters lived in a broken home without a mother. When they became adults, sister Ellie and Annie went on a road trip before moving out of New York.
But during the trip, Annie's weird character caused the two to quarrel, which eventually led to a car accident, and her sister died, and Annie survived.
The course of B treatment is " Behavioral ". In a layer of illusion, the person taking the drug will expose the blind area and self-defense mechanism of his mind.
The C course represents " Confrontation & Acceptance ". The artificial intelligence computer GRTA will work with drug C (Confrexia) to reconstruct the psychological mechanism of the drug user and play the ultimate healing effect.
But the experiment did not go smoothly.
The project leader, Dr. Muramoto, was also addicted to experimental drugs. He mixed Type A and Type C pills and heated them for a long time. As a result, during the first phase of the experiment, he died suddenly due to overdose.
His deputy, Dr. Fujita, had to release his unhappy predecessor and the original creator of the project, Dr. Mantleray, from exile and ask him to return to the laboratory.
Under the auspices of the latter, the experiment could have been continued.
However, the death of Dr. Muramoto exposed his relationship with the laboratory artificial intelligence computer GRTA. GRTA, who lost his lover, collapsed emotionally and could not work normally, and the entire project was about to collapse.
Because GRTA's "tears" interfered with the experimental equipment, during the course of experiment B, in every illusion that Annie and Owen experienced after taking the medicine, their own destinies were closely connected with each other.
They began to believe that they were bound to each other by the invisible forces of the universe.
Seeing that GRTA, who was sad and furious, was about to harm the lives of testers and even laboratory staff during the course of Experiment C, Dr. Mantleray had to invite Greta, the prototype of the GRTA thinking model, and his most feared mother, Greta, into the laboratory, and let her do it. One of the world's most well-known psychologists helped GRTA overcome difficulties.
But the mother's arrival made GRTA more unstable. Annie and Owen were awake and lost in their various bizarre fantasy realms. Their demons became entities and became stronger than ever.
From the setting of the world view alone, "Mad Men" can easily remind countless viewers of contemporary science fiction films of "Black Mirror".
The audience is already familiar with this dystopian narrative that uses future science fiction themes to portray the mental illness and collective mental crisis of contemporary people. The film and television works of "Black Mirror" and "Black Mirror-like" have provided countless possibilities for this narrative.
In "Mad Men", this concept of "everyone is sick" is described by screenwriters like obsessive-compulsive disorder:
Owen’s extended family is naturally a frustration. Everyone who seems to be happy and selfish is just whitewashing the peace. His father even asked Owen to give false testimony in court for the brother of sexual harassment of female subordinates for the sake of the family’s face.
Needless to say, Annie's broken family, after her sister died, her father simply lived in a nursery-like device, and couldn't even see each other.
Dr. Fujita is smoking at all times.
Dr. Mantleray is a typical victim of Sumu's relapse. Under the strong nurturing of the psychotherapist's mother, although he lost his father and became a successful neurochemist, he is privately a weak personality and excessive masturbation.
His first scene was virtual sex with an NPC in the game "Atlantis" with VR glasses.
Although his mother Greta is a popular psychology expert in the world, her marriage broke up and the parent-child relationship failed. In her later years, she could only raise a "little milk dog" at home to relieve her boredom.
Not only the main characters have a lot of mental problems, even if there are only a few shots, supporting roles in two or three scenes, and even characters on the scene, the screenwriter has given the audience a glimpse of their psychological state.
Patricia, a NPB employee who was coerced by Annie, became a gambling man. After divorce, he lost his daughter’s custody rights. (Friends) Service-Hire someone to pretend to be a friend to accompany you around the Botanical Garden.
The people who participated in the test drug experiment were all for the generous rewards of the pharmaceutical company, but one of them was a big man who made a living by participating in drug experiments all over the United States.
The old aunt in the same group as Annie and Owen reads the famous children's literature "Black God Horse" every day before going to bed, but she reads this book about animal welfare, and she says every day, "When will this horse die? ?"...
In this future world where social network fanaticism is not serious, people are still driven into lunatics by childhood trauma, social pressure, and work bottlenecks, regardless of the high or low level of material life.
Love, trust and company are extremely precious and scarce products. People in big cities live in a lonely vacuum, their self is endlessly small, and the world is infinitely cold—just as we are today. The essence of fables makes all science fiction stories come to the same goal.
It's just different from the miniseries "Black Mirror" in the tube, "Mad Men" is not satisfied with a simple taste, but pushed the audience into the minds of the two protagonists-a total of ten episodes of limited drama, five and a half episodes are being filmed An illusion in the mind of Annie and Owen sharing the joys and sorrows.
The audience once again experienced the car accident between Annie and her sister, watching Owen and Annie steal a lemur as a married couple for many years, and in another illusion as a divorced couple in a weird mansion. The final chapter of Quixote.
Under the action of the drug, the subconsciousness and imagination of the two people were fully stimulated.
In the C treatment course, elves hunting for treasure, soprano family rushing, NATO meeting conspiracy and so on took turns to catch horses. Everyone they had met in their life took turns in cameo appearances in different colors.
But "The Madman" is not another American overnight meal of Freud's psychoanalysis. Exactly in the second episode, the screenwriter borrowed from Dr. Mantleray to say that Freud was already outdated.
The ULP experiment is a large-scale deduction of Gestalt psychology and behaviorism. All illusions are generated autonomously by the brains of Anne and Owen under the stimulation of the environment.
The madness of GRTA has weakened the objectivity of the experimental conditions, and the laboratory of "Maniac" has become a large-scale collision field of free will.
Whether mental/psychological illness can be cured depends entirely on each subject.
Therefore, the degree of immersion in the illusion of Annie and Owen determines whether watching "Mad Men" can be an experience higher than watching a drama.
Increasingly lonely humans have not lost the ability to empathize-even the artificial intelligence GRTA has been written and endowed with this ability by Dr. Fujita. The audience in front of the screen is observing and analyzing an illusion like GRTA, and clearing the level with Annie and Owen. adventure.
GRTA, who has lost her lover, can’t be resolved, she involuntarily intervenes in the illusion of others, and treats this as her own diagnosis and treatment.
What about the audience?
Perhaps this is the boundary that "Mad Men" is touching. Try something that other peer dramas have not done or set as the goal: let watching itself become a kind of spiritual diagnosis and treatment .
In the past two years, the diversity of capital in the film and television industry has brought greater freedom to creators to some extent, so it is quite interesting that psychodrama has become a new trend.
The new season of David Lynch’s "Twin Peaks" and David Fincher’s "Mind Hunter" are certainly consistent in their care and style throughout their careers, but they are not in "Real Humans" and "Western World". "Except for a complement to the overall layout. Whether it is retro profile or future technology, people are struggling to advance toward the depth of their hearts.
The rise of streaming media in the past two years has led to a blowout in the cooperation of various film and television circles. Under the mud and sand, the re-running of capital and production methods has produced a large amount of mediocre garbage, but it is just a poor time-killing product.
But in this evolutionary wave of living room entertainment, elites from all walks of life have gradually explored a new small screen aesthetics. "Madman" is clearly a leader.
What's more, the creative team of "Mad Men" is extraordinary——
The director is Kerry Fukuyong 's masterpiece is the first season of "True Detective"; Patrick Somerville , who wrote the script with him, his last work is "Watching the Earth".
Strangely, the "Mad Men" produced by these two people presents a warm color as a whole.
Needless to say in terms of art, Emma Stone and Jonah Hill flew around in various scenes. The overall color palette of the picture is retro and bright.
Fuyong has reached the highest evaluation of TV dramas by viewers over the years: "Take TV dramas as movies."
He did not give up his creation of the atmosphere, created a full "potential" for the tension of the plot, the emotions of the characters and the character, nor was he kidnapped by the setting of "science fiction" and lost his personality.
In fact, if not for some details, the world of "Mad Men" is not like the future at all, but more like a parallel universe and overhead mapping. But these details reflect Fuyong's funny taste:
There are robots for cleaning up dog poop everywhere on the street. It looks similar to the current sweeping robot, but this kind of small machine called "Shit eater" by Annie also simulates the barking of dogs.
The "Friend proxy" service for surrogate friends is mentioned above, and there is also a strange service industry " AdBuddy " in "Mad Men" that solves employment .
When the poor want to make quick money, AdBuddy's service staff will come directly to you to read advertisements. There is no more zero-distance "fixed-point delivery". Owen learned about NPB's experimental project through this live-action advertising service.
And the Japanese corporate culture of NPD's entire company is undoubtedly related to Fukunaga's own half of Japanese ancestry.
Fuyong also included a lot of fans in "Mad Men", which is absolutely the first of fans.
For example, when Annie was at home, the famous sci-fi adventure film "Gordon" in the 1980s was shown on TV;
Another example is that Dr. Mantleray refers to the GRTA failure as "McMurphy", and this is the last name of Jack Nicholson as the protagonist in "Flying Over the Cuckoo's Asylum".
Not to mention how "Lord of the Rings" was dressed up by Emma Stone in the first environment of C treatment...
I'm afraid that someone would have expected "Madman" and "Inception" by analogy, Fukunaga simply played this into a stalk:
The black market information trader in Chinese pharmacies helped Annie conspire and blurted out: "Fuck! This is "Inception!"
In the ninth episode, Annie and Owen made a big trouble with NATO. The action scenes from composition, action design to long-shot mirroring are undoubtedly not a tribute to Inception.
The design of the same token that appears repeatedly in reality and in different illusions is also in the same line, such as Cervantes’ "Don Quixote", popcorn, eagle, etc., which not only complements the protagonist’s background story in details, but also provides the audience with The fun of watching a drama treasure hunt.
Along the way from "True Detective", audiences familiar with Fukunaga's aesthetic preferences will also have a more open understanding of the ending of "Mad Men".
Lara has said so much, then, is "Madman" a love story?
It does not matter. After all, Annie and Owen have been grudges and grudges countless times in the illusion. Fukuyong can't do the kitsch like the second season of "Stranger Things" that makes children kiss.
Perhaps this is another fascination of his:
Audience please note that this is not the end of "The Graduate".
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