By Haoran Xia
Published on: DeepFocus
June 11, 2026
In our present society, where every relationship is somehow determined in advance, the contingency of an encounter has become almost impossible.
Algorithms, social media, artificial intelligence, the endless array of apps—our encounters with others are filtered through layer upon layer of invisible mesh, until the people left beside us are, more often than not, the "same" we already resembled from the start. In other words, modern society offers us a safe, efficient, low-cost model of relation: we build relationships only with those we are already able to understand. And those entirely misaligned with us—people forty years older, people whose politics stand opposed to ours, people who live in worlds we have never set foot in—are quietly sorted out of our lives by this system.
This system is so efficient that we have nearly forgotten to ask: if it were to fail, if two people who could never meet were forced into the same room, what would happen between them?
Hacks tells precisely this kind of story. It forcibly brings together two women who could never otherwise speak to each other, who could never generate a friendship—and in the course of their collision, it gives rise to the most beautiful, the most sincere, and the most intimate relationship of our time.
Hacks was developed by HBO Max, premiered in 2021, and concluded its fifth season this year. At its two poles stand two women who differ in nearly every respect—age, experience, sexuality, and intimate life. Deborah Vance, the nearly seventy-year-old legendary queen of Las Vegas comedy, possessor of mansions, a private jet, and a sprawling retail empire, is nonetheless trapped in a residency she has repeated to herself for decades. Ava Daniels, a twenty-five-year-old queer writer out of Los Angeles, "cancelled" over a single ill-timed tweet, cannot find any work in Hollywood. One refuses to exit; the other cannot find her way in. Their shared agent, Jimmy, throws the two together and has Ava write comedy materials for Deborah.
And so the story begins.
At its heart, Hacks is a story about two women. But before we speak of them, we might first look at how female relationships have come to be defined within the language of popular culture.
Under the traditional patriarchal structure (Beauvoir), female rivalry is perhaps the most common pathological form a relationship between women can take: women compete with one another to win recognition in some domain—and that recognition tends to come from men.
This outward-facing search in fact discards women's autonomy; it voluntarily throws the autonomy women already possess outward, obtaining the validation of that autonomy through the attitude of a third party (usually male). In other words, within the structure of rivalry, the relationship between women is never the relationship itself, but a racetrack leading toward the male gaze—the rivals are one another, yet the judge is always the other.
Against this pathological structure, popular culture has offered up "girls help girls," a surface-level model of female relation, as its antidote. It is true that women ought to help one another—but help in what respects? Under what circumstances? And beyond that help, who is its object? These are questions the framework supplied by popular culture leaves unanswered.
In Sex and the City, such instances of mutual aid likewise exist—this is perhaps one of the earliest and most classic female relationships in the history of popular culture. Yet the "mutual aid" depicted there dwells, for the most part, in romance: how do I help my friend solve her love problems? Love and marriage—these two subjects that, under the structure of heterosexual power (Foucault), suppress women—are merely fragments of female autonomy. If we continue to examine women, and the relationships between women, through the lens of marriage and romance, then we remain within the patriarchal structure after all: the form of the aid has changed, but the coordinate system of the relationship has not.
The brilliance of Hacks lies in this: it changes the coordinate system entirely.
The relationship between Deborah and Ava begins in mutual contempt. Deborah sees Ava as something Hollywood has foisted upon her—a Gen Z kid full of politically correct rhetoric who cannot write a single decent joke. Ava sees Deborah as a relic living off outdated bits—a hack. Their first meeting ends in mutual humiliation, and it is precisely in that humiliation that the two see each other for the first time: both are vicious, both are self-assured, both treat the joke as a weapon for facing the world.
Across the five seasons that follow, this relationship passes through every form we can imagine: Ava, drunk, leaks Deborah's scandal to a writer; Deborah sues Ava; Ava uses a blackmail email to force Deborah to name her head writer; Deborah, again and again, chooses her own career at the very moment Ava needs her most.
Within this relationship there are the residues of rivalry, the shadow of mother and daughter, the eternal power differential between mentor and apprentice—but in the end it digests all of this, because what sustains this relationship was never tenderness, but the most naked mutual need between two creators: Ava makes Deborah's comedy sincere again, and Deborah gives Ava's talent its first shape.
This is exactly where the relationship between Deborah and Ava surpasses "girls help girls": the aid between them spans art, creation, growth, love, family, and—most essentially—how to help another woman find the place that belongs to her in this world.
Nothing they do for each other terminates in the male gaze; what they fight over is always the credit for creation, the ownership of the stage, the power to define themselves. When the content of a female relationship no longer revolves around romance and marriage but around "who I am / who I want to become," the formula changes: only when we set the question of women's subjectivity equal to the question of the subjectivity of the person does 1+1 truly equal 2, and only then is the question of women released further.
So the relationship between Deborah and Ava has long since surpassed gender—it is not merely the ideal relationship that feminism sets out to display; it is a state of relation we long for between human beings, the most ideal state there is. And perhaps the deepest insight of Hacks is this: that this most ideal state arises precisely between two people the system has deemed "mismatched."
"Hack," in common usage, means a second-rate writer, a comedian who gets by on formula. The word itself is the verdict Hollywood has pinned on Deborah.
Deborah was not always a Vegas resident act: she once produced comedy specials with her ex-husband Frank, co-starred with him in a hit sitcom, appeared on the cover of TV Guide, and the late-night pilot she filmed could have become the first late-night show in American television history hosted by a woman. Then Frank slept with her own sister, and after his house burned down (in truth, a dryer fire) he spread the rumor across all of Hollywood that Deborah was an arsonist—he was jealous that she was about to have her own late-night show, and so he turned her into "the crazy woman who burned down the house."
The late-night show was buried; Deborah started over from nothing—performing one set at a time in bars—and eventually rebuilt an empire of her own in Vegas. She was dazzling throughout the eighties, yet she was also nailed, forever, to the position of "second-rate": a hack cast out by mainstream Hollywood, living off her jokes.
To want to return to the trade in Hollywood at nearly seventy is almost impossible. Within an industrial system oriented toward youth, appearance, material, and use-value, Deborah has lost nearly all her "use-value"—she could have retired in comfort, growing old with dignity beside her mansion and her empire, but she chooses instead to struggle once more for her career, to seize back, in this arena of carnage, the standing and the name that should have been hers all along.
One of the series' finest moments comes in the ninth episode of the fourth season. Having finally obtained the late-night show that was her lifelong dream, Deborah is pressured by the network's executives to fire Ava—and between the late-night show and Ava, Deborah chooses to give up the show.
She says: "Having my own late-night show was my dream. That dream came true, but I've changed too, and so now I'm going to do the right thing." In that moment, what Deborah refuses is not merely a dismissal order, but the entire script Hollywood has written for her—that "survivor" symbol willing to sacrifice anything to stay at the table. Within a filthy, chaotic industrial system, she preserves nonetheless her passion for, and her respect toward, creation.
Deborah and Ava are both creators—one writes jokes, the other writes scripts. The line Deborah repeats throughout the series is: I am a comedian.
This is very nearly the whole of her self-definition. When ordered to fire Ava, she says I can't, because I am a comedian, I have to protect my writing; in the fifth season, when her Madison Square Garden show is bought out by an executive and she is told to stop performing, she says just as firmly: I can't, because I am a comedian; and at the very end, when Deborah has decided to end her own life, what pulls her back is the thought that she needs to keep writing funnier jokes together with Ava—her identity as a comedian reminds her, once more, of her mission.
Throughout the series, the identity of the comedian and the creation of comedy are the core along which the story advances, which further demonstrates the importance, and the necessity, of "creation" for the creator.
Yet to speak of creation now, we cannot get around one fact: in a world where artistic creation has long been reproduced and replicated by capital, by machinery, by technology, and now by artificial intelligence (Benjamin), the difficulty of creation no longer lies with the creator alone, but in the fact that the very act of "creation" is being abolished—presented to everyone by a more convenient, easier, lighter, lower-cost means.
In the sixth episode of the fifth season, Ava and Deborah meet with an executive from an artificial-intelligence technology company to discuss a collaboration, and when this executive declares that "the age of AI has arrived—you either join or you get left behind,"
Ava points to a kind of "passive inevitability" that artificial intelligence manufactures at present—an inevitability that in truth issues solely from the blind greed of Silicon Valley executives for money. This so-called "inevitability" is not a property of the technology but a rhetoric of capital: it announces that the future has already been decided, then casts aside all who would question it.
In the course of being abolished, "creation" gradually loses the beauty and the truth it held in the traditional sense. And so, when a creator chooses to create, she in some sense chooses to do battle with the present system of capital and technology—a battle that demands a price. This is why artistic creation today/the near-stubborn striving that Deborah embodies, is so precious.
Writing to this point, the two threads—woman and creation—are at last twisted into one.
The reason the relationship between Deborah and Ava is the most beautiful relationship of our time is precisely that it is, at the same time, a creative relationship.
They meet through jokes, humiliate each other through jokes, apologize through jokes, and save each other through jokes too. The joke is the only honest language between them—and in this language, the misalignments of age, of history, of class all fall away, leaving only two creators' most naked acknowledgment of each other's talent.
Hollywood calls them hacks, second-rate goods. But it is precisely these two "second-rate goods" who, in an age where relationships are determined by algorithm and creation is replicated by capital, accomplish the two most impossible things: to build a true relationship, and to go on creating.
作者：夏浩然
发表于：深焦DeepFocus
二零二六 六月十一日
在当下这个一切关系被提前分化的社会，相遇的偶然性几乎成为不可能。
算法、社交媒体、人工智能、以及各类软件——我们与他人的相遇被一层层无形的筛网过滤，最终留在我们身边的，往往是与从一开始与我们便相仿的”同类”。换而言之，现代社会为我们提供了一种安全的、高效的、低成本的关系模式：我们只与我们能够理解的人建立关系。而那些与我们全然错位的人——比我们年长四十岁的人，与我们政治立场相悖的人，生活在我们从未踏足的世界里的人——则被这套分拣系统默默移出我们的生活。
这套系统如此高效，以至于我们几乎忘记：如果这套体系失灵，如果两个不可能相遇的人被强行放置在同一个房间里，他们之间会发生什么?
《绝望写手》讲述的正是这样一个故事：它强行让两个几乎不可能有交流、不可能生成友谊的女性碰面，并在她们碰撞的途中，生发出我们这个时代最美丽、最真诚、也是最亲密的关系。
《绝望写手》（Hacks）由HBO Max开发，开播于2021年，第五季于今年完结。故事的两端是两位在年龄、经历、亲密关系等各个方面都存在巨大差异的女性：黛博拉·万斯，年近七十的拉斯维加斯传奇喜剧女王，坐拥豪宅、私人飞机和庞大的购物帝国，却被困在一场自我重复了几十年的驻场秀里；艾娃·丹尼尔斯，二十五岁的来自洛杉矶的酷儿编剧，因一条不合时宜的推特被”取消”，在好莱坞找不到任何工作。一个不想退场，一个无处入场——共同的经纪人吉米把两人凑在一起让艾娃为黛博拉写笑话。
故事由此开始。
《绝望写手》的核心是一个关于两位女性的故事，不过在谈论她们之前，我们或许需要先看看女性关系在流行文化语境中究竟是怎样被定义的。
在传统男权结构下（波伏娃），雌竞或许是女性关系中最常见的一种病态形态：女性之间相互竞争，以在某方面获得认可——而这种认可往往来自于男性。这种向外式的寻求实际抛弃了女性的自主性，将女性本身拥有的自主权主动向外丢弃，通过第三方（往往是男性）的态度获得对于自主的认可。换而言之，在雌竞的结构里，女性与女性之间的关系从来不是关系本身，而是一条通往男性目光（male gaze）的赛道——竞争的对象是彼此，裁判却永远是他者。
针对这种病态结构，流行文化提出了”girls help girls”这样停留于表面的女性关系作为解药。的确，女性之间应当互助，不过互助在哪些方面？在什么情况下互助？以及互助之外的对象是谁？这些问题都是流行文化所提供的框架没有解答的。
在《欲望都市》中，这样的互助案例同样存在——这或许是流行文化史上最古早也是最经典的女性关系之一。不过《欲望都市》中刻画的女性”互助”在大部分情况下停留于”恋爱”：我如何帮助我的姐妹解决恋爱问题？恋爱与婚姻，这两个存在于异性恋权力结构（福柯）下压抑女性的话题，仅仅是女性自主性中的碎片罢了。如果我们仍然从婚姻与恋爱的角度探讨女性以及存在于女性之间的关系，那么我们仍然停留于男权结构之下——互助的形式变了,关系的坐标系却没有变。
《绝望写手》的妙处在于，它彻底更换了坐标系。
黛博拉与艾娃的关系开始于相互鄙夷：黛博拉视艾娃为好莱坞塞给她的、满嘴政治正确话术却写不出一个像样笑话的Z时代；艾娃视黛博拉为靠过时段子混饭吃的老古董——一个”hack”。她们的第一次见面以互相羞辱告终，而正是在那场羞辱里，两人第一次看见了彼此：她们都毒舌，都自信，都把笑话当作面对世界的武器。
在故事发展的五季里，这段关系经历了我们能够想象的一切形态：艾娃在醉酒后向编剧泄露黛博拉的丑闻；黛博拉起诉艾娃；艾娃以一封勒索邮件逼黛博拉任命自己为首席编剧；黛博拉在艾娃最需要她的时刻一次次选择自己的事业。这段关系里有雌竞的残渣，有母女的影子，有师徒之间永恒的权力差——但它最终把这一切全部消化，因为支撑这段关系的从来不是温情，而是两个创作者之间最赤裸的相互需要：艾娃让黛博拉的喜剧重新变得真诚，黛博拉让艾娃的才华第一次拥有了形状。
这正是黛博拉与艾娃的关系超越"girls help girls”的地方：她们之间的互助横跨艺术、创作、成长、爱情、家庭，以及——最核心的——如何帮助另一位女性在当今这个世界上找到属于自己的定位。她们为彼此做的事情，没有一件以男性的目光为终点；她们争夺的，从来是创作的署名权、舞台的归属权和定义自己的权力。当女性关系的内容不再围绕恋爱与婚姻，而是围绕”我是/要成为谁”展开时，公式发生改变：只有当我们将女性的主体性问题与”人”的主体性问题划上等号，1+1才真正等于2，而女性问题才进一步得到释放。
所以，黛博拉与艾娃之间的关系早已超越性别——它不仅仅是女性主义所向展示的理想关系，它是一种我们渴望存在于人与人之间的、最理想的关系状态。而《绝望写手》最深刻的洞察或许在于：这种最理想的状态，恰恰诞生于两个被系统判定为”互不匹配”的人之间。
“Hack”在俗语中的意思是二流写手、靠套路混饭吃的喜剧人。这个词本身就是好莱坞贴在黛博拉身上的判决。黛博拉从一开始并非是维加斯的驻场艺人：她曾与前夫弗兰克共同制作喜剧特辑、合演热门情景喜剧，登上<TV Guide>封面，而她录制的晚间秀试播集本可成为美国电视史上第一个由女性主持的晚间秀。随后弗兰克出轨她的亲妹妹，又在他的房子失火后（实则是一场烘干机事故）向全好莱坞散布”黛博拉纵火”的谣言——他嫉妒她即将拥有自己的晚间秀，于是把她变成了”那个烧掉房子的疯女人”。
晚间秀被雪藏，黛博拉从零开始 ——在酒吧里一场一场地演，最终在维加斯重建了属于自己的帝国。她在八十年代风光无限，却也永远被钉在了”二流”的位置：一个被主流好莱坞放逐、靠着笑话过活的hack。
年近七十想要在好莱坞重操旧业，这几乎是不可能的。在好莱坞这样以年轻、外貌、物质和使用价值为导向的工业体系里，黛博拉几乎失去了任何”使用价值”——她本该可以安养退休,守着豪宅与帝国体面老去，但她一心选择再为事业拼搏，在这个修罗场里夺回本来就应该属于自己的地位和名声。
全剧的高光时刻之一出现在第四季第九集：在终于得到毕生梦想的晚间秀之后，电视网高管逼迫黛博拉开除艾娃，而黛博拉在晚间秀与艾娃之间，选择了放弃晚间秀。她说:”拥有自己的晚间秀曾是我的梦。这个梦实现了，不过我也变了，那么现在我要选择做正确的事情。”在那一刻，黛博拉拒绝的不仅是一纸开除令，而是好莱坞为她写好的整套剧本——那个为了留在牌桌上可以牺牲一切的”幸存者”符号。她在肮脏混乱的工业体系中，仍然保持着对创作的激情与尊重。
黛博拉和艾娃都是创作者，一个写笑话，一个写剧本。
黛博拉在剧里反复说的一句话是：我是一名喜剧演员。这几乎是她对自己的全部定义。
在被要求开除艾娃时，她说我做不到，因为我是一名喜剧演员，我需要保护我的创作团队；在第五季，当她在麦迪逊广场花园的秀被高管买断并被要求停止演出时，她同样坚决地说：我做不到，因为我是一名喜剧演员；而在结尾，当黛博拉决定结束自己的生命时，将她拉回来的，是她想到需要和艾娃一起继续写更好笑的笑料——她作为喜剧演员的身份，再一次提醒了她的使命。贯穿整部剧集，喜剧演员的身份以及对喜剧的创作是故事发展的核心，这进一步说明了”创作”对于创作者而言的重要性与必要性。
不过，在当下谈论创作，我们无法绕开一个事实：在艺术创作早已被资本、机械、科技以及如今的人工智能再生产并复刻（本雅明）的世界里，创作的难点早已不局限于创作者本身，而在于”创作”这个行为正在被其他方式取缔——被一种更方便、更容易、更轻松、更低成本的方式呈现给所有人。
在第五季第六集中，艾娃与黛博拉同一名人工智能科技公司高管见面谈合作，当这位高管说出”人工智能时代已经到了,你要么加入要么被淘汰”时,艾娃指出了当下人工智能所营造的一种”被动的不可阻挡性”——而这种不可阻挡性，实则仅仅来自于硅谷科技高管对于金钱的盲目奢求。所谓”不可阻挡”，不是技术的属性，而是资本的修辞：它宣布未来已经被决定，再把所有质疑者抛弃。”创作”在被取缔的过程中，逐渐失去了它传统意义上的美与真。
所以，当创作者选择创作时，ta在某种程度上选择了与当下的资本科技体系进行对抗——这样的对抗是需要付出代价的，这也是为什么，如今的艺术创作/黛博拉所体现的那种近乎固执的拼搏，如此可贵。
写到这里，女性与创作这两条线终于拧成了一股：黛博拉与艾娃的关系之所以是我们这个时代最美的关系，正因为它同时是一段创作关系。她们用笑话相识，用笑话相互羞辱，用笑话道歉，也用笑话拯救彼此。笑话是她们之间唯一诚实的语言——在这门语言里，年龄、过往、阶级的错位全部失效，剩下的只有两个创作者对彼此才华最赤裸的确认。
好莱坞称她们为hacks，二流货色，但恰恰是这两个”二流货色”，在一个由算法确定关系、由资本复刻创作的时代里，完成了两件最不可能的事情：建立一段真正的关系，以及，继续创作。