This leads us to ask: What is the meaning of these empty mirrors that are almost paranoid about the details of urban life? For Shinkai Makoto, every corner of Tokyo seems to be full of anonymous charm, which is worthy of his obsessive brushstrokes. So, what is the charm of Tokyo in Makoto Shinkai’s animation world?
At the end of "Your Name", Mitsuba and Taki who have forgotten everything pass by again and again in the streets of Tokyo. Their hearts were full of vibrations, although they were still just "strangers" who could not name each other, they felt inexplicably close to each other. In fact, this kind of "passing by" in urban space has been staged countless times in "Five Centimeters Per Second". Obviously, this is Xin Haicheng's persistent obsession. Such romantic and sad "passing by" is a unique phenomenon of urban life: because only in a densely populated metropolis, people will continue to coexist in the same space, but they are still infinitely alienated.
In other words, before the emergence of modern cities, strangers in this world could have been strangers forever without any intersection. However, modern urban life makes the concept of "strangers" very weird: strangers always have intersections, and intersections but still strangers.
Xin Haicheng is not alone in his deep fascination with "strangers in urban space constantly and briefly encounters". From Baudelaire's "To a Woman Passing Arms", to Dai Wangshu's "Rainy Lane", Shi Zhecun's "The Eve of the Rainy Rainy Season", Zhang Ailing's "Blockade", and even to Wang Jiawei's "Chongqing Forest" The classic opening remark: "When we were the closest, the distance between me and her was only 0.01 cm." It was all about the subtle and unspeakable bond between the "strangers" meeting in the modern city life.
This bond between urban strangers is both sad and hopeful. Usually we can only see its sadness, because in a crowded city, no matter how close the bodies of two strangers are infinitely in space, they cannot be directly transformed into spiritual closeness. Sometimes, it even more contrasts the spiritual indifference, separation and isolation of urbanites.
In "Your Name", Mitsuba and Taki met face to face for the first time on the crowded subway in Tokyo. Because of the dislocation of time, to Taki, Mitsuba is just one of the countless strangers that he meets every day. At this time, the stranger Mitsuba told Taki her name, but Taki easily forgot the stranger who met by the water.
In a sense, Mitsuba and Taki's amnesia of each other's names in the movie setting also seems to be the constant forgetting of each other by strangers passing by in the simulated city life. The powerlessness of Mitsuba and Taki who "cannot remember each other's name after countless intersections" seems to symbolically reflect the powerlessness of modern people in the urban space of "countless physical proximity, but it is still difficult to truly get close in spirit." . In other words, in modern urban life, loneliness is like a curse. In "Your Name", it is this lonely "curse" that makes Mitsuba and Taki exhausted their efforts and unable to remember each other's name.
However, what "Your Name" wants to express is obviously more than such a pessimistic argument. Through this film, Xin Haicheng finally began to cherish an idealized hope. Different from the "Five Centimeters Per Second", the hero and heroine who had known each other in their youth brushed themselves on the streets of the city and "missed" them forever. If there was a beautiful love that seemed to be nothing and passed away like cherry blossoms, "Your Name" No longer satisfied with this self-pity and helpless depression.
If "Five Centimeters Per Second" is to reshape the Japanese-style "sorrow" in modern urban life, an aesthetic advocacy of "missing" and "passing away", "Your Name" has finally begun to explore the "hope" of urbanites ：In
contrast to “no matter how close in space, there is no power to change the spiritual alienation, and power to relieve people’s loneliness”, this hope emphasizes that “no matter how far away in space, it can’t block spiritual intimacy, nor cut off people. Fetters".
Taki and Mitsuba did not really meet each other during the process of exchanging bodies, but they had a more thorough "encounter." By "living in" rather than "close" to each other's body, they truly experience each other's body and life, and thus have an uncontrollable resonance in the spirit. So at the end of the movie, even if he couldn't remember the other party's name, Taki still mustered up the courage to call the "unfamiliar" Mitsuba in front of him, and they shed relative tears.
In this way, "Your Name" gives a complex and balanced answer to the question of the relationship between "strangers":
Although two strangers have been unable to get close to each other in countless intersections in the urban space, they can't really cut the bond between them even if they are far away countless times.
So what is the unbreakable bond between two strangers?
There is a puzzling core line in "Your Name". Sanye’s grandmother said to Taki who had crossed into Sanye’s body: “Agglomerated, intertwined and entangled, sometimes turning around, interrupted, but reconnected again. This is the grouping. This is the time.” In
this mysterious passage , "Combination" refers to the connections and bonds between people. So why are the connections and bonds between people equated with "time"?
There are two ways of reading: On the first level, this passage reveals that the connection between people is not static, but constantly changing, and extends to eternity infinitely in the dimension of time. Therefore, in "Your Name", even if Mitsuba and Taki seem to have completely lost contact, they can still find each other; or even if the two stand face to face, they will still face separation in the next second. Because of the ties between them, which are far and near, just like time eternally fading forward to the unknown.
On another level, this passage of grandma also redefines "time". "Time" is no longer mechanical and objective, following the lapse of one glance at the standard scale of clocks and watches, but is measured by human subjective experience. This is as implied by the melting clock in Dali’s surrealist paintings. It is in people’s subjective perception that when people build love for each other, the linearity of time is disintegrated and becomes It can "turn around, interrupt, and continue again."
At this point, we can see that, compared to Shin Haicheng’s previous work, "Your Name" finally does not simply describe the loneliness and love of boys and girls, but on the basis of the delicate and deep personal feelings, it has further extended to a more grandiose Philosophical proposition: especially the reinterpretation of the "space" and "time" of modern life.
But I think the biggest surprise that "Your Name" brings to people is its meditation on the "divinity" of our time.
In "Your Name", Mitsuba and Taki's emotional bondage reversed time under the guidance of the ancient gods. The dead Sanye is reborn and rewrites history. Although this is only a beautiful vision under the setting of movie science fiction, the film still expresses its understanding of god, death and history through this setting.
There is no doubt that Xin Haicheng believes that death can be surpassed. The history that has taken place is not cold and indifferent, and the destiny that is not swayed by humans can also be surpassed.
The power that can achieve this "transcendence" is undoubtedly a kind of "divine nature." It's just the "divinity" that "Your Name" believes in, which is different from the superstition of ancient traditions, and it's not just an unfounded fantasy. The "god" believed in the town where the heroine Mitsuba is located is actually just a cover. This "god" cannot protect the residents of the small town from disaster at the beginning. Even after the disaster, it is still impossible to reverse time and space and help the residents of the small town escape from the disaster. In the story, it is the bond of love between Mitsuba and Taki that really plays a decisive role.
In other words, the "divine nature" that can truly transcend death and reverse time is not the so-called "god", but the love between people.
In this postmodern society, Nietzsche's "God is dead" has long been deeply rooted in people's hearts, and atheists have become the mainstream of society, but this is not a bad thing. This does not mean that people can only live alone and helplessly in an unbelief, fragmented world.
Because it is precisely the loss of the whole-hearted faith in a superior god that allows people to discover the true "divine nature" in the most ordinary daily lives.
Xin Haicheng uses "Your Name" to tell us that this transcendent "divinity" is the common experience of life and compassion for death between people; it is that people live together in a rapidly changing modern world. The unstoppable empathy in the world; the bond of love maintained by the memory of the intersection.
Perhaps the reason why "Your Name" can achieve such an amazing success in Japan is precisely because the film says that the "divine nature" of love can transcend death. This is undoubtedly a direct blow to the bewilderment of the Japanese public who have suffered severe disasters such as nuclear leaks and earthquakes in recent years.
People in reality cannot reverse time like Mitsuba and Taki in "Your Name". But there are always people like them who muster the courage to stop strangers passing by on the streets of the city. When the (post)modern sorrowful alienation is broken by courage, love finally rebirths the lonely (post)modern man.
*Part of the original text was contributed to "Popular Films"
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