The film presents the following characteristics of violence:
1) Simple and straightforward. Using violence is often the easiest solution to a problem. For example, in the face of campus bullying and underworld threats, it is much simpler and more effective to fight back directly than to use legal weapons. Natural inertia makes humans tend to choose the simplest solution, but the simplest may not be the best.
2) Addiction. The male protagonist once "kill people for joy". This shows that violence was once a kind of enjoyment for him, and he once indulged in the joy brought by violence. Once you get used to the thrill of being overwhelmed by hormones, you abandon your rational conscience and become a beast, permanently or temporarily.
3) Will cause physical harm to oneself or others. This is the inevitable consequence of violence. Even if he is as strong as the male protagonist Tom, he will be injured in the process of using violence, and being shot in the chest is almost fatal, not to mention the underworld thugs who died under the male protagonist.
4) There will be long-lasting and unavoidable objective consequences. The male protagonist has used so much violence in Philadelphia, and these criminal records and gang grievances will not disappear with subjective will. If the criminal record is confirmed by the police, he will face jail time, while the gang grievances threaten the safety of his family and himself. Although the male protagonist "spent three years killing his past self", those objective consequences cannot be eliminated.
5) Contagious. The male protagonist's behavior (holding up a shotgun to defend the family) and education (hitting his son) implied violence, so his son Jack finally chose to use violence to control violence under school bullying, that is, he was infected with violence.
6) inevitable and permanent. As long as people can't completely suppress the animal side, they can't completely eliminate violence. Moreover, those who are reluctant to use violence need to learn violence in order to protect themselves. More broadly, violence doesn't have to be bloody. Exploitation, consumption traps, fraud, and PUA are all bullying, so they are all violence, and they are all caused by the selfish nature of human beings.
Similarity between violence and sex: Sex, as another human instinct, also has the properties 1-6 above.
Who has the right to use violence? The problem was seen in the salon after the film, and the first reaction was law enforcement. But the law enforcement agencies, the state itself, is the greatest violence. The state uses such a machine of violence to confine the violence of underlying institutions and individuals within its defined boundaries. Moreover, the establishment and survival of regimes themselves depend on violence. Therefore, the state is only one layer of the pyramid of violence, and it has no right to use violence. However, maintaining social order and punishing order breakers is beneficial to the state, so the state uses violent institutions to maintain order and punish criminals. The power to exercise violence is conferred upon itself by the state. If there is a God, I don't think it gives any human or animal the right to violence. But there is no god in the world, only eternal conflicts and disputes, in order to survive, animals have to resort to violence.
Other feelings: 1) Bloody scenes. The murder scene in the movie is completely uncoded... Directly shoot the scene where the body is soaked in ketchup. It is said that this is the style of the director Cronenberg, that is, the violence is presented unabashedly. 2) Straightforward description. The narrative method of the film is relatively straightforward, except for the beginning, it is narrated in sequence. I think the purpose is also to be explicit about violence. 3) After watching the movie, I didn't feel particularly deeply touched... Maybe it just didn't hit me. So the movie I watched on November 6 was delayed until today to finish writing the movie review. I heard that Cronenberg's "The Fly" is also very good, and I will check it out next time. ——November 10 in the dormitory.
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