——Analysis of the theme of "This house is made by me"
I Made This House is a horror-thriller directed by Danish director Lars Von Trier about how Jack, a high-IQ serial killer who committed murders in Washington in the 1970s, is pursued by the police to complete his serial murders s story. Taken as a whole, if I had to force a single sentence to encapsulate what Lars von Trier himself wanted to say through this film, it would be Baudelaire's poem: "I am seen drinking the worst schnapps. , I am walking in the wind."
Taking this poem as the basic element and extending it in the context of reality, giving Lars von Trier his own psychological experience and value judgment, to a large extent, such an extraordinary work has been created. The theme of the film is rich in connotation, profound and philosophical, inheriting a lot of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's thoughts, showing the return and exploration of the artistic matrix.
1. "God is dead"
In Jack's second story, the killer was apparently unskilled or careless and left bloodstains visibly along the way as he fled the scene. In the extremely dim picture, the handheld camera keeps shaking, and the camera slowly zooms in and out (possibly simulating the police’s point of view), creating a rather tense atmosphere. Immediately afterwards, the director used a montage technique to compress time and space. When Jack arrived at the freezer, he used medium and close-up shots to meticulously depict Jack's stiff facial expressions and unnatural body movements. When everyone thought that Jack was finished, just like Jackie Chan's "The Hero of Heaven", it rained heavily, washing away all the sins of this night. Jack was overjoyed and shouted that God saved me.
The imaginative solution and handling provided by Lars von Trier for such a character's predicament directly reflects his own doubts and rebellion against the omniscient and omnipotent God.
The spiritual life of Europeans for two thousand years is centered on belief in God, who is God's creation and appendage. The value of life, everything of man depends on God. Although the foundation of God's existence has begun to disintegrate since the Enlightenment, people still believe in God and worship God because there is no new belief.
Lars von Trier is undoubtedly opposed to this phenomenon. He ingeniously mixes his humor and violent exposure, criticizing traditional Christian morality and modern reason, and expresses it through the description of the killer's situation. Svon Trier's previous work, "The Antichrist" is in the same line.
2. Art Saves Lives/Art Theory
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche affirmed the meaning of human existence with the aspect of tragedy, and further proposed to use art as a basis to face pain and absurdity. He advocates viewing the situation of life with the spirit of Dionysus, or simply speaking, from an aesthetic point of view. This is not to teach people to indulge in illusions, but to give people the courage and strength to face their own lives.
Similarly, the serial killer's philosophy of life is the same: use art to redeem his own life. The director uses cool-toned CG animations to show the killer's psychological process. The content is that a person keeps walking forward, and the street lights in tandem reflect two shadows, one in front and one behind, representing happiness and pain respectively. , the two are a trade-off. Over time, the pain will continue to deepen, and when the pain exceeds the acceptable limit, it is necessary to kill to obtain pleasure and reduce pain. This kind of reincarnation is very similar to the Buddhist "Dharma Mindfulness Sutra". The verse in Volume 7 says: "It is not others who do evil, but others who suffer and retribute; self-deeds and self-rewards, all sentient beings are like this." This is related to the end of the film: even if Jack kills many people, he is still human, still in hell, and still enters the next stage of causal reincarnation.
When the serial killer Jack intends to find meaning in life in this way and as a spiritual support and stereotype of life, another problem is involved:
what is art.
Like Deidara's "art is an explosion", Jack also gave an equally simple and rude answer: art is killing. At the same time, Jack also gave himself a humorous name: Mr. Tricky. From smashing people with jacks, pretending to be an insurer and strangling people, strangling his girlfriend on the sofa, driving to kill passers-by at night, to family slaughter hunting, cutting breasts, imitating Nazis and killing many people with one shot, and finally building a house with corpses, jack Self-redemption is accomplished in self-identification. Such a process and art theory is undoubtedly surprising and disgusting in today's artistic creation atmosphere full of political correctness and moral kidnapping. This indirectly reflects Lars von Trier's own concept of artistic creation: the pursuit of madness, burning, and even extreme free ideological expression of self-destruction, throwing away all political positions and moral ethics to let art return to art itself.
Again, this attitude and madness is in the same vein as Nietzsche.
"The country...where all people lose themselves...the chronic suicide of all is called 'life'". Nietzsche was particularly dissatisfied with the arrogant, German-supremacy atmosphere in his home country, Germany, after the Franco-Prussian War. "Wherever Germany goes, it corrupts the culture there." His critique was based primarily on his concern for culture: "Culture and state . Even anti-political."
3. The morality of the strong and the morality of slaves under the will to power
In Jack's teachings, there is clearly a shadow of Nietzsche's moral philosophy. He denounced general morality, believing that it denies the tiger within human beings and instead believes in the morality of the lamb. It is hard not to think of what Nietzsche called "the morality of the strong" and the "morality of the slave". This moral distinction was further distorted by Fascism into Social Darwinism, and used it as an important reason to persecute the Jews.
The specific manifestation of this ideological tendency in the film is the memory of the third event - family hunting. Jack applies the principles and survival laws of the animal kingdom to human beings, as if everything has returned to the primitive society and only Jack himself, facing all this calmly with the attitude and arrogance of the creator, is killing deer by using the law of hunting deer. He even sat on the picnic blanket and told a humorous joke when he had two of his own children: George might have a bad appetite, maybe he wanted pie. It's like the joke that the Joker tells Batman after being caught in the dc comic "The Deadly Joke", no one laughs at all, except himself.
Obviously jack is the successor of the will to power (at least he thinks so), which is related to the previous discussion of the value of life, which can be roughly summed up as follows: although life is short, as long as you have the will to power, create the will, and become spiritually strong. who can realize their own value. As the highest value measure, the will to power affirms the value of life on the one hand, and defends the inequality in the world on the other hand. In Jack's view, human beings, like natural life, have strengths and weaknesses. The strong are always in the minority, and the weak are the majority. History and culture are created by the strong few who rightly rule the weak. This overthrew the divine hierarchy and affirmed the human hierarchy.
All in all, on the basis of inheriting Nietzsche's will to a large extent, Lars von Trier boldly explored the boundaries of art with "This House Was Made by Me", looking for an alternative that is different from most of today's traditional art. Art. Perhaps the feeling of drowning in the nightmare created by the film's mad murder is the true face of art.
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