At the heart of Western literature lies the idea of secrecy, which can be said to be based entirely on certain information that people have not made public.
This is a sentence said by the teacher of the young Misha shortly after the movie "The Reader" started. "The Reader" is indeed a story about secrets: Hanna, a former concentration camp guard, would rather give up a stable life or even lifelong freedom to protect her secret with all her might, because it was a huge shame she didn't dare to face. When watching this film "Death Experiment", I actually felt that it vaguely overlaps with "The Reader", which discusses German history. One of the subtle overlaps is the humiliation of the villains Berus and Hanna in "Experiment" Attitude.
When he first appeared on the stage, Berus mingled with a group of various experimenters. He wore a straight suit, spoke softly, and occasionally smiled. He used the name "you" when he washed the "prisoner" with anti-lice water. The purpose of volunteering is to absorb new ideas, and he especially emphasized that he "has never been late for seven years." He looks like an introverted and industrious little citizen. He only shows a serious or even severe side when talking about his father's role. However, a day later, when the guards were at a loss, this little character whispered that if he wanted to control the out of control situation, he had to shame the prisoners, and from the third night began to violate the rules set by the experiment initiator and enforce his own against the prisoners. Power, let the other prisoners throw their five bodies on the ground, and from then on, one person can see the overall situation, not only making the 12 prisoners life worse than death, but even taking the right of the initiator of the experiment, just like the birth of a generation of demon kings. The speed of this character's transformation is astonishing. You can say that the reason is that the experiment has released the original evil in people's hearts, but I think his sense of shame plays a direct role.
What is there to be ashamed of Berus? his body odor. According to Suskind's novel "Perfume", although smell is often overlooked by people, it is very important in interpersonal communication. This most primitive sense contains the tiniest information on a person, ruthlessly revealing to others all the secrets of the odorant. Before you see a person, before your brain senses the smell of this person, your nose has already accepted the information conveyed by the other person's smell, and has already subconsciously outlined the other person's image for you, thus The first impression of this person is formed. In other words, whether you like a person or not, you can tell by smelling it. When faced with a particularly stinky thing, most people pinch their noses and turn away, denying it to the end. If the other party is a particularly stinky person, it is difficult for people to have a good impression or even equal respect for him. Berus had been sitting at a distance from the others since the experiment organizer assigned roles, and the first night the jailers were visibly standing across from everyone when they were laughing—he didn't necessarily know he had bad body odor, but others always Consciously or unconsciously distanced himself from him, or laughed at him behind his back, he must have been aware of it (for example, after breakfast on the second day of the experiment, other jailers privately disliked him). As for the rebellious prisoner No. 77, Tared Fahd exaggeratedly exposed his shame to all the jailers, prisoners, and experiment organizers—that is, the entire closed world when he provoked him, and made Berus, who was only trying to establish his prestige, to take power. The fuse of the road. Don't underestimate the clue of "smell". Berus cares very much. When he insults Tared, he mentions this clue again and again, and even takes his punishment as revenge for Tared's insulting himself: the jailers knocked Tared to the ground, When he urinated on him, Prisoner No. 77, who turned out to be a feisty one, stinks even more than himself, and was trampled under his feet by himself; No. 77 has the foul smell of the toilet, so he is not qualified to meet visitors, and he is not even qualified to be a human being; In front of No. 77, Berus described the other party's girlfriend's body fragrance, sniffling obscenely, and almost peeled the girl clean in front of others.
But the relationship between the two is not a quarrel between children. You call me stinky, and whoever says I stinky will pass. Berus, who has been insulted and shamed and exposed to the whole world (the world in the experiment), needs to re-establish his status, even higher and stronger than before, in order to take revenge on No. 77 and let everyone in the new Forget the shame that Berus suffered in the excitement. If you make a simple comparison, Berus and Hanna, the female guard in "The Reader", have similar behavior patterns: the shame of the individual, which must be compensated by the suppression of the role, and the weakening of oneself in the face of shame. Hanna dutifully sent batches of Jews to death camps (at the same time, these victims were also the ones who might have been aware of her closely guarded secrets), watched the female prisoners burn to maintain order, and did not repent until 20 years later. The word "rules" is constantly emphasized in court. Nazi power was initially an expedient measure she relied on to hide her secrets (leaving Siemens to join the army in order to avoid the exposure of her illiterate secrets), and then she actively used it to cover up her shame until she gave up part of her humanity or personality , replace it with power and order.
Berus goes one step further than Hanna: he makes his own power order. Unlike Eckert, who vented his animal desires under the guise of order, Berus always followed the order. Although he deviates from the order of the organizer since he shaved his head for Tared Fahd, he has his own reasons, that is, to establish a new order and fill in the old ones. The loopholes in the order are part of the order. The identity he established for himself was that of the jailer representing the order, and he would not let his personality go beyond the scope of the order [Note 1]. Only then, when prisoners and other jailers looked at him, what they saw was not the stinking, shameless Berus, but order and mighty power, like those who hide small individuals in the light of power Nazi leader. It is an existence that has no weakness because of its lack of personality, a concrete abstraction, no body, and no smell, and it is precisely because there is no smell that makes the individuals in the order feel the invisible threats from all directions at all times.
The stink of people being concrete and the power of abstraction are opposed to each other, and the screenwriter's pen is so cold.
Note 1: Although Berus also established the new order, it does not mean that Berus' personality established the order or that Berus' personality surpassed the order, because the new order was established by a part of Berus' retained personality + the old order.
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