The most direct theme of the film "Thesis" (Tesis) is the presentation and questioning of public audiovisual violence. This is the title of Angela's thesis and the most direct key to the interpretation of the film. On the one hand, violent audio-visual has an irrefutable negative meaning, on the other hand, violent scenes often bring strong sensory stimulation and novel audio-visual experience to the viewer, which is "beautiful like a razor." Violent images, or audiovisual violence, are often the ideographic practice of a certain subculture, a product of imagination, and a product of social reality.
In the opening movie, Angela couldn't help but want to get a glimpse of the corpse lying on the rails. The director used a slow upgrade shot to express the nervousness of witnessing the bloody corpse. However, when the feeling of anxiety reached the culmination, the police pulled Angela back. The narrative rhythm is back to normal. Here, Angela’s lens is a metaphor for the unavoidable tendency of the individual to be violent, and the police’s prevention of Angela is a metaphor for the public’s rejection of violent images. From Angela's desire to spy on corpses and the theme of her thesis "audiovisual violence", it can be inferred that Angela is a girl who is very interested in violence and blood, which seems to contradict her image as a "nerd". Afterwards, Angela’s dreams clearly confirmed her inner desire for violence and sexual abuse, but this desire is obviously contrary to her self-awareness-these generally regarded as pathological and distorted desires are obviously very It is difficult to squeeze into the normal expression space. Angela puts a lot of effort into suppressing these "abnormal" desires. Under her reticent and silent appearance, there is an ambivalence of masochistic desire and self-repression mixed with each other.
Angela's long-suppressed desires will be vented sooner or later, because it is the opposite of consciousness and reality. So, fatefully, at the death scene of Professor Figueroa, Angela encountered the object of her desire-a shocking and sadistic video tape. Angela did not dare to watch the video on the tape, but recorded the girl's screams and listened to it over and over again until she fell asleep-this is a very meaningful inclusion in the scene and also a clue. Then Angela dreamed that Woods sneaked into the house with her left key and slashed Angela's throat with a dagger. After a brief suspicion, Angela began to lick the back of Woods's hand. Then the excitement overcame the fear, and the two began to kiss. When Angela woke up, the Walkman was still playing beside her pillow. Desire was born out of dreams and began to form a fantasy space in Angela's real life. Angela's shuttle between reality and desire, the construction of self-fantasy and the loss of illusion, constitute an important connotation of the film.
When the fantasy space squeezes the real world to a critical point, the character's sense of subjectivity begins to lose. In the movie, it shows the deformation of time and space and the confusion of consciousness. Faced with the abuser, Angela can protect herself in a more rational way. Angela’s IQ and judgment are more than enough to deal with such “dangers”, but in the face of Woods holding a Sony XT-500 camera and the abuser Professor Castro, in Angela, the space of desire and the real time and space begin Overlap and confusion. When this squeeze reached a critical point, the horror that followed forced her to start a run like an escape from a nightmare. The two college chase scenes criticized by many people in the film took place from this. Angela’s escape action was not without clumsy or even flawed, but in this sense, this was not the film’s failure in characterization, but Angela. A critical point at which suppressed desires began to take shape became a driving factor in the plot of the movie.
Judging from the film sequence directed by Alessandro, if "Thesis" presents the gnawing between the boundary between fantasy and reality, in the later "Open Your Eyes", the fantasy situation directly makes the protagonist grow. The dream is not awake, indulges in it and can't perceive the real world at all, showing that the illusion completely swallows the real world (the more well-known version of this movie is Tom Cruise's famous remake of "Vanilla Sky").
Here, the role of Chema is revealed. Every time he appears, he almost protects Angela from being swallowed up by desire and fantasy. At the same time, Chema's love for violent pornographic films echoes the violent theme of the film. The motive behind Chema's violent desire is completely different from Angela. Because of the absence of various emotions, Chema seeks an alternative solution from the violent images. This is one of the meanings of the existence of violent videos-to release people’s violent appeals and let them get some kind of "in the images" Imaginative realization". Chema's relatives are not around, his residence is messy and dirty, and the angry expression on his face gives him the meaning of marginalized people in society. Therefore, violent images have become a tool for cutting horses, alternatively "bearing" the pain in the imagination, and used to dissolve the trauma in personal experience. Chema's appearance is alternative and decadent, but his attitude towards Angela is not without humility. The silent footage in the camera verifies Chema’s love for Angela, almost like looking at it quietly—obviously, Chema’s way of expressing love has nothing to do with violence and lust, even though they are all unauthorized private images. But it seems very gentle and cautious.
Freud's "death instinct" can more or less explain people's destructive desires and impulses such as self-masochism and masochism. Death instinct explains those dark, destructive behaviors, such as cruelty, confrontation, attack, and even killing between people. Correspondingly, people have two instincts, one is love instinct, and the other is death instinct. The former is constructive, the latter is destructive. Although the two instincts have opposite effects, they coexist at the same time. In the film, these two instincts exist almost simultaneously in the three main characters. In the end, Angela's "love instinct" defeated the "death instinct" and was saved.
At the end, Angela kills Woods with a gun and breaks free from the series of crimes caused by real violence. In the end, she responded to Chema's story about "The Princess and the Ugly Dwarf", which eliminated Chema's deep inferiority complex. After experiencing a series of violence and self-defense, fantasy and reality, chase and escape, killing and rescue, a "death essay" on audiovisual violence also revealed its context.
Therefore, the film "Thesis" can be interpreted from the three layers of violence, desire, and fantasy.
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