"Female Addict": Waiting for the soul to expose all the branches

Kelsie 2021-12-18 08:01:13

"Nymphomaniac": wait for the soul bare all branches

Han Song off

time at our heroine Joe was a little girl, her father often took her to go to the park, guide her to see the beauty of the trees, and branches of the tree The relationship with leaves. He said that trunks and branches are the soul of the tree. In summer and autumn, the branches carry the weight of all the leaves. This is a long struggle for survival. Only in winter, when the leaves are gone, will the soul of the tree be exposed.

Joe already has leaves that she needs to carry as much as she can. The childhood sex games, the sexual competitions of young girls, and the secret society of young girls have already revealed the reality that she is an addict. This is her leaves, the weight that her soul branches must bear, just like the leaves of some people are disease, poverty, and desire to control. The way to eliminate desire is to experience desire, and the only way to shake off the leaves is to survive (or, relax: through) summer and autumn. She had sex with seven or eight men every night, 3P with alien men who couldn't understand the language, and accepted the training of the SM master. One night, she had to choose between taking care of the children and going to the SM. She chose the latter.



It seems that sex addiction is directing her actions, but in fact, it is more like she is using sex to force herself and others to reveal their souls, like shaking off leaves and letting the branches reveal their shapes. Therefore, there will be such a picture: after she became a debt collector (the leader of the debt collection organization accepted her because of her "keen intuition for men"), she went to the house of a rich male to collect debts and tied him to a chair. On the screen, tell him some strange stories and observe his reaction. When she finally tells the crucial story and the man reveals the secret that he is a pedophile, on the screen, the man is walking towards a pedophile. A big tree.

The branches of the soul will not appear easily and completely unless winter comes. In the hospital bed, the dying father said that he had found his soul tree, which was an oak tree with a thick trunk and towering branches and leaves. Joe hasn't found her own soul tree. Until the end, under a mysterious call, she found her own soul tree on a cliff. It was a fierce and twisted tree whose leaves were about to fall.

Why use leaves and trees as the image of the whole movie? The netizen "Zi Bu Yu Fei Yu" put it very well: "There is nothing in the depths of the soul, and the elements that make up you must also be returned to the universe."



This is a near-perfect movie, and it is especially commendable for the way it structured the story. It sets up a dialogue environment for Joe to talk with his rescuer Seligman late at night to tell and comment on the whole story. These two people, one is a sex addict, the other is asexual; one is a bodhisattva in the flesh, and the other is Shuhai Cihang; one is practicing, the other is thinking and meditation, and they use associations and interpretations to annotate the experience of the former, making the story fuller to the greatest extent. There is another contest between Joe and Seligman, like a master's tricks, and also like a dialogue between a maverick and the masses. It is a pity that Seligman's cultivation level is not enough. In the end, he has evil thoughts and loses everything.

As an extremely clever writer, Lars von Trier has already thought about how people would interpret the whole story. At the end of the film, Seligman sublimated the Joe story, summarizing her as a "woman pursuing her own rights" and her experience Understood as "fighting back for your own gender", Joe, on behalf of Lars von Trier, rejected people's understanding of her from a feminine/gender perspective, and pointed out that "everything will become a cliché when it comes to you."

The cliché is not the soul, but our understanding of the soul. The soul only needs to observe, like observing one tree after another. Each tree is free of its beauty, but unless it loses its leaves, we cannot see its branches. shape.

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Extended Reading

Nymphomaniac: Vol. II quotes

  • Joe's Father: I've found my tree. My soul tree. And no, it's not that one, okay, 'cause then I would be dead.

    [shows Joe a large oak tree]

    Joe's Father: This is my tree.

    Joe - 10 Years: It's not an ash tree.

    Joe's Father: No, it's an oak tree.

    Joe - 10 Years: It has two trunks.

    Joe's Father: Yeah, isn't it great? It shows itself to both sides, the lake and the forest.

    Joe - 10 Years: But, dad, how does a tree get two trunks?

    Joe's Father: The most common reason is that the top broke when it was very young.

    Joe - 10 Years: That means that you've been broken once. Have you, dad?

    Joe's Father: [long pause] It seems that it can be rather revealing... to find your soul tree.

  • [opening narration for "The Gun"]

    Joe: Whether I left society or it left me, I cannot say. I suppose you can make an argument for both sides. I was on my way to the shady side of the debt collecting business, which, among other things, involved stuff like burning people's cars.