"Miss Bird" suppresses the dull and colorful girl's heart
Shadow Eater Critic: Liu Zhengyi
"Miss Bird" is based on the typical North Bay area community culture, and tells the story of Christine McPherson (self-named "Lady Bird"), a rebellious girl who is about to graduate from high school. A story of harmony and conflict with family, community, and school circles, and growing up in it.
The name Lady Bird puts it plainly. It is a consciously breaking away from the identity symbol of his association with his parents' hometown , which is a very typical rebellious behavior. The propaganda posters Christine made for herself when she was running for school cadres were all elements of birds and girls. While clearing the relationship with her old identity, LadyBird was also a declaration of yearning for a new role, or as the poster said, flying like a bird away from home.
The film can be used as a story about social class differences to demonstrate the impact of a girl's perception of poverty on her self-perception. However, rather than saying that lady birds hate poverty, they hate the culture that poverty brings. Moreover, what the film expresses is not the oppression of characters by class differences, nor is it criticizing social phenomena. The description of the upper wealthy class (boyfriend Danny's family) is only a rough glimpse of Lady Bird's yearning for the blue house (Danny's villa). , her resistance to religion, like her forcible integration into some popular circles in the school, did not originate from a certain class, but from the inhibitions that existed in the whole society. In this way, what really underpins the film is not class differences, but cultural repression . The inherent flaw in the city of Sacramento is monetary poverty, but also cultural poverty. So in fact, the film is just a simple and vivid outline. Under the confrontation with this kind of repression, a girl's rebellious and growth desire in the subjective world is not comprehensive enough to view this film from the perspective of class.
Director Greta Gerwig's narrative speech is not sloppy at all. At the beginning of the film, the mother and daughter drive to visit the campus. Through the quarrel between the mother and daughter about the status of the examination, Lady Bird has poor grades, but she wants to leave California to study art in the East, and finally endure it as Lady Bird The plot of jumping out of the car without the mother's nagging was explained clearly before the official start of the story: the conflict between mother and daughter, Lady Bird's motivation to leave home, limited learning ability, goal obstacles and rebellious elements. The account of the role can be said to be free and easy and fast.
In another scene where Kyle (Lady Bird's second boyfriend) pulls the girls' braids in the church, the students line up one by one. After the camera captures Kyle's actions of pulling Jenna's pigtails from the back, it cuts to the lady bird in the front row because Hearing the laughter, he turned back curiously. This vector action combined with the reaction of the wrong object played with the audience's thinking inertia. It was originally thought to be a fight between Kyle and Lady Bird, but instead Lady Bird was a third party watching Kyle and Jenna flirting. Without dialogue, the two shots directly and subtly show Lady Bird's love and desire for Kyle and her loss as a third party.
Extremeization is a big part of a director's discourse. The opening scene takes Lady Bird jumping out of the car to extremes her rebellious emotions, pushing her desire to escape from family discipline and domestication to the extreme. The same is true for the tactical teaching method of the physical education teacher teaching drama on behalf of the class, which extremes the character thinking characteristics of the physical education teacher. Furthermore, the father found that interviewing for the same job as the son maximized the father's embarrassment of being unemployed. It is also imperative to mention that Lady Bird went to the convenience store to buy cigarettes, adult magazines and California lottery scratchers when she turned 18. The three categories of items that can only be purchased by adults are also extreme representations of Lady Bird's efforts to get rid of the constraints of childhood. The transparent psychological activities of the characters in daily life are magnified by the director .
Another major feature of the film is its representativeness, an accurate presentation of the Sacramento regional culture, or a generalized presentation of the general phenomenon in the entire California Bay Area . First of all, the director Greta is from Sacramento, and then went to New York to study. Like Christine in the film, it can be said that most of the character construction and story inspiration come from the director's unconscious self-reflection. Depression, Mexican descent, Catholicism, wealthy homosexuality, nihilism, conspiracy theories, etc. are all characteristic of quintessentially Northern California-style communities and characters. Coupled with the fact that the story is set around the events of 9/11 (the director also graduated from St. Francis Catholic High School in Sacramento in 2002), these characteristics and their significance in the timeline are highlighted.
Outside, Lady Bird's second boyfriend, Kyle, is a typical pampered prince who is arrogant and anti-popular. His behavior is ridiculous but true. A series of rebellious acts such as Kyle's disdain for the economy and the government system, refusal to use mobile phone technology and the purchase of market cigarettes are not made out of thin air. Because of the skepticism caused by the background of 9/11, the actions themselves are arguably ingrained and documented as part of California's history. Regarding the influence of the background of the times on its products, you can see that in the 1970s in the United States, under the cultural slump caused by the Watergate scandal and hyperinflation, it catalyzed the production of "The TV Station", "The Great Eavesdropping Conspiracy", "Nashville" and "Taxi Driver" "Midnight Cowboy" and other classic anti-government films. In short, Kyle's characters are largely copied from real local characters, as are many of the characters in the film.
Including, my father is an unemployed depression patient who graduated from UC Davis (University of California, Davis) graduate school. He is gentle and mature, but extremely vulnerable and sensitive. Every day, because he cannot send his daughter to the school gate, he thinks that he will let his daughter down in front of her classmates. . In addition to being a mediator for the conflict between mother and daughter, the father's role in supporting the family is almost lost. When the mother and daughter quarrel again, the father is playing a poker computer game in the background. . The father's excessive idleness and the low self-esteem and emptiness caused by the influence of a long time indoors made him depressed and sensitive. And the source of my father's depression is simple to explain—poverty and idleness.
The character elements of the characters in the film strongly demonstrate their grip on culture. In the various circles of Lady Bird in the play, the characters from home and abroad all have some personality traits brought by depression and regional culture. In this way, the story not only accommodates the topic of class and upbringing, but also presents a true Sacramento style. As for reflections on California culture, see Quentin's "Pulp Fiction" and "Four Rooms" for expressions of different interior spaces in California. In a free, independent and sparsely populated place like California, the saying goes, "You don't know what people are thinking and doing if you don't get in." Finally, looking back at this film, the various knowledge communities around Lady Bird are typical, very California, but so completely different, they are colorfully different and colorfully rebellious.
—FIN—
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