For Hollywood's ideological analysis, it is actually examining the interactive relationship between the film and the audience. As an industrialized entertainment kingdom, Hollywood analysts prefer to call it "the relationship between production and reproduction." And Walter Benjamin emphasized that this kind of mechanical copying has caused an important change in the traditional power relationship between producers and consumers, that is, consumers are given more use rights to use art and a say in the interpretation of the meaning of art. . But in the sense of ideological analysis, Jean-Louis Baudrillard puts the film in the perspective of a mass media, and starts thinking in the media sense from the film machine itself. The machine theory believes that the film machine "transmits the impression of reality." , So the film has "objective and true dreamlike effect". So that the audience is immersed in this dream. Or what Althusser called the "imaginative relationship".
So far we can make a certain interpretation of the text of "Afternoon Love". The film begins with a detective’s point of view. This profession is known for its high degree of reliance on evidence, or “truth”. In the opening small case, the detective used the camera to record an extramarital affair but was artificially sabotaged-Mr. X, who broke into the door to murder the adulterer, discovered that the woman was not his wife at all-in fact, it was a trick of cross-dressing. Mr. X successively began to doubt the identity of the adulterer, the identity of this woman, and even the identity of the restaurant, but he still did not want to believe that it was the detective's fault. This naturally comes from the conviction of "reality". We can think of this as a certain kind of thinking about film media in the sense of communication. This kind of thinking strangely forms an intertextual relationship with Antonioni's "Magnification" within the genre.
Then the story of the film constructed a complete system of referring to the film medium. The detective's daughter, Ari, gradually fell in love with Playboy Flangen at first sight because of her father's files. Her knowledge of love comes entirely from a prying into her father's files, and these files have constructed an imaginary emotional world for Yali. In order to enter this world, Yali began to shape herself with the cases in the archives, and finally entered the imaginary world.
Such an interpretation of the film text makes us find that the film's self-reference to Hollywood films is quite straightforward. We easily discovered the pair-to-pair correspondence. For Hollywood movies, the movie itself also uses its media characteristics and a set of structural operations on plot, time and space to create a complete imaginative world for the audience, thereby realizing the ideological inquiry of the audience. As a result, the audience brings this emotional experience and lifestyle into their daily lives, becoming "capitalist qualified laborers" (in the words of Santo Adorno and Marx Horkheim).
What's interesting, however, is that in the film, the detective (media, communicator), Frangen (representative of the imaginative world) and Yali (audience) have completely different attitudes towards the cases in the archives. Detectives despise these incidents and think they are immoral, but make a living from them; Mr. Flangen enjoys his "life of love and run", and his files are getting thicker. But once Yali described her life in the same way, he was extremely dissatisfied. However, Yali was moved by all the stories in the archive, and fell in love with Flangen. While imaginatively shaping herself, she tried her best to integrate into the world in that archive.
This correspondence is not only a simple reference to Hollywood industry, but also involves the concept of subject in the sense of Althusser. Althusser's concept of subject "is intertwined with legal, grammatical and psychological meanings." The "subject" here is different from the concept of free agency in the grammatical sense, and it is also different from the passive "subject" in the legal sense. Althusser believes that ideological machines call legal subjects as if they are still grammatical subjects, making them mistake their obedience for freedom. This reveals the essence of Hollywood movies, that is, through typified collective mythology, which constructs "viewing subjects" and uses their misunderstandings to realize the process of reproduction. "Afternoon Love" fully presents this process of "misrecognition". While watching the archives, Yali was moved by the seemingly "pathetic" and "desperate for love" love story, and took the initiative to plunge into this emotional world. The appearance of a superficial "grammatical subject" to pursue the so-called happiness has in fact become a legal subject, passively letting his father's archives construct all the ways of his emotional life. But outside this world, the detective constitutes another implicit clue, showing the original appearance of the real world and the essence of these love stories. The complete presentation of the production and reproduction process of the imaginary world constitutes the referring power of the film to the film medium.
At the same time, the protagonist's question throughout the film is "WHO ARE YOU?" That is to say, the identity of the heroine Yali cannot be recognized by people in her imaginative world. It seems that this kind of unrecognition is Yali's active behavior, but in fact, due to Yali's misunderstanding of her subject identity, concealment is actually a manifestation of her misunderstanding. The fact is, no matter how Yali shapes herself, she cannot be accurately recognized by people in that world, and her identity is always in crisis. The concealment is out of helplessness, because her identity in her own world, the daughter of a detective and a student of the Conservatory of Music, is considered unattractive by Yali. In the identity she has created for herself, what she lacks is the most essential "WHO AM I?" This deficiency belongs to the legal subject, and the grammatical subject does not have such a lack.
At this point, a complete referential system has been successfully constructed, but Billy Wilder is not satisfied with it. The narrative of the film suddenly moves in another direction at the end. The opportunity for this ending came when Flangen's confusion reached its peak. Ari’s self-shaping made Flangen more difficult to accept, but what is the mechanism of this emotion? Mr. X, who fell from the sky, handed the detective's business card to Flangen, allowing us to see that the power of the type itself began to take over the narrative. Flangen got Ali's true identity along the way, and the detective also knew the truth smoothly, and everything seemed to be revealed. However, until the end of the film, Yali did not know this change, she still lived in her own imagination. But we have seen a happy ending. The detective recounted the daughter's wedding with Flangen in a statement of the case. Alie finally succeeded in entering her imaginative world, and her information was finally inserted into Flangen's information by the detective.
We found a huge gap in the film’s narrative here. At the end of the film, the film suddenly entered a neat typified narrative, but the characters were far from reaching such a state. Flangen still told the detective until the end: "I have a lot of interests." But Yali inexplicably formally entered her own imaginative world. The narrative logic has not yet reached the moment to solve the problem, but the film has reached a perfect ending. This can only be called the type of impetus. The anthropologist Horston Burdelmarker believes: "No Hollywood movie focuses on the truthfulness of emotions." This sentence is commented on the smile at the end of the detective. A detective smiled knowingly when he saw his daughter leaving with a young man of Huahua? !
We have reason to believe that this is a happy ending that was deliberately inserted, just like the ending method of Douglas Silk's "Love in the Rain and the Spring Breeze". This deliberately left gap in the narrative is not to complete the narrative, but to dissolve the narrative, that is, to disintegrate the ideology from within the genre. Thomas Schatz said: “In the activation and resolution of basic cultural conflicts and conflicts, genre films extol our collective attitudes, values, and thoughts; and this eulogizing ceremony is the most obvious in the formalized mode of narrative ending. It is through the ending that the genre can finally realize its ritual social function." This kind of thesis not only appears in Shatz’s works, almost all Hollywood researchers are emphasizing the ritualized role of a happy ending. . This coincides with the ideological problem in the sense of communication that we initially discussed.
Camille and Naboni’s paper pointed out: “The occurrence of an internal criticism causes the film to collapse at the cracks.... If someone reads with coherence beyond the external form, he will see that the film is full of cracks.” And Huai. It is through deliberately using the power of the type itself to promote the narrative, creating a coherent, smooth and smooth chapter on the surface, but creating a huge gap in the narrative within the film, thus completing the elimination of the type, and then in the ideological context. It is different from other Hollywood genres, and even forms a critical force.
"Afternoon Love" is by no means Billy Wilder's best work, but it shows Wilder's movie concept to the fullest. We now understand why Wilder cannot be recognized as a Hollywood movie writer. It is not because he is not an author, but perhaps because he is an author who is free from the Hollywood film industry and film concepts. Can we say that "Afternoon Love" is a critic movie?
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