Detachment, transcendence and detachment, has two meanings in English. One is not to be influenced by others, independent and objective, and the other is lack of emotion, calmness and indifference. This term is not only the coinage of a life attitude, but also a Western art tradition from ancient times to the present. Through literature, performance, painting, photography, etc., it has penetrated into film art-the innate perspective of film shooting also has a transcendent meaning. It can be said that the film connotation and technique of "Transcendence" interpret this word.
Director Tony Kaye is clearly well versed in the artistic traditions that have continued from poets and novelists such as Keats, TS Eliot, Camus, etc., not only using the image effects of popular documentary films, but also using short memories. The flashback clip depicts the psychology of the characters, interspersed with pseudo-documentary interviews, and pays attention to each character without sensation, evaluation, and distance, and he uses Camus's sentence at the beginning of the article-"I have never been so deeply I feel that I am so detached from myself and at the same time so dependent on the world.” The hero Henry, played by Adrian Brody, is an outsider in Camus’s world. He has the mind-reading talent for thinking and emotional communication with people. Avoiding this psychological burden is unavailable. As he said in his diary, he is like a banknote, flowing in the hands of hopeless people, crying silently and sadly. Empathy produces misfortune. After the banknote is touched by different people, it must bring everyone's fingerprints, body temperature, sweat stains, bacteria... Keats said that the poet entered a room, and after he came out, it was not himself, but everyone in the room. Henry, who has a melancholy temperament like a poet, has chosen the profession of a substitute teacher with relatively simple and easy interpersonal relationships and a lifestyle that is detached from the crowd. But a month after he went to a chaotic school in Queens, he also quietly changed.
This film is rich in layers, and different people will be touched by different points. The first thing that hurts people's hearts is naturally the problem of youth education in the United States. Freedom and the pursuit of individuality were once a national trait that the United States was proud of. However, the director is questioning the negative effects of excessive freedom among young people. Freedom means that you have to take certain responsibilities to yourself and others, and their naive minds still cannot have reasonable judgment, which is easy to indulge themselves. They waste their years, skip classes at will, have no curiosity, abuse violence, and insult teachers and classmates. . In the film, there is a girl who insists not to wear a bra to go to school. She thinks that she is not indecent, but natural, but she does not know that her external image is corrupted like a prostitute in the eyes of others.
One of the three women who have a special relationship with Henry in the film, the street girl Erica, is not as simple as pursuing a free personality. Maybe it is because of homelessness, or abandoning herself after being brutally raped, and she devoted herself to her as a child. In this terrible industry, a large number of such girls are produced in the United States every year. This is the responsibility of the entire society.
The teachers appearing in the film are basically good teachers with a sense of justice, responsibility, and distinctive personality—of course, there are also some typical Nazis who hate students—even though they all have broken life problems. Some couples have a cold relationship, even divorce, singles are also lonely, lack of people who can talk and communicate, and some people are on the verge of collapse because of the insults faced by students every day, but they are always thinking about how to become infamous and poor. The rotten school piled up, like the house of Usher that is about to collapse, save the students as much as possible.
The director also questioned the responsibility of the American family. After the laissez-faire adolescents grew up, they became laissez-faire parents. They left their children to the school and regarded teachers as a service profession that had to take full responsibility for their children’s education. The first scene of the root of the problem-no one was present. There seemed to be a benign symbiosis between parents and the school back then. The current decline is like the decline of American society.
What happened to the children? Adolescence is a very delicate stage, it partly determines the direction of a person's future growth. On a Chinese campus, from the position of the teacher’s podium, you will see a lot of sleepy and lifeless college students, while going to ordinary high schools and vocational high schools, you will find many children so restless like in the movies, yes, China and the United States are chaotic. The youth scene will become more and more similar. Every time I see a child with an inner turmoil, I can seem to feel their disordered and vigorous hormone secretion. Whether it was the cat abuser with blood on his hands or the fat loli, they felt like a trapped animal, unable to face the adversity around them. The difference was only to hurt other lives or hurt themselves as the solution. How do we be teachers and elders? Henry, who lacked role models since childhood, was particularly concerned about this.
The core of the plot of the film is how Henry handles his relationship with others (including students) and his relationship with himself. These are two intertwined threads. His story also reflects the living conditions of some people in the contemporary urban wasteland. Because he is endowed with other people, he can easily understand the hearts of others. His gentle respect for others and their choices is beyond the reach of ordinary people. Not anyone can take the initiative to take in a little prostitute who has not yet been tested for AIDS, let alone give artificial respiration to a poisoned girl who is still vomiting blood. But he always keeps a distance from others, avoids feelings, avoids intimacy, and avoids complete heart-to-heart communication. The helpless people drifting on the sea without a sense of belonging refuse to seek belonging, so as to protect themselves. The character Henry interprets both sides of the word transcendent.
Henry believes that writing a diary can lead to thoughts and emotions, and his writing has a gloomy Elliott-style modern poetry—the whole movie has this kind of poetry. We often say that writing poetry can effectively treat depression. Towards the end of the movie, we gradually discover that Henry has been suffering from the terrible childhood shadow. Only writing can support him to live alone and helplessly for so many years, and he is eager to help and save. teenager.
The secret that Henry locked in his heart was slowly revealed through the plot of his relationship with the three women in the film, just like a suspenseful film. In addition to the little prostitute, fat loli, there is also a young and beautiful female teacher. In addition to inserting images, the director also often uses chalk animations to express the psychology of the characters. When the female teacher is dating Henry, insert a one or two second animation of building the wall to directly write the spiritual relationship between Henry and her. From this, you can guess handsome and gentle. Why would a man like Henry be single for so long? The older the girl, the stronger her self-awareness, and she will keep telling her story, and ask her dating partner hardly what your story is. She couldn't understand Henry's heart, which also paved the way for misunderstanding him.
Fat Loli has been insulted and discriminated against by her father and male classmates for a long time. Only Henry can understand her and respect her. It is reasonable for her to have a crush on the teacher. Henry's relationship with her also revealed a cruel truth: sometimes don't be too good to a person, and hopelessness will be deeper after the shattered hope. She has a talent for cult art. Henry persuaded her to use writing to relieve loneliness and depression, but she already knew that the healing function of art was ineffective for her, and believed that the only way to solve all the bad problems in life was suicide, and even her suicide was an act. Art. This is exactly the path Henry's mother chose-not only to solve the problem, but also to make death achieve a shocking effect.
Henry is like Shinji in "Neon Genesis Evangelion"-this is the gloomy Asian teenager created by Anno Hideaki, and has also resonated in the Western world-so quiet and introverted, the female teacher's abrupt attention, fat Lori desperate Asking for help can't break his transcendence in everyone's heart. Only Erica, who was moisturized in both aspects, could handle him. Faced with Henry’s kind help, the girl who stumbled, Erica, only briefly refused to be intimate and friendly, and soon let go of her guard, and gently forcibly broke his world. She cooked for him, bought a cheap ring to give him, and accompany him. The grandfather of dementia, peeked at his diary and regarded him as the only family member, and more importantly, she could really feel his heart.
He and Erica redeemed each other, and he could only show her his childhood slowly—a single mother drank and drugged, and eventually committed suicide naked in the bathroom. We guessed that she might have suffered from Grandpa Henry, who was her father. Of sexual assault, and therefore unable to become a normal person. In this way, we also understand why the mother would protect the baby Henry by locking the door of his room-preventing him from seeing things he shouldn't see. Neither the person in the play nor the audience knows what Henry's mother left him in the last words of the tape. Perhaps there is a deeper and more terrifying secret.
The audience’s speculation about Henry’s life experience was almost confirmed when Henry was misunderstood by the female teacher that he sexually harassed Fat Loli. He was abnormally angry, and the screen frequently switched between grandpa, mother, Erica and others. He roared, you think I am Is that kind of old pervert? And afterwards, he reluctantly sent Erica to the asylum, all of which hinted at the source of humiliation in his heart. After experiencing a large movie climax-from this misunderstanding scene to Fat Loli's suicide-Henry finally had to face the hollow man under his transcendent attitude (this is also the concept in Eliot's poem) . In the open ending, no matter where Henry and Erica will go, he finally learns to accept intimacy. This is Henry's way of self-salvation.
So how does he change his relationship with other people, especially with students? Let's discuss another connotation of the film-knowledge, especially the salvation effect of literature on people. The teachers in the film are under great pressure. Facing a utilitarian society like the United States, they are also confused by the role of knowledge, especially literature, and of course they cannot educate their children. Henry has undergone a transformation, and we can compare the content of the two exhortation classes. The first class took place after Henry was touched by a Nazi historical film. He asked his students to reject the "assimilation" that is happening all the time. The Holocaust is an analogy, and so is the humiliated prostitute. He hopes that students will establish a self-belief system in reading. Arm your mind with knowledge and skills and preserve yourself. This is an attitude from big to small, from general experience to personal experience.
At the end of the film, Henry talked about Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Fall of the House of Usher". He began to teach literature from small to large with personal experience. He described walking through the corridors of the teaching building. When he walked to the classroom, he felt that his chest was pressing on the boulder, and he took the initiative to admit that he was like this. Every student agreed with him. At this time, he read the novel that he felt the same a hundred years ago. This gradually collapsed building is also a state of human existence. The collapse of the House of Usher is exactly the process of the collapse of human rationality and spiritual collapse. Perhaps Henry has realized that literature is human studies, with serious meaning of healing and redemption. This may also be a way for directors and screenwriters to add poetry to the film. It must be mentioned that "The Fall of the House of Usher" is not only horrible, but also has implicit sibling incest elements. Like many obscure, unexplained details in the film, it exacerbates our doubts-we can’t really understand a person. See all the truth.
Adrian Brody is a very charming actor. If you have seen "The Thin Red Line" in which he starred before he became famous, you know how this small character with only two lines can make a difference in a star-studded movie— —His sad temperament, talking eyes, and informative body language make him full of drama. His own characteristics and roles are integrated, making this modern poetic film vivid and believable.
View more about Detachment reviews