[Spoiler]
Do you strive for excellence? Do you want to be popular? Excellent people should stand out from the crowd and be different, but when everyone is pursuing excellence, this pursuit is vulgar. A well-received outstanding person can be lonely at the same time, being loved, but not feeling loved. "Abnormal Lisa" talks about these contradictory phenomena, but the absurdity is widespread; in the case of stop-motion puppet animation, human nature also has this contradictory characteristic, but it turns out that the creator Charlie Kaufman is excellent.
The unique medium of puppets is critical to the story of "Abnormal Lisa". Even though it is time-consuming and difficult, it cannot be replaced by computer animation or real-life performances. The proportions of the dolls in the play are shorter than the real ones, and the movements are not very smooth, but the artist's depiction of their facial expressions is very delicate, allowing the audience to engage in the emotional activities of the characters. However, the face of the doll is composed of upper and lower parts, which are horizontally separated at the position of the eyes. The gap between the two parts is obvious. Therefore, it is also reminding the audience that these are all dolls, making them emotionally engaged and alienated. The effects coexist. Although the setting is very meticulous and creates a realistic atmosphere, the story is surreal, starting from the subjective perspective of the actor, Stone, and the audience will feel that the more they look at it, the stranger it gets.
The strange thing is that everyone else has the same face and the same voice. Customer service expert Stone is a typical "successful person." He has written best-selling books and made speeches, and his popularity is not low. But he has to take antidepressants. All the others in his eyes have the same beautiful but not prominent male face, and the same unsentimental male voice-including his wife and son. Thousands of people make people lonely on one side, because even the closest people have the same face as strangers, they are all masks. This technique is symbolic rather than realistic, expressed in the most specific and clear way, but the feelings of the protagonist are very real. The lonely Stone was on a business trip and stayed in a hotel. He asked an old lover who had been hurt by him to come out. He wanted to reconcile, or maybe want to be romantic, but ended up unhappy. He went to a sex shop outside the street, saw an old Japanese robot doll, and went back. He took a bath before going to bed and was startled by a woman's voice-he only heard the same male voice all the time! As a result, he went to look for the master of the voice and found Lisa, who was shocked, not because she looked like a fairy (even a little regrettable), but because she looked different.
Lisa is a fan of Stone, and came to this city to listen to his speech. As a result, Stone invited her to her room, and Lisa, who was inferior, was flattered because she always felt that she was worse than everyone else. Stone told her that the shortcomings in her eyes made her different, so it attracted him. After the one-night stand, Stone began to pick up on Lisa's minor problems while eating breakfast, but the latter gradually became like everyone else-the same face, the same voice. Disappointed Stone is still going to give a speech, but this time his inner pressure has reached a critical point. While talking about "treating your customers as friends", he couldn't help but tell his confusion and loneliness, the trend of division. It is as if two people take turns "grabbing microphones" to talk. In the end, Stone took the Japanese doll home. Although his family and friends prepared a party at home to greet him, he responded with a disappointing response because they were all that look and that voice. The last thing that gave him comfort was the singing of the Japanese doll with a built-in song device. Although the Japanese content is unknown, it is a different female voice.
Loneliness is obviously the theme of the movie, but before diving in, we must deal with a rather controversial content: Does Lisa really exist, or is the Japanese doll just a person in Stone's fantasy? There is no consensus among the audience. The reasons for claiming that "Lisa is a Japanese doll" include:
1) Both have shortcomings in the right corner of the eye;
2) The Japanese doll appears in the sex shop as a sex product; when Lisa appeared, the doll did not Appeared; when Stone brought the doll home, his wife said that the doll was leaking something that was suspected to be semen, so the doll was a tool Stone used to masturbate and became a human in his fantasy;
3) unique and "abnormal" Lisa and Stone joked that they can be called "Anomalisa" (that is, the name of the original play), and this name means "goddess" in Japanese, which also implies that she is equivalent to a Japanese doll;
4) Both The voice actors are the same person.
If Lisa is just a sex toy, then Stone is an extreme "poison man" who has never even had that "hope that will soon be disillusioned"! Those who disagree with this argue that the theory of "Lisa is a doll" does not explain the last scene of Lisa's appearance. Not only does she have her own appearance and voice, but even the friends next to her have their own faces (in previous appearances) Only standard face). Lisa and the doll have only a symbolic or figurative relationship, not the same. So that scene is the most objective in the play, because the other "one thousand people" scenes are all from Stone's pathological subjective perspective. Well, the world is not so desperate, but Stone still hasn't gotten out of his spiritual predicament.
Stone sees his face differently from others, but the face of the doll is removable, which means that it is possible for Stone to have the same face as other people. But it was precisely because he saw that he was the only one who was different, that he felt lonely. On the other hand, it seems that he is also in danger of losing his "his face." Immediately before he heard Lisa's voice for the first time, his face suddenly twitched uncontrollably, making the sound of mechanical parts moving; later in his dream, the lower half of his face fell to the ground for the audience to see The internal structure of the doll's head. This is also a kind of alienation effect, which not only reminds the audience that Stone is not a person, but further stimulates them to think "Is he like a puppet?"
Kaufman made a wonderful dialectic in "Abnormal Lisa", not only between people and dolls, but also between sincerity and falsehood. Stone taught the customer service staff to imagine that the customer at the other end of the phone is also a person with growth experience, joy and happiness, and should be regarded as a friend. These words are beautiful, and they are not without reason, because they make customers feel cordial and get better service. It’s right to treat people with sincerity, and it’s right to show understanding and empathy to others, but when these “true” things are placed in a standardized business context, they appear to be false-customers are never friends, and the indicator of success is always company achievements. Generally speaking, lying is to make the falsehood true, but Stone’s "Treat others with sincerity" first turns the true into false, and then pretends to be "true", which is doubly false.
Many people say that the advanced technology of modern society derogates people as machines, just like dolls with the same mask. Ironically, machines are becoming more and more like humans, such as artificial intelligence and those dolls that can imitate human expressions. So is Stone whose face will fall off, a human or a doll? The audience will also reflect on whether they will become more and more like puppets? The staff of the customer service hotline is just a gear in the business system. Stone, as an excellent indicator, asks them to provide "humanized" services. It can be said that the staff is upgraded from a small gear to artificial intelligence, but it is even more detrimental to humanity. An "unprofessional" customer service line staff, although they are indifferent and unceremonious in the workplace-or perhaps as we often hear the unsentimental "Welcome"-because those staff leave their sincere feelings to the real Family and friends too. The false "Welcome" is actually the guarantee for the staff to maintain their sincerity. If a staff member treats the customer as a friend, he will sell the remaining sincerity as well. This is not only a deeper deception, but also privacy. The field will also fall. The price of treating a stranger as a friend is that a friend becomes a stranger.
After Stone betrayed the most sincere areas in his heart, the boundary between true and false collapsed, and his mind collapsed, so he saw that everyone has the same appearance and the same voice. The name of the hotel he stayed in, Fregoli, also suggested "Fregoli delusion", a mental disorder that "sees all others as the same person" (but Kaufman inverted the symptoms, because "Fregoli delusion" is " "One person has a thousand faces" instead of "A thousand people have one face"). Now that Stone's mind has fallen into chaos, it is not clear whether Lisa is a real person or a puppet. Even though Lisa is a real person, he is treated like a doll by Stone; on the other hand, in the end, only Japanese dolls have different human characteristics in his eyes-but in fact, Stone is also a doll, and all the characters in the play are- -how about you? Have you ever tried that sometimes facial movements are a little out of control...?
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