In this kind of life, you will lose everything you love and everything you love.
My hearing is not as good as before, and I am forgetful, and I will never be as handsome as before.
But, fuck, I'm still standing here, I'm still that "sledgehammer".
- Video lines
a
To some extent, this is a wrestling boxing movie, but it completely subverts the foundation piece of boxing. The essence of boxing movies lies in the extreme performance of struggle, but this movie is about failure, doomed failure, this desperate and irreversible process.
But this is definitely not a sad story. Sadness is a mental massage that makes pain disappear invisible. This movie uses pain to refresh your mind.
There is physical pain in it, and the so-called glory is obtained by enduring the torture of one's own flesh in a variety of ways. There is mental pain in it. The so-called happiness is buried by myself. There is still philosophical pain in this. The so-called meaning is vain, but our dignity ultimately requires it to feed.
Director Aron Aronofsky has this ability. The story is simple and clear, but it injects fresh vitality into a stale subject; the language of the film is simple and crude, but it is clunky and powerfully inserted into the depths of life.
Second, the
film is cold, and we can't see brightly colored characters in it. The protagonist Randy has a heart attack, and he can no longer be on the wrestling ring; Casey is a stripper, but she has difficulty getting pampered by customers as she grows older; Randy usually works in the supermarket, where he buys groceries. It is an old lady who looks withdrawn, or a middle-aged man who is fat, swollen and listless; as for the supermarket supervisor Randy works, he is just a poor worm hiding in the surveillance room watching pornographic videos.
The director is extremely precise in creating the atmosphere: there are no winners. In the gray world of the film, there are only the losers who are in the gray world. Their numb eyes and long-term patience make them think that this is all of life.
Randy seemed to be different at first. He accepted the cheers from the audience on stage, but when he returned to reality, this illusion was immediately broken: after the game, he could only get a few photos from the organizer. Banknotes, returned to his trailer house, but was refused entry because he did not pay the rent.
But his real tragedy does not lie in this. His real tragedy lies in that he only has those applause. Apart from that, he has nothing. He has no friends, no love, and no relatives. Now, time has also abandoned him. After 20 years of overloading, his heart is no longer strong and obedient, and his most loyal body has abandoned him.
What he can do if he can no longer play in the ring is to greet the neighbor’s child and invite him to play games, but the child quickly leaves because the game is too old and outdated like Randy, as he said. , He is like a piece of meat that is about to go bad, no one pays attention to it.
Third, the
other thing he can do is to watch the dancing. The love between him and the dancer Casey is his only emotional sustenance. It can be said that the scene of Randy and Casey in the tavern is one of the most moving love scenes we have seen in 2008. They twisted their bodies to the music, recalled their beautiful bodies in the 80s, cursed the nasty 90s, and then kissed, but they were pushed away by Casey.
They are too sophisticated, they know everything they are about to face, and their understanding of the world buried her courage. So, Casey left.
The reason for Casey's refusal is that she will not have emotional entanglements with customers. When a person is at a loss, dignity is his last straw.
Kasidi’s words reminded me of many third-level actresses’ answers when they explained why they made porn: it’s for art. They know that they are talking nonsense, but they have to say that, not only for others, but for themselves, without this, they have to face the most naked ugliness in their lives.
The process of repairing the relationship between Randy and his daughter and finally breaking down can be called a textbook of human character. The tears of regret he shed to his daughter at the beach are true, and the tenderness he and his daughter danced in the empty warehouse is also true, but because of Cessetti’s refusal, he reappears and is with that lustful woman. Sex in the toilet is also real. This is probably the greatest sorrow in human nature. We clearly know the cause of the matter, but we cannot control our behavior. In the end, we are defeated by ourselves.
Four
have to say that Aaron Aronofsky has an engineer-like precise thinking. He shows the audience one by one the path that Randy may get redemption, and then blocks them one by one.
The logic of life forced Randy to be a wrestler again. Only on the stage, only in the beastly howling of the audience when he knocked down his opponent, did he feel his existence as a person again. Director Aron Aronofsky’s cruelest part is also here. He completely dispels the meaning of wrestling. In this movie, the fierce ripping on stage is not a real duel, but just a performance. This is actually a devastating blow to the boxing wrestling movie, it makes Victory just a show, a carefully packaged fake. Randy never won, he was just performing victory.
But it is this setting that gives the movie a deeper taste of life. We saw that the two attacked each other with folding stools and fell firmly to the ground; while the audience was not paying attention, they used glass to cut their foreheads to make the effect of being beaten more real and horrible; even to make the people who came to buy tickets The audience felt refreshed, and they creatively used the stapler as a weapon to nail the staples into the body one by one. Although this is false, when they trample on their own bodies in exchange for wages and dignity, it has a sense of classical tragedy. Because it is like a model of human life: to live hard in this world and live for others to see. There is a scene in the
fifth
film: When Randy knocked his opponent off the stage and prepared to slam the opponent with a folding stool, a disabled wheelchair man screamed excitedly and handed Randy his prosthesis to Randy. Beat each other with this.
This is the most symbolic scene in the film: the physical disability is compensated in the physical sparring of giant towers, just like we find the perfect life through the film. Unlike the movie, when the machine stopped spinning and the lights suddenly lit up, we knew that the past two hours was just a fantasy. Here, only the performer knows that this is actually just a copy of the movie. Behind Zhang is an elaborate design and almost messy performance, but the performer is also anesthetized by this orgasm, and he seems to have gained dignity.
At the end of the film, Randy stood on the wrestling stage. His old and weak heart made his actions on the stage seem sluggish. The pain and dizziness made him almost fall down. To the rope on the guardrail, he performed his "smashing and crushing" for the last time... Then at the last moment of his life, he enjoyed the cheers of the audience for their bloody performance.
He knew that these applauses were so illusory, but he also knew that this was the only thing he had.
This moment is so tragic, because it seems so empty.
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