The rooms are connected, but they are full of murderous intent, and the corpse will fall into the ground immediately after a little carelessness. As a result, the six people cooperated with each other. However, this collaboration ended with the police killing innocent people and purging other people. When they finally cracked the mystery of the maze and found an exit, only the mentally retarded person faced the sun-others People are dead inside.
This is the plot of the movie "Painful Fang" (1), a classic fable that deeply analyzes totalitarianism.
Almost all of the most important lines in this movie came from the architect. He said that no one knows who built such a giant monster that devours human life—because everyone built it together, he took on the shell of the maze. But I don't know who the boss is. Everyone is doing things that are beneficial to them, but their own interests are ultimately harmed by the sum of self-interested behaviors.
The architect also said that all the people placed in this giant strange formation have contributed to the construction of this strange formation, no one is being watched-there is no big brother, this is not the "big brother" in Orwell's "1984" "I'm looking at you", but a more terrifying state than "Big Brother is looking at you". The doctor murdered by the police represented a humanitarian. She said it more clearly-the situation today is caused by everyone's indifference, and no one is innocent.
The prisoner escaped in the film, who had successfully escaped from seven prisons and was very sensitive to sensors, but in the process of escaping, he was burned in a dangerous cube with half of his head and died. He was eliminated shortly after the beginning of the movie-he was almost the smartest of the six. The movie seems to say that this kind of cleverness will only bring people to death.
The doctor is a humanitarian. She is compassionate and compassionate to everyone, and is responsible for the team. However, because of this, she became the police's first cleansing target.
The college students just solved the mystery of the numbers in the cube. It is a coincidence that the mentally retarded person is actually a mathematical genius. The college student died and the architect was killed. Before the architect died, when the police escaped from the maze, he dragged the police with all his strength, and the police also died.
In the beginning, the police was a very convincing leader. He was vigorous, confident, able to lead, and had a sense of justice-looking a lot like a metaphor, mocking the United States (this is also reminiscent of Hannah Arendt in " "The Origin of Totalitarianism" warned that the United States would also become a totalitarian country), and later, the policeman could not accept any disagreement. When arguing with the architects, he fought against the doctors and college students who were women. , So that in the end, it directly cleans all the people around who should cooperate.
This "big brother" first classifies people-he refuses to bring the mentally handicapped, because he thinks he is useless and just a cumbersome, so everyone insists on taking him; then he wants to clean up the architect-"Old "Big Brother" thinks he is a badass; in the end, he is purged of everyone-the doctor is a saboteur, because he does not obey his orders and criticizes him; college students are dangerous because he doesn't take him seriously; in the end, only the lonely man himself is left. .
This process is the epitome of all totalitarian political terror. People are divided into useful and useless, first mad team, backward elements, the people, the enemy, one finger and nine fingers, "made of special materials"... etc. Although this is something that has existed in ancient times, However, under the protection of modern technology and the so-called argumentation, this distinction has been destined to fall on everyone from the beginning of this distinction. All national terrorist activities in all totalitarian countries have experienced this first. The horror of political ideology in China-the cleansing of body and life begins with a cleansing of thinking.
Since it is a science fiction film and a fable film, its richness can be explained infinitely, even if the director or screenwriter has never thought of it, it can also be interpreted by the audience. For example, the police in the film can be the epitome of bureaucracy, it can also be the epitome of Nechaev-style revolutionaries, or the epitome of the US government in the international community... This gives the film a richness and richness that other dramas can’t match. Profound.
When initially looking for a way out, these six people were blind. The famous prison escaper only cared about going from one cube to another. He didn’t think about whether this would be laborless and useless, so although he was very smart, he even knew a lot. Technology, but still lives under water-it can be seen that a blind cat cannot hit a dead mouse. Without a big vision, there is no way out. If you don't understand the origin and inner mechanism of this maze, you can't get out-in the face of totalitarianism The same is true. Without understanding its inner structure, you cannot break it.
In the process of getting out of the cube, six people were supposed to work together, but they turned into killing each other. This is how the maze was built. Now in order to get out of the maze, they use the idea of building a maze. It can be seen that this is a paradox of life and death. Death cycle.
Perhaps the biggest failure of this movie is that the mentally retarded person walked out of the maze at the end of the film and saw the sun. Could this plot be the product of the director or screenwriter’s unbearable heart? ——They can’t wipe out all the hope of mankind. Like Lars von Trier, the cruel truth is always revealed at the end of the film, so there is no such thing as "1984". I was brainwashed and satisfied, and worshipped Big Brother with all my heart; there was no protagonist being executed like in "We", or people like "Brave New World" who were happily slaves...
In this cubic maze, they are as clever as themselves. Jailbreakers or policemen harm others and themselves, while those truly wise, such as architects, doctors, and college students, were slaughtered by these clever policemen, just like Hebrew prophets. The only value of their existence is to be reshaped by future generations. The golden body was stoned to death by contemporary people. Every generation of prophets walked too fast because they were so fast, people had to kill them because they were so fast that they couldn’t see their backs. They only waited a few years before reshaping the golden body to worship, and they would never put down the stone in their hands when worshiping. , In order to accurately hit the prophets of their contemporaries. People will never forget the French Revolution, when the Paris mob erected a glorious statue of Callas, a religious martyr in Voltaire's period, while slaughtering dissidents.
Maybe such a cube maze has no outlet after it was built, but because the fate of the machine itself is corruption, this is the only hope for people trapped in it. All the totalitarian regimes that collapsed in the 20th century collapsed in Hayek’s prophecy—it was not who destroyed them, but died from the day it was born—this is a kind of high entropy and cause. Its evil and fragile regime is the product of the mating of the donkey regime and the horse regime, and it is the mule regime. The biggest feature of this type of regime is its inability to sustainably develop.
Soon after the Soviet-Russian Revolution in 1917, a student of Heidelberg University asked their professor Max Weber: "What do you think of the Soviet socialist system?" Weber replied: "It will inevitably collapse because of the planned economy. It’s impossible.” More than 70 years later, Weber’s famous prophecy was finally confirmed by the Soviet Union with its disintegration.
Perhaps, the maze of cubes does have a bridge leading to the sun, and as the movie metaphors, the cube that becomes the bridge only stays for a short time. It runs at high speed, and it will leave the identity of the bridge anytime and anywhere. And how firm belief and wisdom do people have to find the bridge and find the moment of stay?
The answer must be frustrating-and what it leaves to people, on the level of faith, seems to be only as Camus's famous saying: "We should believe that Sisyphus is happy." At the level of wisdom, it seems that Weber's prescription is acceptable: " A planned economy is impossible"! However, Weber has a deeper worry, that is, the final outcome of human rationalization may just be:
"No one knows who will live in the iron cage in the future; no one knows whether there will be another end of this amazing development. A brand-new prophet appears; no one knows whether a kind of mechanical numbness and rigidity will be produced under the cover of a certain sudden arrogance and great emotion, and no one knows....Because it is entirely possible to comment on the final stage of cultural development in this way. : Experts have no souls, and indulgences have no heart and liver. This waste still imagines that it has reached an unprecedented level of civilization." (Max Weber: "Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism")
To a certain extent, evil spirits such as the planned economy are not a high-level rationalized product, but just a small product with less than a few months of rationalization, or a product of pseudo-rationality. What should really worry about is the advanced products of rationalization, such as market economy and rationalist dogma, which are more attractive and effective institutional settings-it is the current world economy in all areas of society that Karl Polanyi worries about. Systems-what will they bring us? Every cube and all the cube combinations in the movie are precise combinations after precise calculations, which seem to symbolize Weber's worry about rationalization, and its profound paradox seems to be that only rationalization itself can crack it!
There is no reason to be as optimistic as the ending of "Flirting Fang", as Hegel said: "The only thing mankind has learned from history is nothing." And the ending of "Flirting Fang" may be the product of a rationalized world— —The film market determines that directors and investors must take risks for a dark ending box office. From this perspective, it can only be said that the depth of the director is even far greater than the movie itself, forming a peculiar interaction between reality and image— —For example, David Lynch’s incomprehensible "Inland Empire" in 2006 — can’t distinguish what is reality and what is image.
However, when we think about it this way, whether it is over-interpretation or not, it shows that the power of rationalization may have been beyond what Weber was worried about-we live in the world of The Matrix, not in Harry Potter. world.
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