AmericanBeauty was translated into American Beauty in China, and the DVD is a provincial version of Taiwan Province, called American Heart, Love of Roses, which sounds like a tender love drama. If translated literally, it should be called The Beauty of America. Although there are fantasies of "beauty" and "rose" in the film, it can be more interesting to define the film from the perspective of a black comedy. America's beauty, America's beauty, America's beauty, America's beauty … just like those humorous and sad scenes in movies, irony.
I was deeply impressed by the talent of Sam Mendes. Every character in the film, no matter how many scenes, is portrayed as flesh and blood, telling many stories in a radial space centered on the street. This film has always been positioned to describe the crisis of middle age, but I also saw the crisis of adolescence, personality, communication, plain crisis, trust crisis ... is it the beauty of America or the crisis of America, and this crisis-ridden society is not only in America.
Countless self and others, countless deja vu in the past and repeated mistakes in the future.
Two families
Lester and Caroline are the hostesses of family number one. They have a daughter, Jane.
This family is simply a typical example of a family where most male and female owners are around 40 years old. They sleep in the same bed every day, covered with their own quilts. They haven't had sex for a year or more, and they are not interested in quarreling. Women often talk about trifles, sometimes with their families and sometimes with their neighbors. Men get up in the morning and masturbate in the shower. He said, "this is the highest point of my day, and my mood has been declining for the rest of the time." When my daughter was in high school, she saved a few years to show her children to others and wanted to have breast augmentation surgery. She seldom communicates with her parents, for one thing, there is nothing to say, and for another, her parents can't understand.
The man's company is in recession, and he will be in danger of being laid off; Although women are not particularly successful as real estate agents, they bear a large part of the family economy. Like all people who are mainly responsible for the family economy, they are the authority of the family. The music and activities of dinner should be decided by women.
I will laugh when I see this. It's all so real. This state accounts for a large part of families whose married life lasts more than 15 years. Dull, without passion and lack of communication, every family member feels dull but uses habits to support the continuation from day to day. What keeps the family intact is affection and sense of responsibility. Affection can only be realized if it encounters twists and turns. There are no twists and turns day after day, only the default of each member to his role. Even, no one seriously examines this repetitive life, just like the existence of every organ in the body, it is natural and logical to let the days go on like this.
The male owner of Family 2 used to be a US Navy colonel, while the female owner was withdrawn, and her role in the family was more like a nanny. There was also a son, Ricky, who was 18 years old.
There are also some such families in society. Men are the authority in the family, and everyone listens to him. He is conservative and arbitrary, always treats things absolutely right and wrong, and always reminds people around him of his former identity in exchange for respect or awe. Women are the most loyal fans of men's authority. As soon as a man says something, she never dares to say anything again, as numb as a puppet. A man's expression is simple and rude, and violence is his weapon to maintain authority. No matter who it is, if you don't follow the trend, punch it. Their son is a handsome, sensitive and slightly neurotic boy, a DV youth with artist temperament.
It is difficult to judge the proportion of such families in society, but I am sure that they exist and are definitely not rare. Everyone in the family has little freedom. Even a man who is above his wife and children like a monarch has become narrow-minded because of his limited social cognition and endurance. Such families have always resisted, but the result of resistance is often suppressed or expelled by authority. If you choose, you can either submit or leave.
The two families are on the same street and can observe each other through the window. Children's love for each other makes them intersect. Children envy each other's families, first, because there is too little freedom, and second, because there is too little discipline; One is because there is no father's role model, and the other is because his father's role model is too paranoid. You can't find yourself if you have too little freedom, and it doesn't matter if you have too little discipline. Think of an old saying, "Every family has its own problems." This is what people do. What they can get is a bondage, but what they can't get is an ideal. Moreover, the two sides of anything affect people, and the deeper the experience, the worse it will always be. How can we overcome the dull crisis and the crisis of communication?
Three young people
Jane, the daughter of the first family, looks down on her father and has no warm feeling about family life. Her temporary ideal is to save some money for breast augmentation surgery. And her parents will never understand her heart. It's not like her mother imagined that going to school to watch a performance would make her feel the warmth of her family. Her mother just thinks she is too self-righteous. In her opinion, they might as well not go to the show.
The warmth of family is irreparable, and nothing can make up for it. The feeling of warmth permeates countless details of life. It is an accumulated height, which cannot be achieved at one time. Children don't talk to their parents because they think their parents will never understand. This is the generation gap problem, which will always exist in family life. I yearn for a life of great freedom, and I grew up in an environment of great freedom, but it is difficult to judge whether this full freedom is good or bad. Like Jane, I used to complain that my parents seldom restrained my behavior. At that time, I always felt abandoned by my family, but I knew more clearly that my parents didn't care, but they cared in different ways. What they can do is to take the identity of parents as a subtle influence and take the power of example as a guide. I should be considered a lucky child. Jane is actually very lucky, but her father's failure has lightened the weight of the role model too much. She has not yet realized the sadness and helplessness of being unsuccessful. In the process of growing up, the greatest advantage of such a young man is that he knows early that he must be responsible for his own choices and has no right to blame others.
Ricky, the son of two families, grew up under the restraint and protection of a simple and rude father. 15 years old, was sent to military school by his father for smoking marijuana. After being expelled from the military school, his father simply sent him to a mental hospital, trying to make his son grow up to be what he wanted. Ricky's character changed from open resistance to disobedience. He used his legal part-time experience to cover up his income from selling marijuana, and used the pure urine of a pediatric nurse to cope with the drug test that his father had to carry out every six months. He learned to exchange trust with his father's favorite soldier in his father's violence. His greatest pleasure is to record all the beautiful things he sees with DV. Those beautiful things may be a pigeon who died on the grass, a woman who froze to death on the side of the road, a plastic bag floating in the wind, or Jane who stared at him through the glass and took off her coat to reveal the girl's chest ... Finally, at the arbitrary decision of her father, she was expelled from the house, and all she could get was the words of her cowardly mother, "It's raining outside, put on a raincoat."
Many children around me grew up in imperfect families. This imperfection is not necessarily the lack of family members, but more the family integrity but the lack of warmth and tolerance. Such children are often delicate in thinking, emotionally unstable and more or less neurotic. Many times, they are fragile and lovely, sensitive and distressing. As pure and transparent as Ricky describes the tears when plastic bags dance in the wind. Too many people have heard the phrase "I hit you for your own good" from their parents. Those painful parts will soon be forgotten, and some will remain as untouchable forbidden areas or a little source of hatred. I feel that Ricky felt a little happy and relieved when he was expelled from his father. Otherwise, he would not have made up the most unacceptable story of his father to actively exchange for the result of being expelled. I believe that no normal person can really hate his parents who gave him life. After a moment of hatred and a period of depression, the rest is the affection that blood is thicker than water. There is no doubt that parents love their children. Even Ricky's tough father would cry for his children. ...
Too many parents try to turn their children into an ideal state, and this ideal often comes from parents' dreams when they were young. It's just that many times they forget the fact that they didn't realize that dream. If they follow their arrangements and wishes, their children will only become the second. There are also some parents who helped their parents realize their dreams when they were young, but if this continues, will it become a dislocation cycle? The role of children is always to help parents realize their dreams, and dreams can only be realized when people regret in middle age and try to impose them on the next generation again. I'm a little afraid of this dislocation cycle, because it lasts too long and has surpassed many lives. In the United States, maybe only a few families like Ricky will have this problem, and some will come to an abrupt end for various reasons, but in China, I really can't imagine how long it will last.
Angela, Jane's female classmate, is a beautiful girl. She relishes her experiences with all kinds of men every day and describes to others how she has been infatuated with all the men who have met her since she was 12 years old. She often uses foul language and vulgar descriptive topics. She is very interested in sex, not only telling others, but also asking for information. Her ideal is to be a model, which often appears on the cover of magazines. In fact, she made up so many things, and she was even a virgin.
Girls are vain, and some vanity can be completely satisfied by men's love. So they always make up or exaggerate. Especially for girls aged 18. Angie is an extreme reflection. I have met many such girls who make up romantic stories to satisfy their vanity. The hero in the story has at least one advantage: handsome, cold, rich, tall and straight, talented and so on. They are all the kinds that will attract countless eyeballs in the real world. They are all models who are single-minded and weak, and only take a spoonful. Every girl came at this age, which is the most brilliant period of her whole life. Another part is that vanity can't be satisfied by fiction alone, so they prove it, just like Angie. They will show their advantages in front of men intentionally or unintentionally, even if they don't want to develop relations with that man, they need admiring eyes and words of praise to affirm them.
Girls tend to feel inferior, and more often, that inferiority is covered up by arrogance and indifference. For example, Angie said that "Ricky is crazy", the most fundamental reason is that "he will never look at me again"; When Lester learned that Angie was still a virgin, she restrained her desire. Angela unexpectedly asked in a panic, "what's the matter? Am I not beautiful enough? " ; Ricky exposed Angie's heart with the most honest evaluation. She sat on the stairs crying in fear, and finally tempted Lester to prove herself ... In fact, Angie had a lot of inferiority in her heart, and she had to cover it up with arrogant behavior and indifferent behavior. There are also such a group of people in life who carefully wrap their sense of inferiority with the most exposed arrogance and even conceit. Once they are poked in the key, they will be miserable until they are angry and even hysterical. This is a "personality crisis", and the only way to get rid of this crisis is to have an objective and correct understanding of yourself.
The process of growing up is painful, and what is lost in growing up is hard to find back. No matter how hard we reach out to resist, we will eventually find that youth slips away quietly at a certain moment. On the last day of 2002, sitting among thousands of people, I heard an old man say, "Your life has been shortened by 20 minutes". It turned out that he left without bidding farewell to his youth. Our adolescence ended in the complex interweaving of various emotions, and another group of people's adolescence came.
yottsu no koi no monogatari
It's a bit far-fetched to define the affection between Lester and Angie by love. More accurately, it is Lester's sexual fantasy about girls, or Angie's affection for Lester.
Lester hasn't had sex with his wife for a long time. Even when he wanted to improve this situation, two people who had already warmed up quarreled because they were afraid that the beer in their hands would stain the sofa worth $4,000. As a result, naturally, they are no longer interested in sex. When he sees the intimate relationship between his wife and lover, he can still ask with a straight face, "Do you want to add some sauce to the hamburger?" Before meeting Angie, Lester just masturbated in the bathroom in the morning to solve his physiological needs.
Angela's appearance gave Lester a new goal in life. Like Lolita, she is immature and has a yearning and imitation for maturity. At this time, girls are really attractive. Lester started exercising because he overheard Angie's conversation with her daughter, so as to "make herself look better when undressing." He found some passion again, quit his job, sold his old car and bought a sports car he had always dreamed of. I even went to work in a fast food restaurant, trying to find the good feeling of "working in a hamburger shop to make money and having sex with girls every day" when I was young.
The end of this love is that when Angie threw herself at Lester for the first time, Lester restrained himself and gently leaned her head on Angie's chest.
This love begins with fantasy and ends with responsibility. The responsibility here is not family responsibility, but protection responsibility. In this "unforgettable love", one aspect often plays the role of parents, and loving one's father (mother) is almost everyone's complex. I never want to evaluate extramarital affairs as "neither fish nor fowl", because it is always right to love someone, even if there is a deviation in choosing the object. In the relationship that leads to bad results, it is not love itself that has a problem, but too many demands from love. I even appreciate Angie's passion for Lester, which triggered the light of hope for life that I haven't seen for a long time.
The fantasy of my daughter and classmates is the same as that of my star. Even when the Oscars were awarded, the guests said humorously, "Who hasn't coveted her daughter's classmates?"
I also think of the discussion about male "Lolita complex" I read in a fashion magazine the other day. This is not obscene or obscene, it is people's yearning for innocence and beauty, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
The love between Jane and Ricky is the most natural and reasonable. The two teenagers in "Seeds of Love" are classmates and neighbors, who can appreciate and understand each other, and comfort and warm each other in addition to the frustration of family life.
Just like when each of us is in love, even if the other party proposes to elope, we really elope together.
There is also a gay couple in the movie, and I did not hesitate to write about them in this part of love. The gay couple are very close and kind. They even have the same name (different surnames) called Jimmy. They will visit every new neighbor and give them some small gifts. They go to work in pairs and do morning exercises every day. Not ashamed of gay relationships.
Gay love is also love, but both sides of love are the same sex, and other attributes are exactly the same. There are more and more things that reflect homosexuality now. I have nothing special about homosexuality. I think they are natural and normal, and they are not in contradiction with ethics. The solution to the problem of homosexuality is to be more tolerant of the crowd. When it becomes a normal thing, it is no longer a problem. Among the rules that restrict people's behavior, morality and ethics are also rules passed down from history and acquiesced by people. Only the law is mandatory.
Caroline and Bird (whose name I can't remember) are standard extramarital affairs. Neither of them is satisfied with the dull but still maintained family life. Both people have the same language in their work and life, and both can find their own shadow in each other. Before they found out, they all thought that only when they had such characteristics could two people meet physically. ...
The proportion of such extramarital affairs must be very large. They can fulfill their wishes that can't be realized in the family, and they can explore the passion consumed by each other's dull life. They can be as grateful and eager for love as every young person who loves them deeply, as long as it does not affect both families.
Everyone has passed the age of impulsiveness and has long known that if you don't like something, you must have it. They are too lazy to go through the process from crazy love to plain love or even touching, and they are not willing to be exhausted by everything they have to pay to re-form a family ... so there is only tacit love. The ending of this love is not as troublesome as the exposure in the movie, but it is not in the tacit understanding, or really a breakthrough, and it has come together. Too few people can have a happy ending.
Such extramarital affairs are still happening, everywhere, all the time. As long as people are dissatisfied with their studies, such things will not disappear. It is said that "dissatisfaction is an upward wheel", but this is just dissatisfaction. Who knows whether this upward step is to step on a step or fall into the abyss?
Love is a problem that human beings can never let go of, and it is a topic that people can never give up. If our ideal is not to fight for productism for life, how can we ignore love?
There are many kinds of love, including the kind that is so dull that only affection and responsibility are left. People who can tolerate blandness will get unusual happiness there. People who can't stand it have to find new love. Well, love is always right, but remember that the hurt (no matter who) that often comes with love is always wrong. Leave love and stay away from harm. ...
When Lester, the first protagonist of the film, finally understood what he should do and smiled sincerely at the photos of his family's past, Richie's father shot Lester-because the naval colonel concluded in an absurd misunderstanding of a scene that there was the most unacceptable homosexual relationship between Lester and Richie. At the same time, Lester's wife is taking out a pistol. She doesn't want to be burdened by responsibility, whether it's threats or intimidation. Angela regained her confidence in Lester and dressed herself in the mirror with a smile. Ricky and Jane are lying on the big bed, looking forward to a happy life after eloping ... It seems that all the good things have come, but in Leicester's place, life has come to an end.
My heart is like a stone thrown into the calmest lake. Ripples are getting bigger and wider, and the whole trembling heart is heavy and sour.
I'm exhausted by my wordiness. This Hollywood movie made me spend the afternoon typing on the keyboard. But I can't stop thinking in my head. I see myself, my parents, my friends, my friends' wives and children, my friends' families, their quarrels or neglect of each other, their smallness in society as individuals and their greatness around me as a whole. ...
Is everything beautiful or crisis? Is it the crisis of America or the crisis of all mankind?
I will always remember the DV record repeated three times in the movie-a plastic bag flying in the wind. The old wolf sang in a song: "Mike, your life once floated far away, flying like a plastic bag." Movies and lyrics are saying that we are completely helpless and helpless.