personal interpretation
(i) Imagery of props
⑴ Golf and clubs
"Violence" - Since the male protagonist used golf to stop domestic violence, golf has become a tool of violence countless times, and all of them are men holding a club, that is, men are the main body of violence. Boxers and photographers, who have improvised golf in their homes, also show elements of violence or instability. Domestic violence men use golf for entertainment, and the male protagonist uses golf to vent his emotions in prison, just like people who use violence to vent in real life. At the same time golf is a symbol of high society, implicitly violence also exists in wealth and power.
The cue stick symbolizes the perpetrator, and the ball symbolizes the seed of violence. The male protagonist penetrates the ball with steel wire, like restraining violence with order and law. When playing a fixed ball under the tree, the heroine stopped him from playing golf, which is a resistance to violence under an equal relationship. When the ball breaks free from the wire, which is a symbol of violence out of order, it will cause great damage to others (and the victim at this time is also a woman).
"Sex" - club, ball, hole, i.e. the action of shooting, is the obvious reference to the sexual organs. The sexual initiative (ie, the club) has always been in the hands of men, and women are the oppressed in the process. When the male protagonist picks up the club to resist the domestic violence man, it can also be understood that the initiative of the female protagonist's relationship between the sexes has been transferred from the domestic violence male to the male protagonist, and the female protagonist's emotions have shifted. The bondage relationship in which the ball is tied to a tree points to the heroine being bound by marriage, and the victim of domestic violence trapped and can only endure the violence. In order to escape from the shackles, blood scars are bound to occur.
Sex and violence both reflect the oppressed aspects of women in society, and precisely reflect Kim Ki-duk's portrayal and concern for marginalized figures and women. Compared with his other works, this one has the least erotic images. But there is no shortage of metaphors and hints. From the perspective of film semiotics, the fish refers to sex—the three goldfish in the water tank of the family in the warm courtyard are pointing to the sexual relationship among the three.
⑵ electronic scale
The male protagonist will repair the same item in every house, and the electronic scale is repaired in the female protagonist's house. Why is it an electronic scale? I guess it has the following meanings.
"Repairing the broken emotional world and heart of the heroine" - the scale is a tool to measure the weight, or a tool to measure the status of the relationship between people. In the hostess' home, her relationship with her husband is unequal and broken. The scale was repaired, and it was the male protagonist who established an equal relationship with the female protagonist, making her way of getting along with people back to normal. When the heroine returned home alone, she dismantled the scale by herself, as if the wounds in her heart were in disrepair when she returned to hell again. Through the repair and destruction of the electronic scale, it reflects the stability and fragmentation of the balance of the heroine's inner world.
"Weighing Reality and Fantasy" - Scales can only weigh actual substances. At the end, there is a picture of the two people calling the number zero, which is the dialectic of existence. The souls of the two depended on each other and redeemed the heroine. Love and soul have no weight. Or imagine that the male protagonist never existed, and the female protagonist imagined all the stories under the long-term oppression of domestic violence. Unfortunately, it does not conform to many of the logic in the film. Then to simplify it again, the male protagonist may not have escaped from prison. Under the condition that he cannot escape the tragic situation, the strong thoughts and hopes of the female protagonist have turned into phantoms, which have become consolations for her change of attitude and life. This measuring instrument corresponds to one of the themes, "Dialectical Being and Nothingness".
(3) Nude Pictorial
"Sex Toys" - The heroine has her own nude picture album at home, and her expression is reluctant and helpless. This nude image is like a sex toy, naked and at the mercy of others. Men forced her to shoot, and men also participated in the execution. The man looked at the picture book, and the man hung her picture on the wall. The image in the photo is exactly what she looks like in the eyes of men, which hints and defines her subtle identity. Her resistance started when she took down the photo of herself on the photographer's wall, dismembered her humble and ridiculous image in the past, and put it together into a fragmented but brand-new image, symbolizing that she wanted to rebuild herself from the pain. After being slapped again, she chose to fight back. The domestic abuser also lost his temper under her tough attitude. Evasion and cowardice are not the methods, they will only make the perpetrator feel at ease. Perseverance is the weapon to restrain unreasonable violence. Only when the victim himself is willing to get out of the prison can others be rescued. If he blindly regards his own suffering as inevitable, the end will be endless patience.
(ii) "Empty room"
⑴ topic analysis
"Important clues to promote the narrative" - First of all, the act of entering the empty room makes the male and female protagonists meet, which is the beginning of the male protagonist's rescue of the female protagonist, and also the beginning of the mutual redemption of two lonely souls. Secondly, entering different rooms reflects the development of time, and the furnishings, owners, and encounters in each empty room have become the driving force of the plot.
"The emptiness of the soul, the lack of trust" - There are many quarrels between apparently loving couples in the film, resulting in a crisis of trust. The empty house symbolizes the emptiness of the heroine's spiritual world, and the emotional world has no one to rely on. The person who broke into the "empty room" was the existence that filled her heart and broke this emptiness. From the first male protagonist wandering alone, to the later two wandering together, it is the strength of hand in hand. During the process, the heroine gradually opened her heart and entered the picture of the camera. A lonely photo becomes a group photo. There are also many empty rooms elsewhere, so there are countless empty inner emotional worlds corresponding to them.
"Dialectical Being and Nothingness" - Is the Room Really Empty? What is the criterion for judging empty space? Just like the sentence that appeared at the end of the film: "It is difficult to tell whether the world we live in is real or a dream..." According to a bold assumption, the male protagonist may not exist, so the weight scale is reset to zero, which is related to the At the same time, what about the heroine who is standing with him? How far their lives have progressed, and whether the transition to a better life is a phantom, depends on how the individual understands it. I prefer to believe that both of them exist, the soul is freed from the shackles of the body and transformed into nothingness in form.
"Seven Empty Rooms" - the golf ball played at the beginning is No. 7, which corresponds to the seven rooms that appear in the film, and also corresponds to the seven-level Buddha in Buddhism. Kim Ki-duk himself likes Buddhism very much. The last one, the prison, also corresponds to the lowest level of hell. These rooms are the epitome of society, each reflecting the underlying social problems. Marital crisis, unstable sexual relations, domestic violence, extramarital affairs, empty nesters, corruption and greed, and very few warm families that exist. These problems are precisely what people want to avoid and not look at, and regard it as the existence of "empty". And Kim Ki-duk is to put them all on the bright side and show them to everyone.
⑵ lines analysis
What's special about this film is that it has very few lines, but it's not boring. The characters are shaped with flesh and blood through their behaviors and expressions. The more important the person, the more so. The impetuous supporting role has a lot of words, and expresses whatever comes to mind. The male protagonist has no lines, and the female protagonist has only three lines (including one), and their words are buried in their hearts. More content is handed over to the screen, allowing the audience to interpret themselves through thinking. It guides you, but doesn't understand it for you. In the case of very few lines, the lines that can be released are extremely important.
When the prison guard was looking for the male protagonist, he said to him: "Human eyes can only see 180°, and things in the shadows are invisible." The male protagonist has since learned to stand in the blind spot of human vision to avoid being discovered. Returning to many rooms after the escape, people can feel the presence of someone but cannot see him because he is standing in the shadows behind the people. In fact, he had this skill from the beginning, and it was his way of life: hiding himself in hidden corners. But it wasn't until then that he learned to use it better and blend into the shadows more thoroughly.
In other words, the scene behind 180º is the shadow area selected by people's thinking. Whether or not you can see a thing depends on your wishes and where you divide it. The female protagonist can see the male protagonist in the room because she loves him, and the domestic abuser can't see it because she hates him, and his existence threatens her marriage and authority. Shadow is also the part that people selectively ignore and paralyze themselves. People turn fear, hatred, and the things they want to avoid into blind spots, so they don't have to face them. Zooming in to the social level, the acute problems reflected in the seven empty rooms are the shadows of society, which have been ignored for a long time, creating the illusion that they have disappeared. But this is only the appearance of hypocrisy, a sign of cowardly fleeing, and the real problem remains. If you block the way like the heroine, things in the shadows will also appear.
This film is based on domestic violence as an entry point, revealing the dark side of society, dialectical existence and nothingness.
View more about 3-Iron reviews
