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This paper examines The Long Season, a landmark Chinese neo-noir series that offers a post-socialist critique of collective trauma and healing through a stylistically innovative lens. Set within the emerging genre of Northeastern neo-noir – popularized since the late 2010s amid the region’s cultural renaissance – the series explores intergenerational trauma against the backdrop of socioeconomic decline since the 1990s. Through a vibrant autumnal palette, sardonic humor, mirrored character archetypes, and a fragmented narrative structure, The Long Season portrays trauma as a psychosomatic cultural complex shaped by ego inflation, repressed grief, guilt, and unexpressed love. Drawing on Steven Sanders’ concept of sunshine noir, Zhang Yingjin’s notion of post-socialism as a structure of feeling, Lin Shiqi’s theorization of Northeastern cultural Renaissance, and Jungian/post-Jungian frameworks, this paper argues that the series expands the thematic and stylistic boundaries of Northeastern neo-noir. Its symbolic imagery and embodied aesthetics invite a body–mind–psyche engagement that exposes the region’s unresolved wounds and imagined redemptions. More broadly, this interdisciplinary analysis bridges Jungian psychology and Chinese screen media, positioning The Long Season as both a regional cultural milestone and a sophisticated meditation on trauma aesthetics, collective memory, and symbolic embodiment.
Ruxin Jemince Jia (Tue,) studied this question.