In recent years, it has become more and more common for people in cities to choose to marry at a later date. It seems that society is extremely tolerant of older single youths, but it is really disturbing that relatives and friends are urging marriage during the Chinese New Year.
In the spring 2014 edition of the Japanese drama "The Wonderful Story of the World", there is a story that imagines a Japan with fewer births after many years, and the government has painstakingly designed a kind of blind date apartment. Every young person staying will be assigned a flat servant of the opposite sex to arrange life for you, encourage you to fight bravely, and wait for you to come back at home...
But the male protagonist is by no means an ordinary waste. Although the "maid" is gentle, beautiful, and very considerate, he is still insubstantial - he will still fry his eggs when he is single, and suffer from failure in interviews - and finally he is tired of the same maid. Chicken soup for the soul, abandoned the maid. But after abandoning it, she felt empty and lonely and called her back.
The virtual maid returned to the male protagonist, but said that she was about to disappear, hoping that he could go to a place to wait at the designated time. Unexpectedly, when the male protagonist arrived at the appointed place, he actually met a real girl who looked exactly like the maid - it turns out that the purpose of the apartment is to create opportunities for different people to get along, and then promote their love.
If it is too superficial to say that this intelligent apartment fully realizes the deep-seated needs of human beings - companionship and love, then the movie "The Lobster" is much more complicated.
In the dystopian future set in the film, being single is defined as a crime, and all single people must be arrested and moved to hotels. If you don't find a matching partner within 45 days, you will be transformed into an animal, lose your right to be born as a human, and be exiled into the deep forest.
The "lobster" here doesn't refer to the lobster in my Greater China Cuisine, it's the animal that the hero David (Colin Farrell) wants to convert - everyone has to think ahead before checking in , what animal to become after the pairing fails.
David's reason is that lobsters can live in the sea for more than 100 years, with noble blue blood flowing in their bodies, and maintain the ability to reproduce throughout their lives. They are animals that pursue freedom and dignity, and he also likes the sea.
In reality, David is an introverted middle-aged man. His brother failed to match a few years ago and was turned into a dog to accompany him, and the sudden departure of his wife made him, who had never been single, be caught in a hotel.
In hotels, no choice can be ambiguous. At check-in, you can choose your orientation, but only of the opposite sex or the same sex, no bisexuality in the middle ground.
After moving in, everyone was asked to change into uniform uniforms, shoes and socks, live in a room, and their left hand was tortured to experience the hardships of single life.
Hotels also offer sexual services to their guests, the purpose of which is just to keep them normal. But masturbation is not allowed for men (it is not said whether women are allowed), and a man was punished by putting his hands in a bread machine for masturbation.
For 45 days, with a tense countdown hanging from everyone's head, everyone's goals are highly aligned: eating at the restaurant, dancing on the dance floor, all activities are opportunities for pairing. In addition to this, there is an activity called "hunting" - it turns out that on the other side of the mountain and the other side of the sea, there is also a group of single people who escaped in the forest, called "loners", they are The enemy of everyone in the apartment.
If you think that escaping from the hotel means a new life, you are wrong. The high pressure in the hotel gave people the illusion that "escape is freedom". When David fled into the forest later, he learned that romance is forbidden among loners. Once discovered, it will be punished equally severely.
In the absolute binary opposition of the film, the most ironic is that the external commonality is the only criterion for judging whether two people are husband and wife. Common denominator allows cheating - when Benville Shaw's lame man can't find a lame woman, he tries to get his own nosebleed to be paired with a girl who gets nosebleeds a lot.
When David questioned his little tricks, the lame man replied, "Which is worse? To die of hunger and cold in the forest, to be eaten by predators after becoming an animal, or to have a nosebleed every now and then?"
Some refuse to compromise with this bizarre rule. The nosebleed girl's best friend has beautiful blonde hair, and she entered the hotel a few days earlier than David, which also means that she will arrive on the "last day" earlier. Yet when confronted with David's approach about the same hair, she unceremoniously hit back at the threat of baldness as well.
Until the last day, she slapped her duplicitous best friend, chose to watch a movie "Walking With You", and finally turned into a pony with a long brown mane.
Others struggle with the fear of being abandoned. The middle-aged woman offered to give David any way to "fuck" her, make biscuits for him, or even call him to try, but they couldn't break his heart. So the desperate woman chose to jump off the building. She moaned in pain, but no one came to help, and in the end the woman fell silent.
David did not feel guilty for this. He chose to approach an extremely cold-blooded huntress. The huntress has been testing whether he is equally cold-blooded, and finally killed his brother, the dog, which finally made David collapse, and finally fled into the forest.
Originally intending to live independently by following the creed of "The Lonely", David ran into a girl who was attracted to him. They devised a sign language to communicate secretly, and planned to escape from the forest and marry on the condition that "both are nearsighted".
But the female leader discovered their secret and blinded the girl. The two who finally escaped came to a coffee shop on the outskirts of the city. In order to find new common ground, David raised a knife in the bathroom and hesitated whether to self-mutilate his eyes. The girl waited anxiously in the cafe, and the film came to an abrupt end here...
Love always exists as the last fortress of the individual against the collective. Sexual oppression and natural liberation are often the initial starting point of resistance to totalitarianism. Therefore, Milan Kundera described the third type of people in "Unbearable Lightness of Life" - "find the weight of one's own existence through love. Without love, one must face the unbearable lightness of life" .
In "The Lobster", marriage does not seem to be oppressed, and love is given freedom. In fact, marriage has become a fast-moving consumer product, and love has become synonymous with "same". People do not have the right to choose a "middle zone", either to follow the rules of society to get a partner, or to escape from society and prepare for a lifetime of loneliness, either way.
So when the strong hotel hostess and her husband sang the love song "Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart" on the stage, but twisted their bodies at the same frequency; The absurdity of the forced pairing only makes one shudder when evaluating his performance in bed.
But the most absurd part of this film is that there is no clear explanation for the source of the hotel's power.
Assuming that the power to define "single is a crime" does not come from a certain power, but that the past social customs will become law one day in the future, then only the given "husband and wife relationship is the way to improve social efficiency, marriage is the only criterion for happiness" would provide a reasonable outlet for the public's doubts.
But there is no explanation for this from the beginning to the end, which makes the protagonists' resistance seem more naive and rigid, and the whole story setting seems more nihilistic.
If we really come to such a society one day, "marriage" becomes the only choice for a normal social citizen, then "single dog" is not an easy joke, but a bitter prophecy. (The owner of the hotel said that the first animal most people think of to convert is a dog, which is why dogs are everywhere)
But if there is such a conversion, I hope to become a flying bird. I don't know how long the bird's lifespan is. At least it can fly a little higher and it is not easy to be preyed on.
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