Dave and Mark film.
Dave is a natural leader, a steady big brother, and is the coach of his younger brother Mark's wrestling and life. Dave has pure love for Mark. This kind of love is frank and passionate, dedicated to giving, and wants to use his success to navigate his younger brother, but he never thought about how much shadow his success brought to his younger brother. The premature divorce of their parents made the two brothers more dependent on each other. The younger brother may need the meticulous care of the elder brother when he was a child, but when they embark on their own paths, they need to leave room for each other to develop, and Dave did not realize this in time. Therefore, Mark's feelings for Dave in the shadow are more complicated: on the one hand, there is an inexhaustible dependence on the one hand, and on the other hand, there are some signs of escaping from authority from time to time.
At the beginning of the film, the bank staff mistook Mark for Dave, and the former reluctantly replied: "He's my brother," and emphasized that "we have all won gold medals." Mark lived in the shadow of his brother for the first half of his life, and his struggles and achievements were completely overshadowed by his brother. At the time, he didn't realize that without his brother's guidance and motivation, it might be difficult for him to achieve what he is today. He was just eager to prove himself, so when John sent an invitation, Mark accepted without hesitation.
John's relationship with his mother
John's relationship with his mother doesn't show much, but it is the best foreshadowing of John's eccentric behavior.
When a person is a child, he first needs to be recognized by the outside world, and when he grows up, it will be transformed into his own recognition, and then he will think about what he really wants to do. Usually the approval of the outside world first comes from the parents, and the indifference of the mother has prevented John from getting this approval, and he stays in the period when children yearn for the approval of their parents even in their twilight years. From bird watching, stamp collecting, and even drugs...and these didn't bring him self-confidence, because all the achievements, trophies, he can buy with money, meaningless. Finally, he pinned his hopes on wrestling. It wasn't the sport that he was obsessed with, but the intimacy he built with his players. In becoming a team member's "life mentor" and "friend", and being "needed" by the team members, he can no longer be alone, no longer dispensable, and finally recognized by the outside world.
As for why the mother is so alienated from her son, the film does not explain in detail, leaving it to the audience to make up their own minds.
At the end of her life, the mother was unable to change anything in the face of John's illness. When John showed her the trophy, she was silent for a while and said, "Have you paid for this?" During the first meeting between
Mark and John , John said to Mark, "You've been living in someone else's life.
You can do better." That's what John wanted to say to himself. John's shadow comes from a huge family (the film emphasizes the influence of his mother), he lacks the same sense of identity as Mark, he finds Mark because he sees himself in Mark, and hopes that he can achieve himself by achieving the latter, Complete self-affirmation.
In the beginning, Mark was very grateful to John, and regarded him as a horse. But as time goes by, Mark feels that this "Bole" just regards himself as a pet bought back with money, a pet that satisfies the owner's vanity. Or maybe John really sees Mark as a friend, but he's been isolated for too long and can't express his feelings in non-monetary ways.
John and Dave
John's tone is always light, with an uncertain rise, often sunk in the seat, his expression is indifferent, completely lacking the courage of a coach, more like a tired old man. And Dave has the charisma that he can't reach, and he is the person he hopes to become. He looks at Dave's guidance team members with admiration and a trace of jealousy. The confidence he had built so rarely through wrestling was underwhelming in front of Dave, a pretentious layman compared to Dave, whose drive he could never match in his lifetime.
The death of his mother was also a fuse. If John needed Dave to maintain the team's performance before, then the only audience left, and there was no point in the play going on. So when Mark lost in the Olympics, watching the fake promotional video, John had to face the reality: he couldn't be a good coach, he couldn't make others, he didn't have the ability to make himself. The most hopeless thing is not to realize that you have failed, but to realize that you will never succeed is enough to drive anyone desperately into madness.
Others:
A few bland home videos are played at the beginning of the film, and the soundtrack is sharp but eerie, thus laying the foundation for the suspenseful tone. But John let go of all the horses in captivity for a while after his mother's death. What he created by holding the camera and going to the scene was a completely different feeling of loneliness, dissociation, and coldness. John's emotions were all dissipated in this solemn and dignified in the air.
After John shot Dave, he stumbled out of the door (or tunnel?), with layers of tunnels with no end in sight. The crooked door (tunnel) was his desperate situation, and then the camera shot the police from "God's perspective" The arrest of John adds a tragic color to John's ending, making people forget his murder for a while; a lonely and indifferent hunter leaves while the audience is watching.
At the end of the film, Mark stepped onto the boxing ring, and the crowd shouted frantically: USA! USA! , and John's repeated emphasis on "fighting for America" to the team members before also seems to imply that this tragedy that happened under the fox hunter and the money empire is just a trivial part of the many broken "American Dreams".
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