I am always anxious. Why do people want to escape exactly what they hold, and what people want to leave is what they want to leave? Just like Qian Zhongshu’s "Siege" or Andrea Arnold’s "Fish Bowl", people and fish live in contradictions and paradoxes like this, but people will create a predicament and let I actively participate in it. Although I don’t know what the result will be, but when there is a new direction and experience, it seems to be a good medicine to get rid of the difficult situation. However, the new direction and experience foreshadow a cruelty and go astray, like youth, in the irreversible axis of life, bitterly and silently endured.
Giddens said, "An outburst of anxiety occurs when an individual cannot achieve or is prevented from achieving a certain behavior." In the modern discourse of survival of the fittest, anxiety exists on weak and heterogeneous women like a shadow. This anxiety seems to be unconsciously in the adolescent girl Mia. Youth is about growing up and getting rid of shackles. In many cases, the anxiety about self-identity as a woman is the same as the rebellion against life as an adolescent girl.
At the
beginning of the film, three sets of shots were used to explain the three conversations between Mia and her younger sister Taylor, her father, and her friend. Anxiety, rebellion, and mania became an unconcealable trait of Mia. Of course, you can attribute it to confusion, ignorance or emptiness, but restlessness often comes from inner needs. Subsequently, the girl's involvement with the white horse became the finishing touch of the whole film.
The white horse is very symbolic. It is the male spirit in Western discourse, handsome, galloping, unreliable and reliable. It represents a woman's worship and desire for men. Its dazzling and stalwart undoubtedly make up for the "father" image in the girl's psychology, and its galloping posture is beyond Mia's ordinary and mediocre. However, the white horse in "Fish Bowl" is imprisoned, and its frailty and old age make the iron fetters that bind it an insurmountable obstacle. This is actually closely related to the rationalization of modern society and the mainstream gender ideology.
The incarnation of modern rational civilization, male is not omniscient and omnipotent. Its old age and stubbornness are facing unprecedented challenges. Women are presented in natural and emotional images. In addition to being the object of male desire, her body has unlimited capacity to bear suffering. The container provides an imaginative comfort for men. This comfort is also a kind of cultural reflection and redemption, providing a reflective reference for the ever-expanding modern rationality, thus saving the declining male civilization. (The reason why Connor, as a married man in the film, sought Mia’s mother to steal fishery also confirmed the loss of the male subject in modernity.) Max Scheler emphasized that women are closer to nature and the earth. It has an inherent salvation function for the modern patriarchal capitalist society. He once clearly stated that "women are more natural than men, and are more influenced by instincts and feelings. They are the eternal stopping force that prevents human civilization and cultural vehicles from running toward the goal of purely rational'progress'."
Therefore, the girl and the white horse in the film The implicit salvation relationship cannot be simply and roughly summarized as the worship of men by women. The mutilation of Mia's family structure makes her rescue of the white horse more like a way to change her own situation, which contains a self-salvation of female subjects. This desire to save was ruthlessly stopped by the owner of the white horse, which is tantamount to suppressing Mia’s desire for a masculine subject as a female. It is related to the single-parent family where Mia lives, and the psychological projection of the white horse to the girl is quite Intriguing. Perhaps it is easier to find a shortcut to understand this segment from the female Electra complex in psychological analysis, but that undoubtedly ignores the meaning of female consciousness awakening contained in "salvation".
Two
Mia as a adolescent girls, some complex self subconscious does not know it. Her failure to rescue the white horse suppressed her desire to awaken her female consciousness. She had to return to the incomplete family to accept her mother's nagging, debauchery and willfulness, and her sister's foul language, indifference and surveillance. But the subconscious (female consciousness) is the source of production ideology and culture. As the most popular form in culture, gender consciousness is inseparable from the operation of the subconscious. The more you suppress it, the stronger it does not become.
The prominent feature of "Fish Bowl" in the narrative of female consciousness is the establishment of a spatial metaphor. Closed spaces are often used as signifiers for women. In the house where Mia lives with her mother and sister, there are no male symbols, no father nor any male compatriots. This is a closed space constructed entirely by female symbols. It is uncivilized, it is an uncultivated "virgin land" (Mia's mother is not a virgin). "Outsider" Connor's intrusion into this space is full of sexual symbolism.
In fact, the awakening of female consciousness often breeds simultaneously with the awakening of sexual consciousness. There is a detail in the film that Mia is at a house party, seeing Connor being attracted by her plump mother, she finds cosmetics in her mother's room by drunkenness and tries to make herself sexy and enchanting. This ingenious narrative strategy is nothing more than to reveal Mia's repressed but uncontrollable sexual desire, a kind of enlightenment of female consciousness. Therefore, in the course of Connor leading Mia’s family to fish by the river and a series of subsequent contacts, the image of a humorous father and a considerate friend quietly formed, and Connor also intentionally or unintentionally treated Mia mentally and physically. Of enlightenment.
Generally speaking, a woman's body must be amorous in order to inspire a man's desires, and a woman's heart must be simple and unpretentious. Only in this way can a man's enlightenment and watering of her become a necessity. However, compared with her mother, Mia's external conditions are too mediocre. The plumpness of her mother's body reflects the lack of thinness of Mia's figure. As a result, dancing itself implies a signifier that makes up for the innate deficiency of one's own body. It is this action that indicates that the deviant behavior of Mia and Connor that night in the film is not a simple "seduce". In fact, Mia enjoys this "seduce" very much. She peeped at her mother and Kang in the middle of the night. When Na's sex started, she fantasized that she would one day be the "she".
three
"Outsiders" in the context of Western civilization have their gender order, representing the present and enlightening the future, and must be borne by men, while women are usually the representatives of the crowd. They live in claustrophobic spaces and are in desperate need of enlightenment. ,save. In traditional male-perspective films, women rely on the guidance or salvation of men to get away, and belong to the traditional world of the past in the time dimension, and move towards a modern, civilized and happy life. But "Fish Bowl", as a film by a female director, has a completely different model. Once this kind of enlightenment and response, guidance and following, rescue and rescue fails, the male subject's position becomes blurred. It is in this ambiguity that women themselves have completed the second enlightenment by their own awakening of self-awareness.
In the film, when Connor has completed a night of sexual enlightenment education for Mia, his hurried flight and anxiety are not abnormal. Women who are not in the world often think that sex is a magic weapon to tame men, and can be unsatisfactory. Her physical appearance promises to be able to exchange the love of men. As a result, the girl chased Connor's house and tried to reassure her, "Age is not a problem", but the man's silence was returned in return. But for Connor, this sexual enlightenment was too unethical. Facing the fifteen-year-old Mia, an unconscious psychology based on the taboo of primitive blood relatives incest became Connor's unspeakable knot, and escape was his only way out. The more profound problem is that whether it is Mia or Mia’s mother, they are all symbols that are outside the inner order of men. They are a kind of space rather than time. Only in that space are they real. Exist, and at other times they are just a pure sexual symbol. At this time, Mia had not yet been able to touch the essence of the problem. That sexual enlightenment was still only on the physical level, without giving her a heart-wrenching education in the depths of her soul.
Therefore, when she sneaked into Connor's house and discovered the truth, a real growth education began. At this moment, we saw that Mia’s eyes were clearly incomprehensible and resentful, and there was also a panic that suddenly realized. It seems that the dirty world enters the body from every pore of her body. "Incontinence" is the only way for the body to drain the dirt. , It was an involuntary body spasm. The key to "incontinence" is that the sacredness of the father's image suddenly collapsed. Mia lives in a single-parent family where the father's image is vacant. Her impression of her father is illusory and perfect. When Connor fills this vacancy, the sacredness is undoubtedly Passed on to Connor. In the film, when Mia peeped at her mother having sex with Connor, her heavy slamming of the door easily reminded us of the Elikrat complex, and at this moment, the "capitalized" "he" suddenly became blurred and was Abandoned mothers are more worthy of sympathy. The empathy for women's personal situation makes the complex of "Electra and motherhood" have undergone an essential overturn. At the end of the film, the passage where Mia and her mother dance together is a response to this. Life returns to peace but has a different charm.
However, it is unrealistic to expect women to come to their senses from then on. Mia's hatred and revenge after learning the truth, like the "incontinence" mentioned above, are unconscious acts. She seemed to be instigated by a crazy will, and she was able to relieve her inner pain in the process of abducting Connor's young daughter Kira. When Mia unintentionally pushed Kira into the lake, facing a young life struggle, the short-term pleasure of revenge suddenly disappeared, and what came into being was a sense of guilt, and an unprecedented sense of justice and responsibility. Compared with men’s evasion of responsibility in the face of guilt, Mia’s move is brave and responsible. This undoubtedly subverts the traditional male perspective in which the male as a rational subject transforms, saves and liberates the female object. Yuan opposes the order, and prefers a feminist ideology of women's self-reform, self-salvation and self-liberation.
Fourth,
because men have always held the right to write in the history of patriarchy, female directors often reposition the relationship between the active and passive in the visual space to achieve the purpose of exploring gender power. Foucault believes that the code of the body actually hides a deep gender ideology. "Seeing" and "being seen" determine the relationship between character control and being controlled, possessing and possessing, and it implies a profound hierarchical relationship and gender ideology.
At the beginning of the film, we see a window through Mia's vision, which is her fish tank for watching the world. The fish is not just a plaything placed in the aquarium to be viewed, it also observes the person playing and admiring itself through the transparent glass. The relationship between Connor, the boy and Mia in "Fish Bowl" is actually a hidden love triangle. In most cases, Connor was an intruder in Mia's private space. Mia's private space was disturbed by outsiders, and she couldn't help but focus on the intruder. Therefore, Connor's body was viewed by Mia and became an idol and symbol in the worship. Most of the places where the boy and Mia play are in the boy's premises. Mia is the visitor of the space, and her body is watched by the boy. The name of the boy in the film has never been known, which shows that Mia did not leave much space for the boy in her field of vision.
As a man, Connor occupies a superior position in the gender hierarchy, while boys are relatively disadvantaged. The gender power in this is more tied to the ambiguous and turbulent body. Sexual ability has become the basic element for adolescent girls to obtain psychological identity, and the sexual ability exposed by the viewer is essentially given some kind of control/traction power. In the film, Mia sees her mother’s physical friendship with Connor, and Connor’s strong desire to offensive and conquer (mother is just an acceptor and encourager of such behavior) makes Mia completely subdued and Connor gains Some of Mia’s psychology was once occupied by utopia (the power of the "father"?). On the other hand, Mia and the boy, it is Mia who dominates the relationship between the two, and the boy is just an observer and follower. When the boy took her to an unfamiliar place where the abandoned car was placed, Mia felt unwell and asked to leave there. After a short loss of dominance, Mia quickly regained control of power.
In fact, the female ideology residing in Mia's brain did not begin to wake up until after two chase scenes in "Fish Bowl". The utopia in her mind before still made her obey the masculine order and worship the gender power of men. But after that, the female consciousness gradually gained the upper hand, laying a warm foreshadowing for the end of the film.
Chasing and being chased can be regarded as a form of watching and being watched. In the scene of Mia chasing Kira on the grassland, Mia’s vision is Kira, a weak female individual; while in the scene of Connor chasing Mia at night, Mia is the chased, and her vision is dark night , And behind a vicious, revengeful Connor, she is the weak female individual. The two chases ended when Kira fell into the water and she suffered a heavy slap in the face, which made her see clearly the disadvantaged and subordinate status of women in social culture, and felt that this status was the inevitable result of the social unconsciousness, and she was already unconscious. Avoid getting involved (at this moment she may see that she and her mother will have the same fate).
So, when she walked into the adult club to perform a long-prepared dance, when the dance teacher asked her to put down her hair and said that it would be more feminine, she realized that she could no longer be the goldfish in the fish tank. Stepping off the stage and leaving resolutely, this is a scene that completely announces the awakening of female consciousness. Because at this moment, Mia has walked out of the disordered stage of female self-identification, and she is soberly aware that the fish tank that binds herself is the patriarchal patriarchal cultural order of the society. Any adjustment is a kind of flattery, a kind of begging. Since then, some of the film is understanding, farewell and growth, warm, comforting, and nothing more.
10/03/17 1:55
September "Watching Movies"
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