“Give you a new backpack, but this time, I want you to fill it with people. Starting from general friendship, to friends of friends, to Colleagues in the company, to those who you trust and are willing to share your inner secrets with them, your cousins, your aunts and aunts, your uncles and uncles, your brothers, your sisters, your parents. Finally it’s you Your husband, your wife, your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, you have to put them all in that backpack. Feel the weight of that backpack. Yes, your interpersonal relationship is the most important thing in your life. But the slower we move, the faster we die. We are not swans, we are sharks.”
Please forgive me for extracting the above two lines to make up the word count, but I still insist on doing this because the movie is about It was developed based on this "knapsack theory", and this theory also embodies the life philosophy of the protagonist Ryan: subtraction. To sum up his way of practicing this philosophy of life in two words, it would be "refusal." In his career, he worked for the dismissal of the company, helped some cowardly bosses fire employees, and helped others "reject". And in life, he also keeps doing subtractions to escape all constraints, which is mainly reflected in the three aspects of work, love and family affection.
At work, he is extremely resistant to cooperating with others (natalie, female assistant). When the company proposed an Internet dismissal plan, he strongly opposed it because he would not be able to "travel around the world" and would be bored in the office typing on the keyboard, and he hated stopping.
When it comes to love, he is a staunch non-marriageist. The eldest is not too young, and he has no idea of "finding someone to spend the rest of his life with" or "raising children to guard against old age". He believes that "the so-called understanding of true love changes over time." When he met the tempting female Alex in Wichita, he just maintained an unstable relationship with his sexual partner, and did not think about the future in the slightest.
In terms of family affection, he spends 300+ days "in the cloud" a year. In his dictionary, the interpretation of the word "family" is different from common sense. There are only circulating air, artificial lighting, fully automatic juice machines, cheap sushi, and a cookie-cutter ritual greeting: the airport. The traditional family is a burden for him. He doesn’t even care about his sister’s marriage (not even knowing the exact time of his sister’s wedding). The big wedding card sent to him by his sister ( Relative to backpacks) is also so out of place. He is like an extremely individualistic hermit who wants to cut off the bond with everyone.
He is so casual, unrestrained, with a bit of humor, like a wanderer full of literary style, despising all secular rules. Of course, this does not mean that he has given up all the "eternity", he has a goal: to collect 10 million miles. However, as his relationship with Alex heated up, his unrulyness was finally lost to his inner attachment, which made him begin to reflect on the meaning of marriage (in the persuasion of the brother-in-law of stage fright in the wedding, he created himself Inspired). This is a major turning point for the film. What exactly is marriage? It means that both parties buy a house and live together, and there will be one or two children, and then Christmas, Thanksgiving, Spring Break... Participate in the children's ball game, and in a blink of an eye they are about to graduate, and then the children find a job and get married. Then retire, lose hair, get fat, and finally die. Everything is a process of death, so what's the point? It doesn't make sense, but this is marriage. In life's most precious memories, important moments, are you willing to be alone? Everyone needs a "co-pilot".
In the end, he gave up the opportunity to speak his "knapsack philosophy" at GoalQuest, and he finally abandoned this "subtraction philosophy". He ran to Chicago, where Alex lived, to find his eternal love. To his astonishment, she was actually a married woman who had been doing "rejection" and finally got the courage to "accept" Ryan. On the road of love-marriage, she was finally rejected. The other party only rejected him. As a flavoring agent outside of life.
He began to understand that those "burdens" were stability. Perhaps we have all shouted the classic lines in "Guessing the Train": "Choose life, choose work, choose occupation, choose family, choose nasty big color TV, choose washing machine, car, laser disc player, choose health, low cholesterol and Dental insurance, choose a mortgage, choose your friends, choose suits, casual clothes and luggage, choose installments and three-piece suits, choose to watch boring game shows, watch and eat snacks...too many choices, what do you choose, I chose not to choose.” In the end, the secondary illness subsided, and we still “choose life, work, occupation, family...choose the future, choose life.” From being radical to overthrow everything to being conservative in acceptance, this is the choice of life.
However, destiny seemed to make a huge joke with him. Frustrated in love, Natalie, the female assistant, left the company because she couldn't stand the blame of her conscience at work (a member she had fired committed suicide because she couldn't stand it). The network dismissal plan failed, and he began a journey of "traveling all over the world" again. Life has returned to the past, producing a strong ironic effect. When he collected 10 million miles, the captain met him and asked him, "Where are you from?" Ryan replied, "I belong here."
Like the movie, I quoted the protagonist’s inner monologue as the ending:
"People go home tonight, and they are greeted by cheering puppies and children. Their lovers will hush cold and warm and sleep peacefully. The night falls, the stars are moving, and there is a beam of light. It's dazzling, it's a trace of my wing."
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