-"The Biography of Mishima Yukio"
1. Beauty
This is a dialogue in the movie "Mishima Yukio Biography". It is in the first chapter "beautiful" of the four chapters in the whole chapter, but I think this is a summary of Mishima's life. Yukio Mishima, as the most important person in the history of Japanese post-war literature, film history and even the entire art history, as the person with the most important significance in the Western culture as the eastern culture, and the most important person among the ultra-right-wing militarists in Japan People, his life and his works are equally legendary. It has been a long time since Mishima died, but he has not yet produced any conclusions about his life and works. The disputes over his life and works have never been resolved, and he has also used his life to write the most dramatic drama. , The most cinematic film, the most literary literary work.
As an artist, no matter where you are in the art category, the pursuit of beauty is the highest state and ultimate goal. Mishima himself is a beautiful man. Although people who have seen Mishima’s own photos may not think that Mishima’s appearance is a kind of "handsome guy", at least he is not tall or even small, but Mishima is pursuing a physical body. The beauty that is intertwined with the spirit. Needless to say in terms of spirit and consciousness, Mishima, who has published poems since he was a child, has been constructing the beauty of the pure land of his heart since he was a child, and when he was thirty years old, he had developed a muscle to make him himself From the appearance to the heart, I have the beauty of a Japanese man who is both rigid and flexible. Many people say that Mishima has been writing two works in his life, one is his work and the other is the work of his own life. If in Mishima’s works, we still need to keep exploring to see the similarities between the protagonists and Mishima, then in Mishima’s works, he has already created an easier one for us The captured image of the protagonist is extremely beautiful.
What is beauty? This is not only a question that Mishima has been pursuing all his life, but also a question that people have been asking since ancient times. Many people think that beauty is a natural state of natural carving, but this is only a one-sided view. Most jade stones really need to be polished and carved. But one thing should be understandable. Beauty is by no means the majority. It is not owned by the majority or discovered by the majority. Beauty is definitely a privilege. Privilege is not only a thing that can be enjoyed, more often it may also have a lot of risks. After all, the ultimate beauty will not be recognized by the majority, and there will be many deformations when the beauty reaches the limit. Just as the little stutter in the movie said after seeing the naked woman, "It's so beautiful and terrifying. It gradually grows bigger and destroys everything." Beauty is really a very destructive thing, no, it is not beauty itself, but the process of pursuing beauty, but the allure of beauty is full of destructive power. Like a beautiful tooth, it will grind out your tongue. Beauty stimulates Mishima's mind, transforms Mishima's body, and ends Mishima's life. Japan has always been a nation with extreme tendencies, both extreme good and extreme bad. They seem to easily go to an extreme situation, influencing others, and undermining themselves-to go to extremes is a kind of innocence. The performance of the state of mind, it does not have so many hesitations, so many thoughts, not so many looking around, purely looking at the good and the bad, the good and the evil, the beauty and the ugliness, and it has forced itself into a kind of inability. In the extreme of escape. You can certainly criticize Mishima's right-wing militarism from an ideological standpoint, but you can never ignore the complete and beautiful image of artwork that exists in the hearts of Mishima individuals.
two. Art
I never think that "artist" is a kind of identity, nor that "art work" is a kind of professional category. Since you choose art, art has become a kind of self-certification, and you will never be able to interact with these two. The words are separated. Many people are saying that Mishima is the person who can best interpret his life, and even that Mishima is the person who can use himself to hype himself the most. If that's the case, Mishima finally traded his physical death in exchange for the immortality of his works, and the price he paid seemed too great. In other words, too many people have died (or even committed suicide), and the things he left behind during his lifetime have not been passed on for long.
Sontag said that "a writer does not achieve greatness because of the severity of the history or horror that he has endured." This sentence is absolutely correct, but for most writers, the severity of reality always extends In his works, he brought more ideographic levels to his works, and for Mishima, as an artist, he extended his works of art to his reality, giving his life a multi-layered ideographic meaning. There is a theoretical direction in modern criticism circles that refuses to confuse writers with works. I can't agree with this method. At least for Mishima, this method of criticism does not apply. Many people say that Mishima's early works did not reflect his later extreme political inclination. Some people even say that the birth of "Worrying the Country" is just Mishima's justification for his own ideology. But as an artist in the true sense, he is basically endlessly interpreting and defending his own spirit. Truffaut said that a film director only makes one film in his life, and that is himself-this sentence There is no doubt that Picasso's artistic creation has undergone seven major changes in his life, and even self-contradictory changes. Each time it confirms that the artist is a group of people who truly follow their heart and are loyal to their souls. Perhaps artists are idealistic, because art itself is idealistic, and beauty only exists in everyone's heart.
In the movie, still through a dialogue, it accurately expresses the existence value of art for beauty. As an artist, he has to face the cruel reality of physical decline. Although the human body may be the most beautiful work in the world that does not need to be modified, it cannot be preserved for a long time or forever. And the tragic fate of an artist is to use a limited life to chase infinite art. Therefore, the life of an artist may be tragic. Even if you never compromise and stick to yourself, you will eventually be like the broken one. A tooth is pulled out or falls out on its own.
three. Performance
Mishima used his life's performances to explain that an artist and his works have a certain sense of romance. Mishima's life is not a linear structure as usual, but a complex intersecting structure. This is not only because of the division in Mishima's heart, but also because of the way he has chosen to express his work and life. As a biographical film that expresses Mishima's life, the greatest success of "Mishima Yukio Biography" is to choose the same technique to show it.
First, the film selects four paragraphs to express the four levels of Mishima's thoughts, which are divided into "beauty", "art", "performance" and "balance of pen and sword". Secondly, in these four paragraphs, director Paul Schrader adopted a three-line parallel approach to express, that is, using black and white images to show Mishima’s old life experience, and using realistic techniques to show Mishima’s home to the Self-Defense Force station. He gave a speech and committed suicide by cutting his abdomen, and presented the themes and plot content that Mishima tried to explore in the novels "Golden Pavilion", "Running Horse" and "Forbidden Colors" in a theater play. Although director Schrader can use the word "mosaic" to describe Mishima's life trajectory full of collages and inlays, and find a good way of expression for it, the whole film seems to be only fascinated by it. Regarding the display of Mishima, I failed to dig deeper and explore the inner incentives of Mishima-style life and works.
Of course, this problem is not only a difficult problem for Schrader, it should even be extremely difficult for any art creator. The performance of life is different from the interpretation of works of art. People stand in real life. Many performances don't need reason. Love and hate, good and evil, any transformation of thought can be unnecessary. However, once the performance of life is to be put on the art stage, it has to be given even the most untenable motives. In "The Moon and Sixpence", Maugham described an ordinary middle-class man, Strickland, who suddenly abandoned his family and became a painter pursuing art. He emphasized more than once in the narrative He couldn't explore nor explain Strickland's fission process and thought inducements. Although Maugham’s "The Moon and Sixpence" has the original writing form, it is still a fictional work after all. He could have portrayed Strickland’s inner picture, but he avoided writing it, perhaps right. It is to tell people that the performance of life is more direct and more inexplicable.
I don't know if Schrader also has Maugham's ideas, but for a legendary writer who is already well-known to everyone, shooting his biography and exploring his inner motives should undoubtedly become an unavoidable problem. However, in terms of form alone, Schrader may be too loyal to a unified expression. The old days of Mishima used black and white images, the suicide of Mishima used realistic techniques, and the presentation and interpretation of Mishima's works used stage modeling-this seems to be too smooth in terms of creative concept. In fact, based on Mishima's entire life journey, we can completely express it as "dream life". Mishima not only created countless unforgettable characters in his works, but also created and played the most important role in his life. It's hard to tell which Mishima in the work and the Mishima in reality act more like himself. They are both unified and divided. You can't distinguish which Mishima is more real and which is more illusory. Mishima's performance has reached a state of "true and false when fake is true", and its artistic creation has achieved a unified effect. I’m wondering, what kind of effect would it be if the experience of Mishima’s suicide was presented in a stage-style method, Mishima’s works were interpreted in black and white, and the past time of Mishima was performed realistically. Woolen cloth? In addition, although some people say that the Ogata Ken, as the queen actor of Imamura Shohei, does not resemble Mishima in appearance, the Ogata Ken, which looks more beautiful than in reality, has basically reached the point where it looks like a god.
Four. Balance of pen and sword
Talking about Mishima, it was shown that Mishima could not escape the last mistake of his life, but I don't know why he avoided the mistake in Schrader's film and only showed a little laparotomy. Perhaps Schrader felt that Jie missed the cruelty, especially in the real situation. Mishima, who had already completed a caesarean section by himself, failed to be decapitated three times in a row when Jie Jie was wronged, and he even tried to be painful. He also failed to commit suicide by biting his tongue. In the end, the torturer was changed and finally died. Mishima, after expecting to use his pen and words to influence others but failed, he inserted the sword (knife) in his hand into his abdomen, letting the sword he admired for a long time cut off his head. .
Writers will always have a sword in their hands. While pursuing beauty, they will all try to use that sword to cut off those ugly things. The sword in Lu Xun's hand should be the most obvious and dazzling to Chinese people. An artist without a sword in his hand should not even be called an artist. Just as commercial movies will always weave a beautiful dream for people to make people forget reality and hide in illusions, while art movies will do the opposite, deliberately hurt the most vulnerable nerve in people’s hearts. . Every artist should have this responsibility. If the pursuit of beauty is the artist's instinct, but also the responsibility of holding a sharp sword and using it accurately and accurately is the responsibility of holding a sharp sword.
Of course, for the Chinese, including most of the righteous people in the world, Mishima took the wrong sword, and in the end he could only use the sword to cut himself off. If he was born during World War II, there might be more people in Japan to support him, but he raised the banner of militarism in the 1960s and 1970s, making him stand on the balcony of the Self-Defense Force headquarters. What you get when you make a generous statement is endless ridicule and boos. I am not here to lament Mishima’s untimely birth. His militarist thoughts are not at the right time at any time, and even this makes Mishima’s perfect image in my heart greatly compromised. Three To me, Shiaozhi can only be a first-rate writer, and will never be a perfect artist and thinker. But as an individual and independent person, Mishima undoubtedly found the balance between the pen and the sword in his hand, even by himself. Mishima has always been searching for himself in the balance between his pen and sword. The state of imbalance made him lose himself and make it difficult to distinguish himself. Mishima is also struggling to create himself at both ends of the pen and the sword. Just as Tolstoy said after writing "Anna Karenina", he could no longer control Anna in the second half of the work. , Anna has the soul of self. Of course, Tolstoy's words are about the creative experience, but he has confirmed the fact that the self really seems to be beyond control. When Mishima faced the ridicule of the soldiers on the balcony, when his militarism and Bushido spirit were scolded, at that moment he should wake up to the out-of-control and ineffectiveness of his creative self, and his innocence lies in, ruthlessly. He tried to seize the final control over himself-self-destructing his life-to finally emphasize his ownership of pens and swords. Reality made a big joke with him again. The candidate he designed, Morita Mustachi, failed to complete the wrong ceremony, and had to use He Haojin to execute it. In the end, Mishima failed to complete the original intention of the creation. the whole process.
Mishima made the dazzling cherry blossoms eternal with the pen in his hand, but he cut his head by mistake with the sword in his hand. The pen and the sword are balanced in the hands of others due to unity, but they are balanced in the hands of Mishima due to contradictions. Mishima may really be that beautiful bad tooth. It’s unparalleled in beauty, but it cuts his tongue and wears out himself. In the end, he was pulled out by others/self. In a bloody state, the beauty we saw was the same as before. Is it beautiful? ——Mishima, when you were dying, did you ever ask questions—is this it?
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