On the other hand, the author has only watched "Cloud Map" once so far. I can confidently say that I have read this movie again and again without any doubts. Every clue, connection between stories, plot and details are deeply memorable. . This is not because I am very clever, but because I am very familiar with the theme and narrative of "Cloud Atlas". It realizes what we like to do but have never been able to do. This makes the viewing process. Feeling sorrowful and joyful.
Regrettably, the current mainstream film critics praised or criticized "Yuntu", but most of them focused on the narrative method of its six clues, and there are no shortage of criticisms of "Yuntu" for its ostentatious skills and pretentiousness. This is precisely deceived by appearance and deviates from the idea that "Yuntu" is trying to explain. Whether it is praise or derogation, it has a strong sense of buying a pearl and returning a pearl. In fact, "Cloud Atlas" is a commercial film with profound political metaphors and the theme of oppression and resistance (or "liberation"). Ignoring this central idea, it is inevitable to not know the true face of Lushan Mountain. In order to illustrate this point, we can first compare some similar movies familiar to Chinese people, such as "Let the Bullets Fly". But a better analogy is the film by the Wachowski brothers, the director of "Cloud Atlas," uh, the Wachowski brothers and sisters.
In the ideological lineage, the Wachowski brothers and sisters are talented directors with strong European and American left (different from the left in developing countries), liberalism, and populism. Their famous work "The Matrix" trilogy or "V for Vendetta", both used "liberation" as the theme. Realizing this, when recalling "Cloud Atlas", you should be able to find a sense of deja vu in addition to the performance techniques. So here is a review of "The Matrix" and "V for Vendetta" and
"The Matrix" trilogy has countless highlights, so I will put them aside for the time being. What I want to talk about here are their two obvious focal points in the field of ideology, one is the fear and resistance to "alienation", and the other is the persistence and pursuit of "liberation."
The first focus: "Alienation", with the vigorous development of industrial civilization and capitalism, has become a problem elaborated by most left-wing thinkers, especially the Marxist school. The industrial civilization under the capitalist system has increasingly alienated workers from the role of creator to become a vassal of large industrial machines. Humans do not dominate machines to create happiness for themselves, but exhaust their lives to serve machines, and they must obey mechanization. Order to create infinite wealth for a few people.
The disintegration of human subjectivity and the resulting sense of fear hovered in the hearts of literary and art workers, allowing them to develop various film and television works that exaggerated the fear of "alienation". In the movie "Iron Man", the protagonist is infected by a metal ghost and gradually becomes a metal monster, which embodies the "alienation" panic of the pre-industrial era. The "alienation" panic in the electronic age is even worse. For example, "Ghost in the shell" (Ghost in the shell) has assumed that humans abandon the body in order to explore the true nature of the self and the soul. In contrast, "The Matrix" is the most thorough, allowing humans to directly turn into AI batteries, and linger as artificial intelligence food.
The second focus": "Liberty" (or winning freedom) can be said to be the "theme" of the entire "The Matrix" trilogy, and the best performance among them is the second pre-transmission painting "Youth Story" "And "World Records." They describe that even in the stable life of a slave, slavery still brings a strong sense of illusion and unreality to people, constraining people within a delineated boundary. The opportunity to break through this kind of enslavement and bondage must be fought by name, only once in a lifetime, but it can still make people forget their lives. Such a story illustrates the nature of human resistance to slavery, not just material poverty or labor hardship, but the spiritual pain caused by being enslaved and "alienated". At the same time, it praises human beings for their courage and unwillingness in pursuing their own spiritual subjectivity. .
Wachowski’s another "V for Vendetta" is obviously a movie with the theme of "revolution". The protagonist is rebelling against a far-right "Big Brother" dictatorship, racial oppression, driving out immigrants, religious suppression, killing homosexuals, ideological monopoly, and so on. The theme of the film is placed on the path of "revolution": V has been working hard to spread ideas, using heroic dedication (terrorist activities) to awaken the people and inspire the courage to resist tyranny. Obviously, this kind of thinking is a bit close to the criticized "Popular Opinion Party" in the history of the Russian Revolution (heroic historical view, terrorism, not focusing on solid mass work), reflecting the populist concept of Sister Chovosky. But the movie itself still shows moving ideals and heroic feelings.
"Cloud Atlas" is another masterpiece with the theme of "oppression and resistance" by the brothers and sisters of Chovosky. It has a certain connection with "The Matrix" or "V for Vendetta". The scripted novel version of "Cloud Atlas" is also exactly what Natalie Portman gave the director to see during the filming of "V for Vendetta". The six stories in "Cloud Atlas" actually talk about six themes about "oppression" and six themes about "liberation".
The "oppression" theme of the first story "Adam Ewing's Pacific Diary" is actually the racial oppression of black slaves. The main line of the story is packaged as the protagonist escaped the greedy doctor femme fatale.
In the plot, when the wealthy, noble and "civilized" white people forced the black slaves to do heavy labor under the scorching sun, they never paid attention to the hardship of blacks and the cruelty of violence and persecution. Instead, they believed that the "species" of blacks was stronger. Heat resistance. This scene is reminiscent of "Django unchained," in which the slave owner Cavin lamented that blacks can withstand whiplashes and that the brains are more tamed than any race.
This racist thinking of "alienating" human beings into alien species is the classic self-defense of the Western exploiting rulers when they kill and enslaved them. It uses rational paradigm to cover up the cruelty and shamelessness of the heart. The male protagonist Adam Ewing was originally a member of the white slave-owner family. He was also used to enslaving blacks, but he was rather unbearable because of the kindness in his heart. He sheltered the black slaves who trusted him because of a pitiful look.
The following story illustrates the point that wealthy, noble, and elegant whites can be as dirty and poisonous as snakes in their hearts, while filthy and vulgar blacks on the outside save the protagonist with kind and noble friendship. The kindness of Adam Ewing's nature initially only made him feel a little intolerable in the face of slavery, but his subsequent experience has led to this intolerance to grow into a determination to fight, "I owe this self-liberated slave a life, and my conscience made me no longer able to bear it. Participate in such trade". So he left the family with his wife and devoted himself to the abolitionist movement.
This reflects one of the themes of "liberation", breaking with the exploiting and oppressive class to which one belongs in order to save others. Like Marx and Engels until Zhou Enlai, this is the first step taken by many wealthy-born revolutionaries on this road. Many movies also use the same theme as the core, and have a larger space to express. Here are some great works recommended to readers: the outstanding "Avatar", the classic "Blade Runner", "The Ninth District", "Prison Room 211", "Repoman" (Repoman, also translated as a reborn man).
The second story "Letter from Hidheim" tells the theme of "oppression" is the discrimination and oppression of homosexuality. On the surface, it is the story of a genius musical teenager who was stolen by an old musician and forced to commit suicide.
Although the whole story revolves around the talented male protagonist Frobisher, the focus is on the creation of "Cloud Atlas Sixt", but it is easy for the audience to ignore another consistent factor: the reason why Frobisher escaped from the Conservatory Because his homosexual behavior is not tolerated by society. And this kind of discrimination also caused the whole society to ignore Frobisher's talents, which forced him to stay away from his lover and go to an old composer to beat him, in order to find other ways to realize his ambition. Not knowing a person because of "homosexuality", discriminates against him, ignores his strengths, and magnifies his shortcomings—this is the same as racism, caste discrimination, ethnic discrimination, national discrimination, cultural discrimination, class discrimination, and gender discrimination. There are common roots. Many literary and artistic workers also try to express a similar sense of oppression in different fields, such as Jean Valjean who just got out of prison and can't find a job and steals in "Les Miserables", such as the belfry monster in "Notre Dame de Paris", such as "The Opera" The ghost in "The Phantom". People who have suffered such unfair treatment can easily feel the despair of the whole world being an enemy of themselves.
Later, the old composer’s threat to Frobisher was precisely taking advantage of his homosexuality. In other words, the old composer did not use his own power to coerce Frobisher, but relied on the whole society to discriminate against homosexuality to persecute Frobisher. Frobisher wanted his talent to be his own, otherwise he would discredit him in the music industry.
It may not be easy for the audience to understand why Frobisher chose to commit suicide to avoid the lover who came after him, but this suicide was described by Frobisher in the opening film as a kind of great courage. In fact, Frobisher chose not "suicide", but another theme of "liberation", "no compromise".
What he faced was the discrimination and oppression of homosexuality by the whole society and Christian orthodoxy (deemed as mental illness, as fornication, and excessive arrest and massacre by the extremes), whether it was forcing him to escape from the window or forcing him to give up himself His masterpieces, or the clothes made for him by cheating his lover, are just the tip of the iceberg of this entire discriminatory system, and he has nowhere to go step by step.
An incomprehensible alien like Frobisher, if they want to survive, they must hide their true temperament, pretend to be another person, betray their talents, and only succumb to the social order that cannot tolerate his true self. Not everyone can tolerate this feeling. Just like Zheng Yuanjie's fairy tale "How to Train the Rabbit", when the whole society asked Pipiru to become a rabbit like other "good students", Pipiru finally secretly put on a rabbit costume in exchange for the happiness of his relatives and teachers. He felt scared from his bones when he thought that he would live in costumes for the rest of his life.
In the face of such a challenge, Frobisher chose to "never compromise". Suicide was only a way to achieve this determination, so he was full of courage. Remember Rorschach in "Watchmen"? Even if the film fictionalizes a bloody utopian scene where millions of people are killed and the world is saved, Rorschach cannot abandon his inner sense of justice. The belief that the phrase "never compromise" represents must also be realized with his own ashes. .
In the third story, "Half-Life: Louis Sarre’s First Mystery", it is rare to mention that giant monopoly capital, for its own profit, does not hesitate to make business decisions that harm the core interests of the people, and treats human life as a waste when suppressing opponents. . In the subjective world of capital, people are like plants or mines, they are only the objects of profit, not the objects of service. As individuals, they may have emotions, anger, sorrow, and joy, but the logic of their behavior has long been determined by the logic of capital itself.
This story about nuclear power in the movie makes it easy for us to think of some practical problems, such as nuclear leakage disaster, Minamata disease, defoliants used for weeding, genetically modified crops with toxic proteins, abuse of food additives, and so on. Of course, it needs to be mentioned that the use of "nuclear power" as the theme also reflects the current pan-leftist de-industrial mentality of developed countries. It is slightly different from the leftist of developing countries, and it is easy to cause various non-professional disputes. But from the perspective of opposing big monopoly capital, they are indeed united. These are also common problems in left-wing discourse in developed countries and do not need to be developed here. Instead, I recommend several good movies with similar themes: "The Forever Gardener", "Multinational Bank", "The Jury Out of Control".
From the clue of "liberation", I think the theme of this story is "strong." The protagonist of this story is a woman, and unlike other stories, it is chased and killed by Hugo Weiwen (this guy who is the villain without a mask) from beginning to end. The protagonists have encountered one setback after another. Although they were afraid and afraid, they did not shrink back.
The core theme of the fourth story "The Tribulation of Timothy Cavendish" is naturally the most exciting sentence in the whole play: "I'll not be subjected to criminal abuse" (I will never surrender For violent abuse). It has also become the spiritual pillar and creed of later generations like Xingmei and other rebels. Although the story itself is about the misery of an old man, the process is full of humiliation, and it is not as solemn and mighty as the later movie.
Although this story has a funny plot and a bit of black humor, it also expresses a serious theme. And interspersed with the plot of the interrogation of Xingmei, repeatedly paying tribute to Solzhenitsyn. The struggle of the elderly in nursing homes actually tried to elaborate on the question of "liberation": how do the weak resist the strong and resist oppression?
So Timothy, who was locked up in the nursing home, wrote swiftly, "Unlike Solzhenitsyn, I am not alone." Several elderly people whose physical and intellectual abilities were as weak as their skin, got together for the same goal and staged a "prison escape" in the style of "Escape from Sobibor". They were struggling and could not restrain the chickens, but they cleverly defeated the vicious nursing home managers. They have no weapons in their hands. "Unity" is their only weapon.
In the sixth story "Thinking at the Crossroads and Beyond", besides the main line of escaping from the cannibal tribe and launching the communication device, there are three themes.
The first theme is the fall of human civilization. I haven't read the "Cloud Atlas" novel, but I can say with certainty that the movie describes the end of human civilization caused by the rise of sea levels after global warming. This is a disaster that even those with high-tech humans cannot solve. They are forced to all Can only give up the homeland. This is one of the topics that pan-leftists are particularly keen on.
The second theme revolves around the struggle with the "heart demon", and this "heart demon" is selfish and cowardly. After the protagonist played by Tom Hanks, his courage to defend others finally defeated selfishness and cowardice, he stepped up to fight against the cannibal tribe and won a new future for himself and the stars.
The author believes that there is a third theme, and this is the most important point in this story: Tom Hanks’s tribe worships Xingmei and regards her as a god; and Xingmei in history is just a multitude of clones. One of them, and died hundreds of years ago. This in itself constitutes a huge irony, but it also contains the most precious truth.
The reason why it is said to be ironic is that Xingmei stood up as the most humble copy and sacrificed with his comrades in order to wake up countless people to fight on their own. And hundreds of years later, the oppressed people gave up the struggle on their own, but regarded Xingmei who wished to awaken them as gods, and asked Xingmei to guard them.
In the end, Xingmei did not help the tribe escape the invasion of the cannibal tribe. It was the cowardly protagonist who changed the tragic fate finally gained courage in anger, stepped forward to fight the cannibal tribe, and rescued them instead. On the contrary, this great irony has brought out the truth that there is no savior, nor the emperor of the immortals. To obtain happiness, we all depend on ourselves.
The fifth story "The Recorder of Xingmei 451" should be said to be the climax of "Yuntu Sixtet", before it is the prologue and foreshadowing, and then it turns to calm and the next cycle. The scene of this story is the most exciting, the plot is the most shocking, and the amount of thoughts conveyed is the largest.
First of all, it’s interesting that SMI 451’s recorder tells the duality of "Brave New World" (Song Ji Restaurant) with both capitalism and bureaucratic socialism "1984" (Interrogator, Ministry of Unification). Dystopian story. At the same time, it shows the cruel persecution of human nature by capitalism and bureaucratic totalitarian rule. The "Unification Ministry" in the story is obviously like the "Ministry of Truth" in "1984" using violence and book burning to suppress people's thoughts, while on the other hand, the gorgeous "Song Ji Restaurant" is using capitalist personal achievement dreams to deceive Star beauty, used to hide facts that are more cruel than violence.
In this story, the most shocking scene is the scene of the truth about "Paradise". The mass-produced "Star Beauty" were slaughtered like livestock, and they were hung up and disinfected and washed like livestock... After several processes, they were reorganized into food recycling. This scene is also the one I most appreciate and look forward to in the whole movie. It gave birth to a determination to completely revolutionize.
This is one of the most critical metaphors in the whole drama, which strongly criticizes the cruelest logic of exploitation: taking the wealth created by the laborers as one's own, and then feeding the laborers with their own flesh and blood. There are countless examples of this phenomenon in life. For example, the older generation of state-owned enterprise workers spent a lifetime of hard work and then used their life savings to buy houses for their children. However, the work of children has created the greatest economic prosperity, but they cannot get the most basic security of life. And to nurture the next generation, we must rely on "recycling" the flesh and blood of this generation in the future, just like treating their parents.
In European and American commercial films, this level of criticism is usually expressed in political metaphors under the packaging of commercial films. One of the best political metaphors in the recent past should be the trading unit that replaced currency in the movie "in time", the amount of "time" left in each person's life. In order to allow a few people to earn more than one million years of immortality and wealth, the capital order deprived workers of all the lives created by laborers through taxation, inflation, and commodity monopolies, leaving the vast majority of laborers at 25 years of life.
This scene borrows the truth from the beauty of stars and the "paradise" to provide another shocking expression for the "alienation" of mankind by industrial civilization under the dominance of capitalism, which is comparable to the first time that human batteries appear in "The Matrix". The impact brought by the giant tower of the womb.
This story also explores the meaning of "justice" in the light of whether "clones" should have freedom and dignity. Europeans and Americans will be more familiar with such topics. In history, when white people purged heathens, enslaved black slaves, and slaughtered Indians, they always used various forms of "rational" justification: interpreting the oppressed as aliens, machines, gangsters, demons, fools, etc.-Jane In short, they are not worthy of "freedom" and "dignity."
Some people try to refute these "understandings" in literary and artistic ways. The idea is to push the contradiction to the extreme, assuming that the object of oppression is not humans at all, but aliens, robots and other things, and then talk about it. The story makes everyone moved by their destiny. For example, the clone in "Cloud Atlas", the biochemical man in "Blade Runner", the robot boy in "AI", the robot in "I Robert", the 0/1 kingdom in "The Matrix", and even include Zerg in the latest expansion film "Heart of the Swarm" in "StarCraft 2".
When the audience went down with Xingmei’s emotions scene by scene and saw the clones entering the food processing line like cattle, most of the anger they felt was directly translated into Xingmei’s words: "The system that created them. We must be destroyed, we must fight, sacrifice, and use the truth to educate the people."
This involves the meaning of another topic of "liberation", using struggle to "awaken" more people.
I want to say that the appearance of this extremely cruel scene, on the contrary, reflects the Buddha nature in the mind of the original author of "Cloud Atlas". This is the so-called "equality of all beings." Kind-hearted people see all beings and everything as themselves, and they also take the initiative to empathize to experience the feelings of all beings and all things. People with this perception ability will have a stronger experience of the cruelty that humans have multiplied in the era of industrial civilization, such as indiscriminate logging, indiscriminate fishing, environmental pollution, industrial aquaculture, and so on.
The feelings of the slaughtered animals are actually the same as the humans themselves. But humans enslaved them in extremely cruel ways, and used various reasons to blind their conscience. For example, human beings are the noblest, all things are born to support people, such as animals are like machines, without emotion and soul, for example, it is reasonable to slaughter animals to satisfy themselves, etc.... There are many sayings, but all of them do not face this reality. : Human beings are very cruel when they harm others for their own benefit.
The excuses used are just like the excuses for slaughtering Indians, the excuses for enslaving blacks, and the excuses for exploiting workers and peasants; it's just that oppressed humans can defend and fight for themselves, but other oppressed creatures cannot. This makes artists who have Buddha's nature in their hearts have a strong desire for expression. In the fictitious world, they can make human beings change positions, become the object of oppression, and experience the feelings of the cruel methods of human beings' actions on human beings.
Anxiety about the cruelty of humans is especially manifested in the way of killing animals, air guns hit the heads. Those with strong psychological quality can try to find videos of cattle killing in industrial slaughterhouses online. Both "Killing City" and "Cloud Atlas" show this scene with strong visual impact. Another famous example is the movie "Old Nowhere"-in which the murderer also uses the butcher's air gun to kill people.
And this kind of expression is outstanding, is the Japanese manga "Killing City". This comic is bloody, violent and cruel, but the author himself may have this kind of Buddha nature of equality among all beings, so that he can show the cruelty of mankind straightforwardly. There is a passage where the protagonist and his party came to the assembly line of a factory in order to save the human beings captured by aliens. They found that countless people were killed as animals. Then they hooked their ankles with iron hooks and hung them naked on the assembly line. Next step processing. This scene is exactly the same as in "Cloud Atlas".
Due to the limited space of the six stories in "Cloud Atlas", the development and depth of each story is actually not comparable to other films or literary works of the same theme. Its biggest feature is that it combines the six stories to tell, which produces an effect that transcends a single story. At the same time, this is the biggest theme of "Cloud Atlas": to more fundamentally explore the origins of oppression and resistance, and integrate them into human beings. In the historical narrative of civilization.
The six stories tell about slavery, homosexual discrimination, capital monopoly, violent rule, imprisonment of thought, dream of success and so on... There are many different forms of "oppression". And the sentence that runs through is "Weak are meat, the strong do eat!"-Weak are meat, the strong do eat. It fully embodies the commonality of various evils of mankind: relying on one's own power to hurt and enslave other people for one's own benefit.
This kind of oppression is not only in the face of dictatorships or capital exploitation, but actually exists in all aspects of human civilization, and it has continued to be grandiose. Class, capital, culture, religion, tradition, gender, patriarchy, marriage... This is also the meaning of the term "liberation of all mankind" in the discourse of pan-leftist struggle. Refer to the revolutionary era of our ancestors. The scope of revolution is not only to bring down Japanese invaders or dictators, but also to liberate women, popularize education, reform patriarchal law, oppose exploitation, break superstition, and abolish unequal treaties...
It is describing "oppression". At the same time, "Cloud Atlas" also tries to show a "liberty" panorama. There are equal treatment of the oppressed, break with the exploiting classes, never compromise, be strong, united, wise, sacrifice, awaken others, overcome inner selfishness and cowardice, rely on courage to fight against powerful enemies, and so on.
And what are the integrated thoughts behind these narrative stories? I think this is the "struggle" itself. The protagonists of the good side in the six stories have some common characteristics, such as kindness. And this also makes them bullied by bad guys at the beginning of each story. In the end, they all went to struggle. Everyone used a suitable method to finally win a certain completion of their own story, and then the whole story came to an end in resonance across the age.
"To fight", this is probably the biggest message "Yuntu" tries to convey. This has already been expressed by the brothers and sisters of Chovosky, and the initial results have been achieved. The masses who occupy Wall Street have already put on the mask of V.
The movie's theme song "Yuntu Sixtet" is a cycle with beginning and end. This brings frustration to some pessimistic moviegoers. They thought of the cycle of human tragedies from this movie.
But the author thinks that this movie is actually going to convey another positive spirit, that is, although the wicked people continue from generation to generation, the fighting spirit of the good people can continue to be passed on. A novel, a letter, a movie, a sculpture or even a sentence-can be the driving force for future generations to fight for their own happiness.
"Cloud Atlas Sixt", also as a cycle of reincarnation, expresses the passion more like the excitement brought to people by the opening song of "The Lion King": "Circle of Life", endless. This kind of endless life is the spirit of the kind-hearted people who resolutely fight when facing evil, which is the phrase "I'll not be subjected to criminal abuse". This is the true theme of "Cloud Atlas".
The author believes that it is precisely to express this kind of "unending" inheritance relationship that the novels and films of "Cloud Atlas" create the narrative structure of sextet. Using six stories spanning hundreds of years to narrate alternately, different time and space overlap in the same emotional interlude, and the wonderful feeling to the readers just means inheritance and continuity.
Narrative techniques similar to multi-line parallelism have always been in literature, such as "Three Body" and "1Q84" that everyone should be familiar with. In the movie, Gerich's "Two Old Smokers", "Snatch" or Ning Hao's "Crazy Stone" and "Crazy Racing" have all made good demonstrations. It's just that the six clues like Yuntu unfold together and are highly synchronized, requiring more powerful driving ability and self-confidence.
The reason why the movie chose the same actors to play multiple roles is also intended to serve this theme. Similar techniques are used in many film and television themes. For example, at the end of "My Team Leader, My Team", the elderly Meng is bored and he seems to see the faces of his former comrades in the young people (played by the corresponding actors), which means that he is the same as his comrades. Young people do not need to go to the bloody battles, but can live a happy life, which gives a lofty meaning to the sacrifice of the martyrs.
In the final analysis, such a well-designed narrative structure is to highlight the central idea of the work. If you pay too much attention to the analysis of the narrative method and ignore the motivation behind it, it will inevitably be far from the original intention.
Finally, from an ideological point of view, the movie "Cloud Atlas" naturally has some unexplorable topics, which need to be added.
For example, the distinctive historical conception of good and evil replaces the larger historical narrative with the struggle between good and evil, with a strong sense of historical idealism, and many issues can be further debated.
Such as the obvious anti-industrial thinking. The decline of human civilization in the movie is actually not because of the struggle between good and evil, but it implies that human civilization "will not control its own greed and claim too much", which led to certain environmental disasters that caused large areas of land to be submerged below the water surface. There is a strong environmentalism color. If we continue to delve into this line of thinking, I am afraid that we will inevitably quarrel with technical people.
For example, as a writer, the author mainly emphasizes the power generated by the inheritance of words, language and ideas in the novel. In practice, there are other ways to pass on the spirit of struggle.
There is also the ultimate means of struggle in the story of Xingmei, and there is also a strong populist color. Can relying on the sacrifice of a few people awaken the struggle of the masses? This kind of romantic works, including "V for Vendetta", "Les Miserables", etc., have not made a deeper discussion on the issue of the right path.
Aside from the above, the baseline of "Cloud Atlas" is still a commercial film after all. A commercial movie that has gathered so many superstars can express a theme of oppression and resistance so magnificently and spread so widely. Compared with the few people who quarrel about being "more correct" than others, it is still more effective. The endless stream of oppression and resistance is, in the final analysis, the prelude to the liberation of all human beings and the progress of civilization. The uplifting melody of "Yuntu Sixtet" rather than eulogizing, or the ambition is just that.
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