Town Youth:the Contradictory Audience

With the recovery of China's film market,its movie box office gets higher and higher.Meanwhile,many movies with poor quality get high box office,such as"Fuchun Mountains" and the series of "Tiny Times".Under this situation,Townyouth begin to appear frequently in the movie reviews and reports.Taken literally,town youth refers to the young people who live in small towns,but in the media reports,the town youth seems to referring to the movie audience in the third-tier city and below:the town youth is not interested in the Hollywood blockbusters,in the opposite,they like these domestic films with big stars,stories that related to them and a lot of propaganda even though they have poor word-of-mouth.Obviously,the town youth is a slightly belittle and ridicule name.On a regional basis,many third-tier cities,even some forth-tier cities can not be counted as small towns,to call them town seems to show a superiority complex over the differences of cities.Meanwhile,as for movie audiences,although the adolescent is the important part of the movie audience,but it is an amplification of the intergenerational differences that calling all these movie audience youth.These also imply whether there is a kind of youth subcultures disagreements?In addition,the infiltration of consumption culture and the understanding of movies which worth of discussing and exploring are also related to the town youth.But we only see the stereotype of thetown youth made by the media that they are movie audiences of poor taste and this study wants to find out what is the town youth real like.This paper takes Yichang(third-tier city)Hubei province as an example,surveying the youth who have been in Yichang for a long time of their movie-watch.In order to present their state of life under intergenerational differences and city differences through their movie-watch,especially their pursuit of taste and the attitude of the mainstream culture.After the interviews with thirteen young people who live in Yichang,the author find that most of respondents watch more than 10 films per year,they consider watching movie as an important way of gathering and a pure consumption and pay no attention to the aesthetic significance of it.For movie selection,the word-of-mouth,the personal interests and the starring of the film are the main factors that affecting their choices.Films with good word-of-mouth and competent actors are their main choices,however,they do not want to completely lose their individuality.They show significant preference for the Hollywood blockbusters,and disidentification for domestic films,but they see a lot of domestic films.In their view,life and movies has a very clear dividing line,the film world is wonderful but fake,their life is real but boring.The author believes that behind these town youth's enthusiasm of the film is their fighting against the huge difference between cities in various aspects.Through movies,the gap between small cities and big cities seem to disappear:they can see the latest movies as soon as the people in big cities.The consistency and contradiction of the town youth in the movie selection embodies their cultural dissociation:they want to be the rational audiences with good taste which in line with the mainstream aesthetic,meanwhile they unavoidably have an instinctive resistance to the mainstream culture.They do not want to bother to interpret a movie,even to really understand it,they seem to be ignorant and stupid audiences in this way,but maybe it's the appropriate response to films they consider as the dinner entertainment.