Melody of Golden Age (2024) Speaking of Tropes...
I discovered Melody of Golden Age quite by accident. I stumbled upon it during my daily forays into YouTube and mistakenly thought it was a short drama until I realised it wasn’t. I recognized Mao Zijun after doing a triple take and then went straight to his filmography to solve the mystery of this incomplete 40 episode drama. Mao Zijun of course is very good in it as he is in everything I’ve seen but he’s not the male lead here. That honour goes to Ding Yuxi who valiantly does his best to elevate a pretty standard ancient police procedural with an arranged marriage and palace politics.
I’m putting spotlight on the drama not because I think it is a particularly good one. It certainly has its standout moments but it seldom rises above a banal use of idol drama tropes while pushing the female empowerment line in the usual contradictory ways that C dramas do. To my mind there are about 6-8 really good episodes while the others are a mix of mediocrity and face palming embarrassment.
During my early days driving, I used to hear it said that one should navigate the roads on the assumption that everyone (else) is an idiot. Now that I’ve driven for over three decades, I’m convinced that most people drive as if they’re the only person on the roads. Many make spur-of-the-moment decisions without thought of how it affects the traffic or other drivers.
The vast majority of C dramas are trope driven shows. That in itself isn’t a problem. But tropes often come packaged with very specific genres. So this blending of genres is not only about skill but also requires the script to transcend tropes. Take Melody of Golden Age for instance. The female lead Yan Xing’s only mission in life is to solve cases and be a crime investigator. It’s all about justice and justice must be hurried. She seems to know her way around a crime scene and makes her deductions accordingly. She’s got coroner type skills and at face value would be a more than suitable complement to the male lead, Shen Du — the country’s notorious top cop. Unknown to him, they have a shared past albeit briefly and she’s keen to help him redress wrongs that were directed towards his father and clan. On their first encounter as adults, they manage to rub each other the wrong way. Sort of Pride and Prejudice like. In a twist of fate, the empress dowager regent decrees that Shen Du marry Yan Xing’s older half sister. Older half sister has a scholarly suitor she likes, gets cold feet and quite irresponsibly they do a runner. So to protect her family from serious repercussions for defying a royal edict, Yan Xing volunteers to be the substitute bride.
The problem with using Pride and Prejudice or that particular popular romantic comedy trope in this instance is that the bad first impression trope only really works when both parties don’t know each other. It is about the discovery and that gradual self-awareness of one’s own flawed presuppositions that makes the initial conflict and subsequent pairing palatable. Fundamentally it’s about growth. In the case of Melody of Golden Age, a pile of misunderstanding between the leads could have been avoided if she had just open her mouth and told him about their childhood connection. On top of that, her reticence makes her look immature, petty and foolish which to my mind goes diminishes all the effusive praise she gets for being a pioneering woman. What that shows is that there’s a correlation between characterization and how tropes are used as connective tissue in storytelling.
If this were purely a show about romance, it wouldn’t matter quite as much but the show is first and foremost a police procedural so the kind of audience it’s trying to pull in is somewhat different with other kinds of expectations. Much more importantly it flies in the face of what we’re supposed to believe about the clever female lead — the so-called strong independent woman who harps on about how women can be detectives like men can. Except that much of the show demonstrates otherwise. Because she’s eager to prove that she’s a capable investigator on her own, she often acts recklessly — the old adage “fools rush in where angels fear to tread” springs to mind — and puts herself in harm’s way only to be saved by Shen Du who saunters into the scene in nick of time. While she’s passionate about solving cases and righting wrongs, she has no martial arts ability to extricate herself from dangerous situations. Yet over and over again she gets herself into a situation where she needs to be rescued. When she realises what she’s up against in terms of their adversary’s determination to succeed, it finally dawns on her that her family might get dragged into the fray. All throughout the story is obvious that she can’t be a detective without him — his clout, his strength and his love. She would be bleeding out in an abandoned building before any truth can come to light.
To be fair the script has both leads do this sort of thing once too often. Repeatedly the leads don’t communicate well and each do their own thing. Again it might be alright if we’re not solving crime where honesty and trust is important for a good working relationship. And for justice to prevail. Instead they bicker, drag out the push and pull for twenty plus episodes because 40 is the magic number. Even when he finds out who she is, he says nothing about how he feels about her and pretends that their childhood connection is somehow irrelevant. Until that is… he overhears her say to his romantic rival that divorce is inevitable between them because there’s someone he likes.
So yes, for two supposedly intelligent people, they do a lot of unnecessarily stupid things. Because the script needs them to.
No doubt the show wants to be something like The Imperial Coroner and The Legend of Yunxi (and there are certainly echoes of both here) without understanding what made them successful. The Imperial Coroner has many humorous moments and a sweet romance but the leads are always likeably consistent because Chu Chu and Xiao Jinyi are not governed by romance tropes in their relationship. It’s a criminal investigation show with some romance thrown in. Moreover their romance develops out of their common interests and shared goals — two nerds gravitating together organically with no drama. Chu Chu is in awe of Jinyi and Jinyi finds a female version of himself. On the other hand, with a show like Melody, it’s as if the writer is deliberately using romance tropes to prevent a romance from developing or developing too early.
The result is frustration. In every sense of the word. Apart from frustrating the narrative itself, it is also frustrating to watch two supposedly intelligent detectives misunderstanding or purposely misunderstanding each other because … they don’t want to be married to each other?? That’s the million dollar question. Even when they do want to stay married to each other, they don’t speak up until the misunderstanding reaches a crisis point. There’s no plausible reason like in Unveiled: Jadewind to keep mum. What’s even more absurd, (a device common to C dramas) is that the female lead seems wholly oblivious to the male lead’s change in attitude towards her. Yes, it’s also his fault for being overly transactional and belligerent at the beginning but again his disagreeable attitude is forced onto the narrative. Afterall he is a person holding high office and he knows how the political game is played. More importantly he doesn’t behave in a manner befitting his station threatening a young woman acting under duress.
Not surprisingly the best episodes come after Shen Du’s confession. After he’s opened up and all her insecurities are allayed, they talk about how to proceed and work together harmoniously. Once the show is stripped bare of all the goofiness and takes itself more seriously, it’s not hard to see the wasted potential of what could have been. The elements are present for the whole show to be a solid production.
The last few episodes however revert back to all the show’s bad habits. It feels like Shen Du has learnt nothing when he plays the noble idiot when there’s really no sense in going down that route. Then there’s the eye-rolling take down of the show’s main baddie. Shen Du’s scheme is unbelievably bad. There aren’t any real surprises there once we get to Episode 39 especially if you watch a lot of micro or mainstream dramas. It also does this microdrama thing of resolving everything thing in the throne room in a stagey Shakespearean sort of way — people mouthing threats and waving around swords with no desire to actually use them — while monologuing hysterically.
The loose cannon cop is of course a longstanding trope in US cop shows. But the reason why a John McClane, Harry Callahan or an Axel Foley gets away with it, is because not only are they resourceful, they can use weapons and have physical strength to defeat their opponents. It’s a male character stereotype for many reasons. They are also the right type of maverick to deal with the intractable criminal problems that the usual solutions are helpless against.
Female empowerment stories are increasingly less about women having more choices or gaining respect for the work they do traditionally but women becoming male stereotypes. One of the reasons why I love Jane Austen as a writer is because her female protagonists are all different. Anne Elliot is different from Elizabeth Bennet and from Elinor Dashwood. They all exude strength under different and trying circumstances but they’re not afraid to be vulnerable when they hit breaking point. As I get older appreciate Anne much more because as Frederick says, she’s sensible and reliable. He falls in love with her again because she can maintain her wits about her in moments when all others are losing their heads.
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