About Life on Mars, I don't want to talk about the relationship between dreams and reality, I don't want to engage in a Freudian mental analysis. I just want to talk about the final outcome, to be precise, Sam's suicide. Psychiatry attributes suicide to psychosis, but that doesn't actually solve the problem of suicide, because it doesn't point out why the psychopath is.
Suicide, whether in the East or the West, is generally regarded as psychological depression, negative world-weariness, and even anti-social behavior.
The premise of considering suicide as a sin is that life has meaning, so the act of ending one's life is the destruction of meaning, so suicide is evil. But the question is, is life meaningful? If so, what is the basis for it? It was the question of the meaning of life that Sam faced in 1973. In Kierkegaard's words:
"A man sticks a finger into the soil and smells it to know where he is. So I stick a finger in the world - and I smell nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How did I get here? Here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who lured me into this world? Why didn’t anyone give me advice?… I was kidnapped and bought by a heart thief and thrown into the world How did I get a stake in this big company they call reality? Why should I get a stake? Isn't this a voluntary company? Where would I be if I was forced? … Who complained?"
And when Sam woke up in 2006, those problems didn't go away with 1973, they actually got worse. If Sam didn't find meaning in life in 1973, will he find it in 2006? In other words, do we viewers know the meaning of our life when we watch Sam in search of meaning?
Life on Mars does not give a direct answer, but pushes the thinking of the question directly to the audience. I think that's where LOM goes beyond the average TV series. The end of the show might really feel uncomfortable and overwhelmed, but it forces the audience to think anyway. But in the episode, the black bartender Nelson once told Sam: When you can feel, then you're alive. When you don't, you're not. Whether life is meaningful depends on whether you feel meaningful, Do you feel alive.
Well, in this case, if a person feels that his life is meaningless, then he has the right to decide whether to continue living or to die. Apparently, when Sam wakes up, he thinks his life in 2006 is meaningless (his meaning is in 1973, at least it seems), and the tone and imagery reinforce this.
Mark Oller said in "Meditations" that we cannot deny people's demand for the meaning of the world because of the emptiness of the world, otherwise we must affirm that life in the world itself is illusory, and absolute values outside the world cannot be at all. Penetrate into this world. In other words, once we have affirmed the nothingness of the world, then we must affirm that the requirement to give up life is justified. Because absolute meaning is only outside the present world, and in order to gain meaning, there is only one way of liberation.
And what Sam faced after waking up was the meaninglessness of life and the emptiness of the world. In this case, instead of living in emptiness, it was better to choose suicide. Since life has no meaning, then actively chosen death has meaning. Even this death is meaningless, but it is at least a means by which man can impose meaning on the world.
There's a lot of psychoanalysis in Life on Mars, and in a way, it's natural to think of Sam as a lunatic. But like I said at the beginning, that doesn't solve the question of why he's going crazy. As far as I'm concerned, I don't think Sam was mad in his 1973 dream, what really drove him mad was when he woke up to the nothingness of the world in 2006 (perhaps when his finger was cut but without feeling). But on the other hand, this is not madness, but a desperate revolt of a weak human being against a world of nothingness.
If the world is meaningless, then in a meaningless universe, life is just a game in which people play different roles. Once a person feels the game is too hard, he has the right to withdraw.
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