‘미스터리’ 장르로 소환된 ‘동북’ — 드라마 <만장적계절>을 중심으로

Abstract

Since 2019, the “Northeast” region has emerged as a new focus of interest in China’s literary and artistic circles. Against this background, a “Mystery” genre drama(懸疑劇) based on “Northeast” has been mass-produced. This study views Chinese drama The Long Season (<漫長的季節>, 2023) as a representative Northeast narrative within the mystery genre, and aims to examine both the contemporary portrayals of the region in Chinese cultural production and the genre-specific characteristics of drama production. The “Northeast” region has long exerted a strong presence in Chinese literature and the arts. With the advent of mass culture in the 1990s, what imprinted the Northeast upon the public consciousness were “Northeast Errenzhuan(東北二人轉)” and “Comedic sketches(喜劇小品)”. These performances—stand-up style comedy vignettes—employ Northeastern dialects and colloquial vernacular to individually recreate the lives and sentiments of Chinese society and ordinary people (especially those in the Northeast) through parody, humor, and exaggeration. What now decorates the landscape of Northeastern cultural production are the creative activities of the so-called “New Northeast Writers Group(新東北作家群)” and a range of films and television dramas that use the Northeast as their subject matter or setting. In recent years, shifts in the Chinese government’s drama-related regulatory policies have made “realist themes (現實題材)” the mainstream, and within this category, suspense dramas have become the most favored production format in China over the past two to three years. Moreover, the drama “theater(劇場)” branding strategies of video-streaming platforms(網絡視頻平台)—which selectively feature high-quality dramas with distinct themes—function as a kind of “premiumization” to capture increasingly discerning viewers. Through this approach, a significant number of mystery dramas have been released. Based on the region’s mass layoffs, rising crime rates, natural scenery, old industrial facilities, railroads, and other environmental elements, the “Northeast” region has come to be spotlighted as an ideal setting for mystery dramas. In the past few years, a large number of works set in the “Northeast” region have been produced, visually recreating the region’s unique urban landscape on screen. The Long Season subverts the basic plot structure of the mystery genre by intertwining three timelines—2016, 1998, and 1997. It casts realistic, ordinary, everyday figures—people one might see around them—as detectives, while portraying antagonists as characters with complex inner lives; in doing so, it erases the clear boundary typically drawn between perpetrators and victims, who are usually the central axis of cause and resolution in such stories. Unlike most mystery works set in the “Northeast” region, which evoke a chilling atmosphere against the backdrop of cold, snowy plains, The Long Season distinguishes itself by depicting the region’s short autumn through warm tones. Although the Northeast region rise to new prominence in today’s Chinese literary and cultural world is a welcome development, it remains essential to continuously examine how the region’s social and historical significance can be harnessed as a contemporary cultural resource.