When I have nothing to do, I want to watch a movie, "Director: Tom Ford" is an excellent label, which attracts me to choose "Nocturnal Animals". It is worth mentioning that Tom Ford is Tom Ford of a clothing brand. He is gay and has an old lover. He has directed two movies in total, one is "Single Man" and the other is "Nocturnal Animals". "Single Man" tells the story of the widow's mourning for the lover, the desire for a new relationship and the confusion about the future life after the death of a gay man in a car accident. What will Nocturnal Animals be about? I'm curious.
The marriage of Susan and Houghton
Susan and Houghton have been married for 10 years, and their relationship lives on in name only. Susan was tortured, often sleeping through the night, and started taking antidepressants. She wanted to save her marriage by traveling and partying together, but it seemed like feeding the car grass, which was useless. The bigger the mansion, the thinner the warmth, and the indifference permeating the corners and corners of the house.
The plot of Tony's novel Nocturnal Animals
At this time, Susan received a manuscript of a novel from her ex-husband Tony. Tony has been writing for many years, and this is the first full-length manuscript he has completed. The title is "Nocturnal Animals", and the title page reads: To Susan. The protagonists of the novel are: a family of 3, 3 gangsters, and a sheriff. In the novel, Tony substitutes himself and Susan as the male and female masters of a family of three.
A family of three went out on a trip. At night, they were driving on a deserted interstate highway. They encountered three drunks blocking the road. After waiting for a long time, they were angry and overtaken. The daughter extended her middle finger from the rear window to express her dissatisfaction with the drunks. The drunks overtook the family of 3, successfully forced a stop, robbed the male protagonist's car and took away the male protagonist's wife and daughter, leaving one of the accomplices to drive with the male protagonist, dressed in costumes to find his wife and daughter.
Driving to the deserted Gobi, the gangster asked the male protagonist to get out of the car and drive away, in fact, he wanted to kill him before he was prepared. The male protagonist, who got out of the car, had no masters, and looked around for possible traces of his wife and daughter. Suddenly, he heard the low voice of a car coming from a distance. The male protagonist, who was still in shock, took advantage of the situation to lie in a corner of the Gobi, evading the pursuit and killing, letting the gangsters laugh: "You Your wife is looking for you, come out quickly." He didn't show up either. The next day, after a long climb, the male protagonist escaped from the Gobi and went to the police station to report the crime. Soon after the case came to an end, his wife and daughter had been raped and killed, and they were both severely injured before they died.
The grief-stricken male protagonist and the sheriff began a long pursuit of the murderer, and several captured criminals were eventually released due to insufficient evidence. Revenge seemed far away. The deadlock was broken by the sheriff of Linhuan's lung cancer, who proposed to help the male protagonist to lynch the criminal together. In the end, the male protagonist finally killed the murderer who murdered his wife and daughter, and committed suicide.
The relationship between Susan and Tony
In the process of reading the novel, Susan realized the despair, hatred and redemption of the male protagonist (that is, Tony) for the "cowardly" in his character. Based on this, she understood the devastating blow to Tony when she broke up because she disliked Tony's cowardice.
After reading the novel, Susan seems to fall in love with Tony again. Ten years ago, because she disliked Tony's cowardice, she abandoned him and he lost her. In the past ten years, he has completed the hatred and transcendence of cowardice in the form of novels and realized self-redemption at the level of consciousness. Ten years later, she was in trouble with her marriage, and in the process of reading the novel, she seemed to feel that Tony was no longer cowardly. She mistakenly thought it was his unrequited love for her and his lifelong pursuit, so Susan took the initiative to ask Tony to meet, just like the first time they met Susan took the initiative to ask Tony to go home. Susan dressed up and arrived early, however, Tony did not show up.
Fourth, the strong stay strong, the weak stay weak
The above is an introduction to the plot of the film. The seemingly complex narrative structure inadvertently reveals the hidden theme: "The strong stay strong, and the weak stay weak."
(1) Strong is all-round strong, weak is full-scale collapse (negative effect of mental structure)
There is a saying in Ma Zheshang: "Material determines consciousness, and consciousness reacts to matter". In other words, the survival environment determines the survival strategy, and the survival strategy has two manifestations in the group, the internal one is called cultural psychology (spiritual structure), and the external one is called cultural characteristics.
Mental structure determines information screening preferences and processing priorities, as well as their own survival strategies. After external information is captured by the brain, it is filtered according to your inner mental structure. There is a paradoxical phenomenon in such filtering. Only obtaining what one knows, recognizes, and is familiar with will result in self-strengthening, thereby creating an illusion that most people are similar to themselves, and most things are As you see it yourself. In fact, people and things that are vastly different from you are filtered out by unconscious active shielding!
Just like the financial law "compound interest", a good mental structure will be better, and a bad one will be worse.
Tony and Susan in the film come from average and wealthy families in Texas, respectively. Tony has a good relationship with his family of origin, but his parents are both petty citizens and have no success in his career; Susan's parents are financially strong, both believe in Christianity, and their stance is firm. It can be seen from the above that there are differences in survival strategies between two people from different classes of families: A. Proactive: encounter on the street, tell each other about the past, Susan took the initiative to show love to Tony, and the two established a love relationship. Susan has a tough personality and bravely resists her parents' interference in her studies and relationships, and questions her parents' belief in Christianity. B. Pay more attention to the outside world: Tony's fiction studies are always more concerned with details and descriptions of the heart, and Susan is tired of this and hopes that he looks at the world and draws inspiration and strength from the outside. C: Goals and plans: Susan had already aspired to work in arts management when she was in college. On the contrary, Tony had a vague hobby of writing and never made any plans for the future.
(2) The thinking characteristics of the weak: wait, rely, and want (mental structure characteristics)
A person's cognition of himself and his cognition of his relationship with external resources, as well as the choice of life and death, together build his inner spiritual structure. The male protagonist's family in Tony's novel is surrounded by gangsters, and his life and death are unknown. In this case, the male protagonist's mental structure is as usual, thinking that he is weak, unable to get any help, and will soon be threatened with life, so, When the gangster took him to drive with him to find his wife and daughter, he didn't dare to fight hard, but sat in the co-pilot cowardly, hoping that this wicked man could return him safety and tranquility.
After his wife and daughter were brutally murdered, the male protagonist was not like the lone avenger in the Hollywood movie plot, but pinned his hopes on the police station. Although the sheriff was dedicated, he always failed to bring the criminals to justice due to insufficient evidence. In the end, the sheriff of Linhuan cancer took pity on what happened to the male protagonist and decided to use lynching to help the male protagonist punish the gangster. This gave the cowardly male protagonist the opportunity to confront the gangster who killed his wife and daughter. However, hesitating or missing the opportunity, He was blinded, and before he fell to the ground, he pulled the trigger and finally ended the scum's life.
(3) The weak: revenge in lust and fall in reality
When a person's mental structure is severely damaged, then he will feel small and think that he has no ability to control surrounding resources. How to relieve anxiety? First: Deny the original value of the problem - the problem that caused the conflict is meaningless and therefore does not need to be solved. Second: terminate the conflict early to prevent the problem from occurring. Third: a problem that causes conflict can neither ignore the value nor prevent it from happening. It can only distort the facts, fictitious a self-justifying fact, and force oneself to believe it, thereby forgetting the conflict itself.
Tony was dumped, and Susan voluntarily miscarried without consulting him, ending the marriage completely. The fact of being abandoned, like a sharp blade piercing Tony's soul, how to digest the pain as hard as a stone? For a cowardly person, lust seems to be the only way out. Tony virtualized the facts and tampered with his abandonment in the novel as the male protagonist passively gave up to rescue his wife and daughter. While focusing on expressing the male protagonist's remorse, self-blame and pain, the despair abandoned by Susan in reality seems to no longer exist. Tony is the male protagonist, and the male protagonist is Tony. He heals himself by distorting the facts to forget. At the end of the novel, the male protagonist commits suicide by shooting himself, not only to comfort his dead wife and daughter, but also to kill the damn cowardice!
At last, Susan read the novel and asked Tony to meet, but he didn't show up for a long time.
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