In fact, I think the wonderful thing about this movie lies in the fact that the second half of the heroine insists on self as the subject (she hopes the hero will fall in love with the "real her") and gradually become the fictitious image of the hero. Contradictory tension. The first half is really lackluster, almost making me sleepy.
To talk about suspense, there is really no suspense in this movie, which is far behind Hitchcock's "Mentally Ill". No matter how mentally retarded I am, I can’t really believe the nonsense of the husband’s so-called ghost possession, and this is a Hitchcock movie, not a ghost movie, so naturally I understand from the beginning that this is a conspiracy of the husband. . At the same time, as the finale of film noir in the late 1950s, it is obvious that blonde women are femme fates who deceive male heroes.
As a conspiracy, this plan is completely inexplicable. It feels that the husband is a conspiracy designed based on the hero’s fear of heights, and the murder of his wife has become secondary. But even if the protagonist has a fear of heights, if someone sits on the stairs of the tower instead of leaving, wouldn't it block her husband on the top of the tower?
These are all complaints. I mean, if this movie does not have the second half, but only reveals the truth directly after the first half ends, then this will be a detective movie that is not counted as a third-rate film, and it is positive. It is because the second half of the paragraph suddenly made the lackluster first half glow with infinite charm and full of new readability.
If the male protagonist in the first half is the absolute dominant viewpoint of the camera, then the female protagonist in the second half gradually replaces the dominant viewpoint of the male protagonist and becomes the narrator. Generally speaking, there is only one dominant point of view in Hollywood movies, which is either the full knowledge point or the observation of the whole event led by the protagonist of the story. But Hitchcock's favorite is to play with this kind of subversion and have the ability to keep the audience from disgusting. The first narrator with a dominant perspective in "Mentally Ill" was killed inexplicably in the middle of the story. This made me depressed for a long time watching this movie when I was a child. For the first time, I knew that the protagonist who had been acquiesced by the audience was also Can be killed in the middle of the movie. The movie "Dizziness" played this hand again. After the actor found the heroine again, he approached the person, hoping to learn about her identity, but the heroine lied to him. When the actor closed and left, the camera didn’t follow. The hero came outside the house, on the contrary, the camera stayed inside the heroine's house. This completely conflicts with the previous experience of watching the movie that the camera moves completely with the actor’s point of view. At this time, the heroine becomes the leader of the camera, and the camera enters her heart. With a few flashbacks, it reveals the heroine’s heart. The secret is that she colluded with her husband and killed the real wife.
Since then, the camera has been following the heroine. At this time, the heroine secretly made up his mind to make the hero fall in love with the real her, instead of the fictitious "she" that she conspired with her husband to make up as a wife. .
From then on, when we look back to the first half of the movie, we will find different meanings from those long and tedious tracking passages. As a film critic I’ve seen before wrote, in these passages, the male protagonist is not only the dominant player of the camera’s viewpoint, his actions determine the movement of the camera, and more importantly, the heroine’s image has always been his His subjective viewpoint was peeped by him.
That is to say, from the beginning, the heroine does not appear as a self-contained subject, but as an image in the eyes of the hero. This image is gradually perfected as the hero peeks deeper and deeper. She was a melancholy, noble, dignified and mysterious woman. She was pitifully troubled by the family curse. She longed for a hero to save herself. Beautiful and helpless, it really made every man tempted.
However, this image is fictitious, not the true nature of the heroine at all, but a fictitious husband deliberately shown to the hero for money and murder, and the hero is obviously a good audience. He not only keeps track of the heroine all the time, but also displays the most beautiful side of the heroine as a lens through the closed perspective of the door frame, the front glass window of the car, and the picture frame, allowing the audience (as the receiver of the hero's subjective viewpoint) ) Deepen the recognition of the fictional image of the heroine.
Hitchcock did not stupidly put this unspeakable mystery at the end of the film and then confessed it. Instead, when the film went to 1 hour and 39 minutes, he told the audience the truth through the heroine's memories. This, of course, is due to Hitchcock’s own understanding of suspense (he thinks that it’s only a surprise not to see the time bomb suddenly explode, and to see the time bomb waiting to explode is the suspense), but on the other hand it is also to make the movie more interesting. Reflexivity is more obvious.
As mentioned earlier, when the actor closes the door and the camera does not leave with the actor, the heroine becomes the sole owner of the camera. At this time, she dominates the camera, and the camera even enters her heart to reveal the truth. , And as the audience, we also know that the heroine's previous image shown to the hero is completely fictitious. This time the heroine does not want to leave, but hopes that she can dominate the viewpoint of the hero. She wants the hero to fall in love with the real her, not the fictional image.
However, the heroine's efforts completely failed. After coming out of the room, the heroine still dominates the camera's point of view, and she still holds the initiative relative to the male lead. At the dining table, the camera movement is still shifting with the heroine's point of view. The female protagonist saw the male protagonist's eyes staring at a woman whose dress and hairstyle were the same as the image she had previously fictionalized. She also looked at that woman. At this time, the camera switched to that woman. This lens is still the subjective point of view of the protagonist. . But the heroine has realized that the hero is still obsessed with the fictional image, and has not fallen in love with the real her.
So the female protagonist began to make concessions to the male protagonist step by step, agreeing to the male protagonist to dress her up, and slowly restore her to the previous fictional image. The male protagonist bought her the same flowers, the same clothes, and the same shoes. When she finally lost her last bottom line, and even the color of her hair agreed to return to the previous fictional image, she completely lost the initiative. , The camera viewpoint is once again dominated by the actor's viewpoint. When she agreed to dye her hair, in the next shot, she disappeared, completely absent, and became the male protagonist outside the barber shop waiting for her to reappear in the image he hoped.
The barber told the hero that it takes a while for the heroine to dye her hair. The hero returns to his hotel to wait for her, and the camera follows the hero to the hotel. Then the hero looks out the window. You can see from the hero’s expression. The host saw the heroine, but the camera still didn't show the heroine until the hero opened the door and the camera peeped out of the house again from the subjective point of view of the hero, and the heroine walked out of the elevator slowly.
It is important to point out that at this time, the heroine reappears as the image seen from the subjective point of view of the male protagonist. This is not an objective point of view, but the subjective point of view of the male lead. The fictional image of the protagonist's imagination appears. Since then, the heroine never dominates the camera's point of view. She once again degenerates into the desired image in the eyes of the hero (audience), and completely loses herself.
The sad thing is that the heroine doesn't care about being alienated, she just wants to please the hero. She doesn't feel frustrated that her image is becoming more and more toward that terrible fictional image that will destroy her, but just asks the hero " Are you satisfied?" The male protagonist had to ask the female protagonist to clip her hair again. As a result, the last point of the heroine's original characteristics was also lost, completely changed to the previous fictional image, and the hero was finally satisfied, and the two of them hugged together.
It is a pity that this is not a comedy story. The final result of this alienation of the heroine must be self-destruction. The irony is that her step-by-step catering to the actor made the actor see through the falsity of this image, and he found that it was all set by the heroine and her husband. So he further asked the heroine to tend to that fictional image-not only dress, hairstyle, hair color, but also come to the same environment and perform the same event. This finally drove the heroine crazy. This time, she really lost herself completely and became the wife she played, and suffered the same fate as her wife-falling from the tower and died. However, the actor was saved and healed his fear of heights.
My interpretation of the whole story is that at the beginning, the heroine was willing to play a fictitious image for the sake of money and became the object of the hero's prying eyes. This is the original sin of the heroine. From that moment on, she split into the original image of her and the man. When she fell in love with the hero, she longed to overcome the fictional image and let the hero see the real her. She once became the dominant point of view of the lens, because she knew more than the male protagonist, but she could not beat the image of her in the male protagonist’s eyes, so step by step, she once again became a fictional image in the male’s eyes, and Lost her self, but also lost the dominance of the camera. When she was completely reduced to that image, she herself was completely destroyed, and it was the man who was only perfected.
Finally, I will say something off topic that has nothing to do with this movie. I think it is entirely appropriate, even inevitable, to use Freud and feminism as an interpretation tool to analyze Hitchcock’s film, because Hitchcock is obviously actively using this tool to make His film is more complicated. We say not to over-interpret movies, but we don’t even want to give up reasonable and legitimate interpretations. I don’t agree with saying that "movies are movies", especially for Hollywood movies, which are the most popular entertainment and the most sensitive to public ideology. This is especially true of film makers in China.
Feminism as an analytical tool is completely reasonable. What SB does is not methodology itself, but old scholars who dogmatically worship methodology as ontology. Instead of using concepts such as feminism, psychoanalysis, and realism as a tool, they worship these concepts as the ontology of movies, and introduce all movies into these concepts far-fetched. This has led to the people nowadays. The structure of the headaches when I hear these concepts. But how innocent are these concepts?
My film review also hopes that everyone can be the instrumental value of these concepts.
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