(here's my sad attempt to do an entry similar to that of http://www.dramabeans.com/ in analyzing tvb drama)
Because my family watches television like a dinner side dish, we're constistently exposed to the tyranny of poorly written Hong Kong TVB dramas. I'm not saying their all bad but they mostly aren't good. So we've recently been following the drama called 飞女正传 aka Fly With Me, starring the veteran actress Ada Choi, having just came back from a year long wedding vacation, the always charming Moses Chan, nicknamed muscle man Kenny Wong, and the cutey Raymond Cho. The overview of the story is that Ada plays a female role to which all girls fear that they're future will be like (at least I totally fear this future), a woman whose rather successful in her 30's and still does not have a steady relationship. Her body has begun to lose it's S-line and begun to sprout the silhouette of a big pear. After all her horrible past relationship with guys, she gets genetically mutated into a superwoman named Janet Bin. Janet Bin is her alter ego, not only does she have a figure that Victoria Secret's models would die for, she can fly and has super powers. The show goes on to deal with Ada's character balancing her relationships with her new alternative identity.
There really isn't much to the plot that's fascinating and no I am not diverting from my title. TVB writers deserve props not for the general plot but for the five minute philisophical speech that occurs in episode 3 (spoiler!).
Towards the end of episode 3, Ada's character wallows over the guilt of sending her company's heir into a coma. She finds herself hanging around her 2nd uncles gift shop located in the hospital, where she remarks why he keeps all the left over umbrellas that visitors leave around. He gives a insightful comment that with each umbrella there is an owner and with each owner there is a story. This is already a pretty artistic set up, but what happens next delighted me even more.
After her uncle is done telling the umbrellas' individual stories, Ada finds herself taking sometime to self reflect on his words. Now we get to hear the voice over of her uncle's philosophical speech, which if I may give you a rough translation.
"There is philosopher once said what makes human human is the notion
of memory. Humans even though they tend to forget, but if only a small
minor thing can bring them back into recalling the past, then it makes
them whole and human altogether."
What's brilliant about this scene isn't the speech but the image of Ada looking beyond and we get to see a camera zoom out with her uncle's shop coincidentally named Godot and the clock on the left hand side rapidly spinning. At first I thought, oh cool Godot interesting that Hong Kong people would put the name Godot in their dramas because it's very uncommon. It was not until I began to listen to the voiceover did I realize how the whole scene fits together so well. For those who don't know, the shop's sign Godot should have orginated from the Samuel Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot," which the theme of the play flirted with life, death, future and past. The two protagonists of the play converse in nonsensical terms to which upon first glance, you're caught with a but "HUH?" hanging above your head. Upon further inspection you find that they're conversations are enriched with deep thoughts about the value of life. The two characters are always waiting for something call Godot, they don't know if it's a person or a divine being they just know that is their task. There's a lot of scholarly work that revolved around this play, so I won't further go into it, but one of the relevant themes of the play and Ada's scene was the notion of memories and knowing your past. The uncle's speech was about how fleeting moments of memories serve make us human; ironically, in the play the two protagonists come off as fools because they don't know of their past but only live the present and seek the future. In addition as Ada is pondering upon these words, the clock on the side quickly spins away suggesting that time within this scene is not important that the memories are built not within a time constraint but upon a different component of the individual.
This is pretty intriguing because Ada's alter ego Janet Bin is derived from her but plays a separate character with super powers. She looks great and is almighty but lacks a past because she's essentially spawned by Ada's resentment towards males. Her actions do not have meaning because she lacks memories, making her not human.
I never thought that TVB writers would present work that referenced literature outside of Asian thinking (actually they rarely reference the academia world at all). In addition to have this scene who closely represent the whole play within a couple of seconds is rather clever of them. This scene defintely needs to be applauded, as for the rest of the drama your opinion is as good as mine.
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