「這又不是演戲」 “We’re not playacting here”: Self-Reflexivity in the Taiwanese Idol-Drama

Abstract

「這又不是演戲」 “We’re not playacting here”:Self-Reflexivity in the Taiwanese Idol-Drama W. Michelle Wang (bio) In this essay, I seek to develop a cross-cultural approach to popular culture artifacts using tools from narrative theory. Specifically, I attend to the peculiar phenomenon of the Taiwanese idol-drama’s deployment of self-reflexivity, by addressing possible functions that motivate its inclusion in the narrative and its potential impact on viewers. The use of self-reflexivity in this genre of Asian popular culture is particularly interesting because the device typically functions in ways that appear to be at odds with the mimetic nature of the idol-drama. I use my case study of the Taiwanese idol-drama Love Keeps Going (2011) to show how varied instances of self-referentiality in the narrative serve different ends. More generally, I argue that the functions of self-reflexive techniques are nuanced and contextualized by the conventions of particular narrative genres. In laying out my argument, I begin by defining methodological concepts that underpin my theoretical approach. I then point to key characteristics of the Taiwanese idol-drama genre and explain how it has proven to be a significant narrative form for East and Southeast Asian television viewers, within the larger contextual discussion of Asian popular culture flows. The remainder of my essay uses Love Keeps Going to explore a number of issues surrounding narrative self-reflexivity. First, I examine how deployments of the self-reflexive device serve apparently paradoxical ends in the idol-drama, highlighting both the narrative’s realism as well as [End Page 105] its artificiality—what James Phelan terms its mimetic and synthetic components.1 Second, I theorize that self-reflexivity is being used in the idoldrama as a way to establish what I call a mimetic pact, and I use my analysis of the case study to more fully elucidate the functions and implications of this pact. Briefly, the mimetic pact can be defined as the use of self-reflexivity to motivate the audience’s sustained investment in the mimesis of the idol-drama, with the implicit reciprocatory promise of realizing the narrative’s affective possibilities facilitated by such mimesis. Third, since the idol-drama’s characteristic “happily ever after” is a key contributing factor to the genre’s popularity with East Asian audiences, I suggest that the use of self-reflexivity in Love Keeps Going’s one of two endings helps shape the viewer’s sense of whether narrative closure is ultimately achieved. The work I undertake in this essay not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of this genre of Asian popular culture, but also aims to fill what Jeffrey Sconce identifies as the “formidable void” of stylistic analysis in television studies (95). By targeting an Asian television genre that is not often discussed in a scholarly context, I draw on ideas from narrative theory to follow up on Sconce’s call for stylistic analyses of such narrative texts. I ultimately suggest that self-reflexive narrative devices are being used to guide viewers’ interpretive and affective responses to Taiwanese idol-drama narratives. By leveraging tools from narrative theory, I explain how self-reflexivity in idol-dramas serves such audience-involving functions in this enormously popular genre of Asian storytelling. Methodology and key definitions I adopt a rhetorical approach to the idol-drama’s narrative, focusing specifically on the interactions between the implied author, the narrator(s)—in this case, the characters themselves, since we deal largely with direct discourse in television serials—and the authorial audience as well as the real audience.2 Given the seemingly unmotivated use of self-reflexive gestures that foreground artifice in a highly mimetic genre, I hypothesize that these gestures serve as a form of covert communication between implied author and authorial audience. My use of the rhetorical model and these conceptual terms is thus necessary to demonstrate this argument. [End Page 106] Within the rhetorical model of narrative, the implied author is distinguished from the real or flesh-and-blood author in that the implied author serves as “the source of the beliefs, norms, and purposes of the text”—beliefs and norms that may or may not be shared by the real...