Distance between Attachment and Detachment

Monty 2022-04-22 07:01:31

After reading it, there are a lot of ideas, let's start with the name. Detachment, the root of which comes from attachment. I think the film has a layer of meaning to tell about this kind of emotional or spiritual sustenance and relief, which is emotional attachment/detachment. The male protagonist only serves as a class teacher and only makes a short stay in each school. In fact, it is because he does not like to have any spiritual dependence and emotional fetters. This has to do with his dark childhood. Including the little girl he sent away later. His mother's suicide when he was a child made him fearful of any emotional dependence, of facing the excruciating pain of this forced separation. So, he always detaches his emotional attachment by pulling away before he has an emotional attachment to anyone.
As a teacher, he also said at the beginning that everyone always thinks that teachers will have a great influence on students, and even change their lives. However, Meredith's death told him that in fact everyone is so insignificant, who you think you can change, in fact, the depression of death is still powerless. When he faced the painful blow of death again, he went to the little girl, who could warm his heart, and their relationship was a kind of redemption for each other.
In fact, his life with the little girl was hopeless. The phone call basically told the audience that the little girl was HIV-positive. The shadow of his childhood lingered there, and he would keep changing schools. . . His self-positioning, which needs warmth and hope, and keeps a distance because of the cold, is always tossing between attachment and detachment. It is also a tug-of-war between the inner world and the real world. That's why I especially liked the passage from Camus at the beginning of the film, and it is also very relevant: and never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.

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Extended Reading

Detachment quotes

  • Henry Barthes: How are you to imagine anything if the images are always provided for you?

    Henry Barthes: Doublethink. To deliberately believe in lies, while knowing they're false.

    Henry Barthes: Examples of this in everyday life: "Oh, I need to be pretty to be happy. I need surgery to be pretty. I need to be thin, famous, fashionable." Our young men today are being told that women are whores, bitches, things to be screwed, beaten, shit on, and shamed. This is a marketing holocaust. Twenty-four hours a day for the rest of our lives, the powers that be are hard at work dumbing us to death.

    Henry Barthes: So to defend ourselves, and fight against assimilating this dullness into our thought processes, we must learn to read. To stimulate our own imagination, to cultivate our own consciousness, our own belief systems. We all need skills to defend, to preserve our own minds.

  • Henry Barthes: [agitated at assisted living nurse] Let me be very clear here, you stop neglecting his needs, or I will start fucking with yours! I will have you fired! Then it's going to be your family! Your children are gonna be at risk! You got it?