The long-awaited new FX series Feud finally airs this week, with its first season about the feud between two great and legendary actresses Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. I watched the first episode with the expectation of watching an exaggerated and wonderful drama conflict. After watching it, I felt an unexpected sadness in my heart. What I saw was not only the battle between the two actresses, but the struggle of two elderly women in the arena of Hollywood and the pain of their youth no longer.
In Hollywood, a dream factory that consumes youth and creates illusions, the camera lens and the spotlight always favor young and beautiful faces, and the aging actresses are like dry fish, lacking resources and losing attention. The beginning of the series shows that Crawford has not received a filming project for a long time and is unable to make ends meet, and Davis can only show his acting talent in a small theater on Broadway. The two superstars who were once all-powerful in the film industry were gradually annihilated due to their age. When Crawford found Davis to co-star in "The Surprise of the Blue Girl", the ambition to revive his career was a sense of desolation and despair that he couldn't hide from being overwhelmed by the waves.
The screen is not only picky about the appearance of women, but also has many restrictions on the roles women play. When Crawford was picking out a script for her comeback, she couldn't find a satisfactory female role when she searched around. The screenwriter's positioning of female characters seems to have been fixed and typed, either an elderly mother or an innocent girl. And their role in the works is more of a foil for male characters, and their own stories are rarely told.
This reminds me of a documentary I watched, Miss Representation. The documentary chronicles the portrayal and shaping of women's images by the media, and leads people to look at the media's oppression of women from a critical perspective. From this we can see what kind of process is the formation of female images in people's minds under the control of the media. What struck me the most about this documentary is that the influence of the media on people is far beyond people's imagination. In the commercial society, the influence of consumer culture on people through the media is even greater. When we were young, we watched commercial advertisements, and the people who took care of the family and cleaned the house were all women; the women in the advertisements always had a tall figure, long legs, and a slender waist. When we watch Hollywood blockbusters, the heroes who save the world are male heroes, and women are their beautiful girlfriends or wives, who support them behind them... All of these are invisibly shaping people's wrong perception and positioning of women. It seems that women are always subordinate to male authority, and only young and beautiful women are noticeable. The low experience of the two actresses in the play is undoubtedly the audience group cultivated under this aesthetic system and the "victims" under the trial. The moment the two teamed up to make a movie, a wrestling match against the torrent and unwillingness in the heart officially started. The battle is not only directed at the big market, at each other, but at themselves. "Feuds are never about hate. Feuds are about pain." This sentence in the play can be called the theme sentence of the whole play. The evaluation is impressive. The grudge between the two is not hatred in essence, but mutual torture that cannot be respected. People always think that differences lead to hatred. In fact, more hatred comes from being too similar. As Crawford's husband put it, "I can't find two more like you", in a way, Joan and Betty see each other as if they were looking at themselves in a mirror. The inability to face the other is essentially the inability to face a corner of oneself. The excellent acting skills of the two leading actors make the contradictory characteristics of Joan and Betty, which are both proud and fragile, vividly displayed. Many times, hatred is often not acting on others, but on self. All the cages of hatred are ultimately imprisoned by themselves.
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