In the late 1990s, that is, between 1998 and 2000, there were several consecutive films with similar settings - "doubt the authenticity of the world we live in". "The Truman World" (1998), "Another Dimensional Hacker" (1999), and the culmination of "The Matrix" (1999) all belong to this category. The City of Moving Souls (1998), which this article mainly wants to talk about, is also one of them.
It is not clear to the author why multiple films with the same design origin appeared consecutively during this time period. The film and television idea of "doubting the authenticity of the world we live in" is far from the philosophical origin of Descartes' "I think therefore I am" Putnam's "brain in a vat", or Asimov's science fiction novels on similar topics. Long before these films were released, if you insist on giving a reason for this time, it may be the rapid popularization of personal computer and Internet technology in the 1990s, and the emergence of various online game open worlds, which made the concept of virtual world popular among the public. Cognition allows the screenwriters to make up these stories about consciousness and philosophical principles.
Is our life arranged by some transcendental force?
This is clearly a fascinating topic. In previous film and television works, people's "free will" has always been a beautiful thing that has been constantly exaggerated and praised. For the ultimate goals of success and dreams, countless inspirational literature and movies regard it as an eternal theme, which is extremely beautiful. , a positive energy thing.
However, these science fiction films that began to appear in the 1990s denied the authenticity of the objective world in theme, and also denied many values of "free will" established in the objective world. From this point of view, the films of the 1990s often still lead to the beauty of human nature in the traditional sense of "love" and "justice". At most, they play a sly at the end of the film, and continue to imply that the second layer of the real world in the film is also virtual. ——
In "Hackers of Different Dimension", the pictures of the real world are like a flash when the TV is turned off, which makes us realize that the characters in the film are only a virtual world in the end, and we who are watching the film are a higher level of "real" ", ZION in "The Matrix" was originally the real world where Neos awakened from the matrix world, but the progress of the plot in the second and third parts seems to imply that this is just another testing ground for computer people. .
"City of Souls" is simpler in comparison. Its story setting is actually quite avant-garde and interesting (spoiler):
A person who wakes up finds himself in a world with amnesia, and he has no memory of what his identity has done. After layers of stories developed, he finally discovered that the dark and rainy world he was in was actually a testing ground for a group of aliens who only possessed collective consciousness. Humans have long since become extinct. They constantly change their identities and memories, and after 0:00 every day, all identities are confused again.
The male protagonist gained high authority over this testing ground when he changed his memory by accident, and has the same control power as other aliens. After the final battle, he reshaped the world and reunited with his wife on the beach.
His wife is a wife in the current memory, but in the previous memory and the next memory, he is just a passerby. The interesting thing about "City of Souls" is that he asks the question: "Is it the memory that defines our soul?"
The thought of Marxist philosophy is that "the essence of man is the synthesis of all social relations". The essence of people mentioned here, in my understanding, is the essence of the difference between people. Simply put, the "people" mentioned here transcend the code name of the name. Names, pseudonyms, and nicknames are all code names that cannot be fully interpreted - in "Wulin Gaiden", Xiucai used "Who killed who, it was me who killed me" to circumvent Ji Wuming because the code name between the name and the name Human nature makes a fuss, who are you, you are Ji Wuming, I can also be called Ji Wuming, then who is Ji Wuming?
If Ji Wuming had not lost his memory or had read Marx beforehand, he would probably have answered like this: I am Ji Wuming, the god of thieves, one of the three brothers of the Ji family, a disciple of the Sunflower School, and the husband of Fang Gu... and these It's all about social relationships, or "identities."
And "identity" is closely related to memory, which includes my memory of the world and the memory of other people in the world . In the world of "City of Souls", everyone's memories are virtual memories that are frequently replaced by aliens, so is "I" still me?
In fact, the answer may be no. In the movie, the reason why the male protagonist never forgets his wife and finally overcomes all difficulties to be together, but that is because he did not forget this memory because of an accident. Without this memory, he may still be biologically human, but he can no longer be classified as a "human" in the social sense.
Therefore, when "Soul Shifting City" doubts the authenticity of self-memory and the external world, it is actually expressing the nihility of human nature after social relations have become nihility.
In "Westworld Season 2", there is a sentence that is repeatedly mentioned " As long as the last person remembers you, you can survive . When the last person who remembers you forgets you, you die." The sister resurrected Bernard, confirming this important line. Coincidentally, there is the same setting in the animated film "Dream Hunting", which tells about the afterlife world. In the nether world, the existence of ghosts depends on the memory of people in this world. If the grandma dies early, then Hector's The undead will also disappear forever.
The settings of these two works are also built on the same basis as "City of Souls".
Therefore, "City of Souls" actually overlaps with the themes of "The Matrix" and "The Matrix", but the focus is different.
Similarly, the protagonists in these films have experienced stories of "awakening from the current world and possessing supernatural powers". After Neo and other ZION human beings awakened, they were able to fly and escape in the matrix world; the virtual characters in "Another Dimension Hacker" killed the human who created themselves; the American drama "Westworld", as a recent work in science fiction film and television, discusses the The theory is far more than that, but it also gathers this characteristic: after the prostitute awakens, it breaks away from the programming and hurts humans, and also obtains high-level permissions to control other HOSTs in the western world.
Obtaining supernatural powers after awakening is actually very similar to the idea of escaping from "reincarnation" in Buddhism. Before awakening, they were all trapped in their own world and suffered in cycles of death, rebirth, and death. After seeing the truth of the world, they were able to escape the current "reincarnation". Compared with those who were still trapped in their original world, they became a magician.
There are no more "reincarnations" in "City of Souls". But if we go back to the topic of "our lives are manipulated ", does killing our manipulator (god) mean true freedom?
This topic, I may put it in the Westworld review and continue to talk about it.
View more about Dark City reviews
