⚔ sword and cross ✝

you maybe already knew that "zhang xincheng's acting skills" was in the top 10 weibo hot search all day yesterday, but if you didn't i think you can now see why. i left out the more ghastly parts of this scene (as well as all the shots of fu xinbo's superbly horror-stricken face, the face of a man seeing something no one should have to see, the face of man looking directly into a war) bc that's not what's relevant to me here. and lbr any old first-year drama student can have a fake seizure.

instead what i wanted to focus on is some of the most astonishing transparency i've ever witnessed a television actor offering their audience. this is a character dragging himself deliberately into the pit of hell bc he thinks that's what he has to do—to be saved? oh no, not saved. fei du doesn't think he can be saved. he's just trying to pass as a creature that's shaped like, behaves like, something roughly equivalent to a human being. this is part of how fei du has crafted his "painted skin," the one that only lwz ever sees through.

(and whichever screenwriter decided lwz should have to be there for this? should watch fei du put himself through self-torture as a way to visualize figuring it out?—whoever you are, screenwriter, i could cheerfully kiss you. this choice doesn't just compress and expedite narrative but it gives us additional character payout: amazing.)

and yet! not as amazing as that moment when zhang xincheng leans forward and smiles. it's not that fei du sees lwz, not in this reality; if he's smiling at anyone, it might be fei chengyu. but i would also put it to you that at least part of the reason luo wenzhou is so absolutely horrified is that he's afraid of his own complicity in this nightmare. what if his crabby chinese-dad lectures, the belligerent fussing, the constant criticisms, have done a kind of work he never intended? fei du genuinely believes (but thanks to fei chengyu, not lwz) that he's incapable of human emotion and reactions, empathy and connection, and that he has to be punished into some simulacrum of personhood. when he leans forward and smiles like that? "i'm good now, aren't i? look at me trying—i want to be good, like you and tao ran. it will never work. i'm unsalvageable, i'm worthless, i'm wreckage. but i'm trying to be a person, i'm trying to be good like you are—"

from this moment on, lwz has a newly doubled responsibility. it's not just what his shifu had told him (and what luo wenzhou recognized, when a young fei du had first looked at him with "a gaze so clear it had been nearly wild…stifling never-before-uttered cries for help"): namely, that "if someone ever looks at you like that, you…absolutely cannot fail to live up to those expectations." lwz's been carrying that burden already; after all, he's been investigating this case for over seven years. but now, it's also his responsibility to make sure that going forward, starting from today, he doesn't fail to protect fei du from himself (from fei chengyu, really; and the drama does a little sleight-of-hand here, but more on that some other time). he starts by ordering fei du to "come back to the bureau and work overtime with me," his first desperate attempt to stop this, without having to confront fei du (who he knows would simply shut him out anyway, at this point—put on his glasses and his mask and smile the cold polite little peach-blossom smile, the rehearsed painted skin).

here's the interesting thing, though, and then i swear to god i will shut up and let you go on your way: apparently no one ever told fei du, or he never read about or internalized, despite his brilliance—that you can't teach new behavior through negative stimuli. it's basic operant conditioning; he should have known this. think about it for one second: "don't do that" doesn't tell you what you should do. it teaches an organism to be aversive, but it doesn't give them any positive behavior to fill the void instead. that's why the word "no" means nothing to a well-trained service dog. "no" doesn't give any direction or instruction; it doesn't suggest any outcome. in a very twisted kind of way, this actually proves what fei du loves to deny: that he has raging ptsd. it's just plain self-punishment, not self-correction, and he's deluding himself. absolutely none of what he's doing in the basement would be making him better, EVEN IF he were antisocial.

(the visual metaphor for this is the completely unnecessary scarring he's inflicted on himself through his own badly-administered ECT. it shouldn't leave scars. but he's not trying to do it the right way, or to achieve a result. he's doing it bc he believes he deserves to suffer.)

we all know what it will take to make fei du better, at this point; he's proven his ability to dodge around therapists for years on end. instead it has to be wenzhou's traveling bag full of patience. his persistence, him breaking a lock with the same bit of wire he once used to fish his police ID out of a trashcan (metaphorically). it's water-cooled noodles, and the way he won't let fei du get away with either his grandiosity or his self-loathing. it's lwz's ability to startle him speechless by kissing him on the forehead, his genuine warmth and tenderness and the uncomplicated pleasure of real connection, as well as someone who will thwack him affectionately on the back of his head, whose irreverence will jolt him out of his tragic main character narrative and bring him right back to the here and now.

the fact that steven fucking zhang compresses all of this into like four minutes of red-saturated camera B roll? is just astonishing. he does it with his whole body; he does it with every slow, deliberate, hypnotic, almost serene gesture. in the novel we never see any of this. in the drama, he's made it into a graceful ritual, into kink, into an erotic spiritual practice, with the stringently enforced purity of his self-discipline. it would almost be beautiful, if it weren't a travesty of all these things. and even worse? the ghastly contrast of his self-violence against the fact that he does all of it while somehow also literally being the most beautiful man in the entire world? lwz's gay little brain has to be pinballing around in his skull like an agitated squid, how does he cope with this.