Some people say that such love is impossible, and I will argue that if human beings are a species born with disabilities, then such love will only be the only possible love in the world.
My basic understanding of Oasis is that it is a story about people who are deprived of language.
Whether it is mental retardation or cerebral palsy, these are disease carriers that present aphasia. Perhaps the choice of a cerebral palsy patient is more out of the need for visual spectacles and the conditions for the performance of the actors, and it can even be accused of a tricky approach (Wen Suli's representation of the cerebral palsy is too convincing, with As for I couldn't help but keep pushing the computer screen away, as if the cruelty was about to pierce through the screen and stab me) And what these two diseases have in common is their unspeakableness about their situation, because it's unspeakable, their brains are Considered as a closed body without the generation of thinking, in the end, even their life itself has become an objective object without life, which can be disposed of by others.
Before the final scene at the police station that made the audience unbearable ethically, Lee Chang-dong had already shown how those who could not speak were treated. The heroine's apartment is a field without any privacy. The key is placed in a flower pot in the corridor and can be taken out in front of strangers at will. Anyone who wants to enter the house can easily get what they want. wish, so she could not predict who, when, and what would suddenly break into her room (which also led to the final tragedy) and she had to accept all intruders passively, so she took the extreme of rape Events are also completely open. The limitation brought about by disability is not only on the disability itself, such as being unable to eat by oneself, taking a bath by oneself and other daily life, it will modify the code of the whole life and change the operation mode of each level. For the heroine, it was not that she had no strength to resist at the time of the incident, but the essence of her life had been limited to some kind of drained form, the mechanical beating of the heart or the continuous breathing. Destruction was bound to happen, she was just waiting for it.
The neighbor woman who takes care of the heroine and her lover have sex in her room, which proves that this place has become a suitable place for cheating. It is free and convenient, and the most necessary condition for cheating is that no one knows. Obviously, the female Although the protagonist exists in this room, she is not regarded as a human being, and the cheater does not need to worry that she will inform, or even whether she can understand the meaning of what is happening in front of her. When the woman (perhaps because of the lowest level of care she usually has to feed the dog, but she knows that there is life in this twisted mass of continuous twitching flesh), hesitantly tells her lover, "She is in Look", he replied "it's okay" with a tone that he couldn't understand why he needed to worry about it. In many film narratives, animal eyes are often used to shame the cheater (or even a legitimate couple) (such as "The Wolf of Wall Street", I watched too little and can only think of these for a while, but there should be More) And the cerebral palsy here is inferior to animals, she has no ability to shame, she is relegated to a kind of furniture-like being, motionless, silent. Her viewing cannot be transformed into speech, and viewing has become a process of input only. How the input is processed and understood by the brain, because the exit is blocked and can never be known, so the viewing itself loses its meaning.
The significance of the male protagonist to the female protagonist, the special thing about him as an "oasis" is that he is the only one who wants to decipher that series of meaningless fragments of signifiers, in the voice that normal people can't understand, take the initiative to piece together. A coherent sentence person who repeats the heroine's words with encouragement because she is incapable of saying too many words at once, he acts as a supplementary brain to help her store what has been laboriously said so that she can Continue to speak with peace of mind, instead of worrying about not understanding the last sentence (in the scene of the police station, we can see how the words of the heroine cannot be understood without the support of the male protagonist). In the process, he realized that the heroine's reason exists, or in other words, he has never questioned this reason. I am ashamed of the fact that her knowledge of history, her desire for love, her primordial sexuality, her slow but still articulate ability to articulate her needs, all aroused me at certain moments. Surprisingly, "not all cerebral palsy is mental retardation", this is new knowledge for me.
If the heroine's aphasia is intuitive, the hero seems to have very good language skills, a lot of times I can't be sure if he is really mentally handicapped, because at least in reality, I know a lot of people just because of the candor And frank, just because they are unwilling to act according to the set of rules that everyone lives, they are regarded as weird people, and even considered to have some mental illness. From the mouth of the male protagonist's younger brother, we know that it is his own idea to take the blame for his brother. This can be regarded as a weird move, because it goes against the self-interested tendency of human nature, which is suspected by people of his low IQ. good reason. Of course, family members do not need to understand the reasons behind this behavior, because the effect of this discourse is in their interests. Regarding the relationship between the male protagonist's words and thinking, the family determined that there was an intellectual defect and a mental illness that caused distortions, so although the male protagonist could speak, he was not believed.
When the male protagonist brought the female protagonist to his mother's birthday party and casually told everyone that it was his brother who killed the family's daughter in a car accident, his unconcerned reaction made everyone's surprise and anger to the extreme, as if he just brought an unrelated person. How can he push the whole family into the abyss of guilt on a happy family day without expressing such malice in words, which is beyond his family's understanding. His brother, who was the real perpetrator of the car accident, was undoubtedly the most disturbing one, because the hero not only helped him to blame, but also replaced him with guilt, which is a maddening transgression. In fact, the male protagonist should not have any guilt, but his brother, who should not only feel guilty for the family who was involved in the car accident, but also feel guilty for the male protagonist who took the initiative to take the blame. According to a normal person's thinking mode, the male protagonist should show emotions such as anger, pain, grievance, etc. However, he instead sympathizes with other people's victims, and his words cannot show any attitude towards the matter of injustice and guilt. In order to get rid of this guilt, it is obviously the most convenient way to judge the male protagonist as an immature child with a low IQ. Only the younger brother, who still had the hope of understanding, even though he could not understand it at all, asked the words that would not have an answer: '솔직히말해봐, 지금무슨생각하고있어? (To be honest, what are you thinking about?)' In fact, he has already said what the male protagonist is thinking, but both the elder brother and the younger brother firmly believe that there are still some things that have not been said. The fact that the Lord is mentally retarded to eliminate his guilt, on the other hand, carries the conspiracy theory that the male protagonist pretends to be stupid and seeks revenge, and lives in a persistent uneasy conscience.
At the climax of the story, the hero and heroine's overt aphasia and invisible aphasia finally converge, they can't tell everyone the fact that they are in love, and can't make this love recognized by everyone. For everyone, if they can't love each other, they still have hope of living. For them, the tragedy of love is equal to the tragedy of life. One is imprisoned again, and the other loses hope of life.
When I saw someone in the comments asking why the heroine didn't explain that she wasn't raped, I wonder if he doubled down and skipped so many paragraphs that he just understood the complete opposite of the plot. What Li Cangdong shows is just the opposite. What we see is how the heroine desperately wants to express herself and tell the truth, how hard her reason is trying to break through that twisted body and be understood. Her anxiety has made her fall into a vicious circle of not being understood. Since her relatives have long since given up understanding her from specific words, but from body language, the more she tries to speak, the more restless she is in her body. Being understood by her sister-in-law as PTSD after rape, and self-righteously helping her tell the truth she thinks, the heroine will be even more anxious, like someone who has been gagged. The situation becomes: the more you want to speak, the more you are seen as unable to speak, and the more you cannot speak, the more you want to speak. After expressing hopelessness, the heroine threw her body against the table and cabinet, tried to commit suicide, or expressed her denial of the status quo in this way. However, even such an attempt would be understood as being unbearable to be raped. The shame that followed, so she was even deprived of justification for choosing to die. What a profound despair.
Why didn't the heroine explain it? The answer is also obvious. As long as he wants to defend himself, he is in a free relationship with the girl with cerebral palsy, and the girl actively wants to have sex with him, and people will treat him as a fool even more, especially if he has a previous record of rape. The most dangerous thing a fool can do is to claim that he is not a fool. The hero seems to have realized this long ago, so he did not make any excuses. His escape was just to make a phone call with the girl, to reconfirm her existence in the broken voice signifier, to help her cut down branches, and to eliminate the shadows on the oasis. His clear awareness of the need for justification seems to indicate that his intelligence may be beyond ordinary people.
Some people say that such love is impossible, and I will argue that if human beings are a species born with disabilities, then such love will only be the only possible love in the world. It uses an exclusive language, the oasis language of the oasis country, which does not require understanding from others, only mutual understanding. However, just as the disabled are a minority, the oases are also those that are dying. They are constantly eroding, shrinking, and disappearing. One day, there will be no oasis in this world, and there will be no more love for a few people.
The oasis is relative to the desert, where everyone understands everyone, or at least everyone tries to understand everyone. Only when there is no difference between an oasis and a desert can we admit that there is no difference in every kind of love. But is such a world an oasis of indifference or a desert of indifference? I have to express this reality in a pessimistic tone: we seem to be a little closer to the latter.
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