The content of the full version of the working manuscript
Last Monday, at the 91st Academy Awards, "Green Book" won the best picture award, and its star Mahershala Ali (Mahershala Ali) also won the best supporting actor award, which is the second time he won the best Oscar. Best Supporting Actor Award, he won the award for the first time for his outstanding performance as the drug dealer Juan in "Moonlight" released in 2016.
Beginning with "12 Years a Slave" directed by Steve McQueen for the best picture at the Oscars in 2014, it has gradually become the norm for African-American filmmakers to win Oscars, which also reflects that in just five years, American society has dramatic changes in context.
Retro police and bandit drama "three-dimensional" parallel
The show structure and case types returned to the style of the first season, with "Two Heroes" becoming Mahershala Ali and white actor Stephen Dorff. Adjusted the "double-white" configuration in the first quarter, and "black and white police detective" was the standard for police and bandit film and television works in the United States at the end of the last century. The narrative structure is also restored to the flashback style of the first season, but the flashbacks of the two male protagonists in the first season are replaced by the single flashback of Detective Wayne played by Ali.
The starting point of the story takes place in the United States in the 1980s of the last century, when this pair of "Black and White True Detectives" took over a case of the disappearance of a child brother and sister in a southern community. This seemingly ordinary case brought the two of them, their relatives and friends into a nightmare for 35 years.
The most striking thing about the whole play is the parallel narrative structure of the three time dimensions . The whole play covers three time and space dimensions, the last century in 1980, 1990 and 2015. Taking the memories of Detective Wayne's three time and space dimensions as the main line, through the interspersed transformation of various lens images, it evokes the social upheaval in the United States for more than 30 years. In addition to the two "Black and White Detectives", Carmen Ejogo, the heroine who plays Wayne's wife, and Tom, the father of the missing child, are also the main characters of the story. The four leading actors are portrayed in different eras. The characteristics are distinguished, so that the audience can more easily identify the era and environment of the characters in the continuous transition of the camera.
Wayne retired from the Vietnam War long- range scout and served as an Arkansas police detective. His white partner, Roland, is also a veteran of the Vietnam War. Roland always calls Wayne "Old Pop". The nickname in the military is a tribute to Wayne's outstanding criminal investigation ability, and it is also a kind of testimony of the two "life and death comrades in arms". The "Black and White True Detective" from the Vietnam War pushed the historical dimension of the entire series forward to the "frenzy" 60s and 70s of the last century in the United States.
The long-awaited renewal of the controversial "drama"
After the first season of "True Detective" aired in 2015, it received good ratings, and domestic audiences even called it a "magic drama". But there are also voices of dissent in the United States, especially criticism of the stereotyped portrayal of female characters in the show. In order to attract audiences and form a topic, in the premiere episodes of cable TV networks, the scale of nudity, violence and bloody will be much more open. The large-scale content such as female murders, pagan rituals, and a large number of female nude scenes in the first season of "True Detective" caused a lot of controversy after the broadcast.
The second season of the following year was inevitably influenced by the criticism of the previous work. The screenwriter adjusted the narrative strategy and divided the core characters into six characters of "three men and three women", and the leading actors were all first-class actors from the British and American series. As a result, the stories of the six characters are intertwined, divided, and transformed to decompose the driving force of the core story.
Therefore, many viewers could not grasp the main point of the story, let alone the plot, which naturally led to a serious decline in the ratings and reputation after the broadcast. The core expression of the screenwriter Pizzolatto in the play: the underworld -related transactions of local government infrastructure development, and the realistic criticism of land degradation and environmental pollution by mining mining, the audience is more and more unclear in the entanglement of the six characters.
Due to the decline in the ratings of the second season, HBO did not officially renew the third season of "True Detective" until the end of August 2017, and revealed that the overall style returned to the first season. At that time, the media speculated that the third season of "True Detective" would be. Launched in early 2018. In February 2018, the starring role in the play, the actor of Wayne's adult son Freddie was confirmed and announced, and it was delayed for half a year from the confirmation of HBO's renewal to the announcement of the adult Freddie actor.
In the past six months, the Hollywood "metoo" movement has been rampant. If the third season is to be produced with the style and characteristics of the first season, it will definitely be severely criticized or even boycotted by the public opinion circle. I believe that in this half year, the story should be adjusted a lot. The 7-month shooting cycle of the third season was completed in 2018.
Exploding "True Detective" halfway point
The True Detective series consists of 8 episodes per season, with a single episode lasting 60 minutes. Both the first and second seasons set the "breaking point" of the whole story at the end of the fourth episode. Especially the 6-minute long shot at the end of the fourth episode of the first season, which was hailed as a classic moment that can be "loaded into the history of American TV dramas" after it was broadcast! And the whole process is shot with film provided by Kodak, so that the image quality has been upgraded to the film level.
Judging from the 6-minute long shot at the end of the fourth episode, the state police detective Rast, played by Ma Jiao, infiltrated the speeding bike party undercover to form the "Iron Crusade" , a drug-trafficking organization, which is known to be a "white supremacy" organization by the name. The clue is that his partner Marty went to the strip club to investigate and learned that Rust infiltrated the drug trafficking organization as an undercover agent. The strongholds were all covered by underground pornographic venues. There are too many nude scenes of women in this episode.
The reason for the well-known 6-minute long shot is to prepare to go to the black community to fight with black drug dealers to snatch drugs. The leader recruited Rust to join the group, so that the "brother" Nato, who had been missing for two years, won the trust of the drug trafficking organization.
It is evident from this episode that the plot design of True Detective's story, characters, and even the final 6-minute long-shot take advantage of the ethnic prejudice and regional cultural traditions rooted in the American South to "offend" a variety of different The group of standpoints made the whole drama praised as "in the history of American TV dramas", and also gained the peak of the ratings in the second half.
The breaking point of the second season of "True Detective" was at the end of the fourth episode. The police team encountered an armed raid by Mexican drug dealers in the block operation, and a big melee in the abandoned block began. In this story burst, five of the six main characters appear. The shootout in the chaotic neighborhood is like the epitome of the whole drama. The complex characters and the multi-threaded story make the explosion point of this "magic drama" become the defeat point, which also led to more than a year after the broadcast. swing period.
Parallel time and space buried deep "burst point"
In the third season of "True Detective", it did not continue the design of the "breaking point" at the end of the fourth episode of the first two seasons, but buried the "breaking point" in the fifth episode by transforming the narrative characteristics of different time and space dimensions. beginning. The key tool connecting the fourth and fifth episodes is the M18A1 "Broad Sword" anti-infantry mine that caused a lot of injuries to the enemy on the Vietnam battlefield.
The biggest victim of this "burst point massacre" was Woodard, a descendant of the Native American. In the investigation of the disappearance, he was interviewed by Detective Wayne and learned that Woodard was a Vietnam War sniper, which is highly similar to Wayne's long-distance scout. The two also have "hunters" ” special skills, there is a certain consensus in the dialogue. At the end of "Breaking Point Massacre", Woodard's military rank title to Wayne "Sergeant" before his death made the similar characteristics of the two people more prominent.
From the investigation of the disappearance of the siblings to Wayne's discovery of the white boy who died of a fractured cervical vertebra, anxiety, prejudice and hostility began to hover over the Ozarks , where several southern states meet , until the stagnation broke out in the fourth and fifth episodes. The ethnic hatred in the barbaric era of North America is the real .
Until the end of the story, the truth revealed by the one-eyed black servant: in order to secretly adopt a girl (sister) for the hostess, cover up the accidental death of a white boy, use the wrong remedy to induce more tragedies, and eventually destroy the entire community , also brought 35 years of "amnesia" nightmare to Detective Wayne.
Excellent coping with the passage of time
At present, the third season of "True Detective" has good ratings and word-of-mouth results. I believe that news of the development of a sequel will surface soon, and the mistakes of the second season will not be repeated. The protagonist Ali's outstanding performance in the play is likely to win the Emmys in August. Coupled with the second Oscar for Best Supporting Actor he just won, he is likely to become the "double champion" of the 2019 Film and TV Actor Awards.
The contradictions, conflicts and cultural "misunderstandings" designed by series producer and screenwriter Pizzolatto in the play are like the mine traps of the "half burst" in the play: expressing one's own author and burying it in these experiences35 In the character texture of the changing context over the years, the audience was not easily noticed when following the plot, and when the final truth was revealed, it naturally led the audience into deeper cultural thinking.
Such a delicate narrative structure, burying a unique personal expression in the depths, is Pizzolatto 's most powerful and subtle response to the drastic changes in the social context of the United States and the fearful and stunned film and television creation environment!
--Thank You--
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