There are only two metamorphoses on earth, too much or not.
How we see the world often comes from how we see ourselves. If you hate both A and B, and you hate more and more things, then one day you will know that you hate only yourself.
Alyssa was direct, mean, freewheeling from the start, and no doubt she thought everything was too much. What she was actually trying to say was: I couldn't control myself.
James is a clockwork boy and a cold-blooded killer who thinks the world is indifferent and boring, but it is actually an externalization that loses emotional perception. Simply put, we can't find anywhere else that you don't have.
So when Alyssa meets James, it's like two people on the edge of a cliff glaring at each other, they are separated by an abyss, and everyone is moving towards it. Until one day, Alyssa said like a perennial alcoholic old sailor, give up the land, fuck it, and they fell into the abyss together and started to escape.
The escape itself is the norm. Some advance, some retreat, some return, and some transcend. The only difference between people is that you have escaped one step, and he has escaped half the world.
Ibsen said that spiritually man is a far-sighted animal who can see clearly from a distance. We judge a thing to be farther away from it, and summer can be best written in winter. For Alyssa and James, fleeing simply because they had had enough turned out to be "counterproductive".
Alyssa moved away from her mother, who had been suffocating at home, and welcomed her so-called Gandhi father, who turned out to be a coward who also behaved too much. Going too far means not taking any responsibility, making a mess and walking away, leaving behind to heal the wound is the mother who swallowed it. Too much, never freedom and pride, swallowing up, but not cowardice.
James is spatially distant from his lonely and optimistic father, and daily distanced from his suicidal mother in time, and when he flees far enough, he suddenly sees love. His road trip with Alyssa is an emotional toning process, with a wonderful chemistry between too much and not having, all erupting at the moment of being surrounded by the police. James understands his attachment to Alyssa, that he is willing to sacrifice himself for her, and that his father has the same attachment to his mother. But the father still maintained his silly humor, blind vulgar optimism, precisely because of attachment, because of love. Without it, everything would be disconnected, meaningless, joyless, and equally unnecessarily sad. His numbness and indifference all along is just because he buried the pain and despair that he could not bear in his childhood. James made the ultimate leap at the end, and he understood all that was ever in the highest form of human emotion, self-sacrificing love, because nothing is emotionless.
This is growth, and growth is understanding. Growth is escape, return, and leap.
View more about The End of the F***ing World reviews
