Chaoyang crossed the top of the pyramid and covered the face of Elma, who was waiting all night and was about to leave. She looked straight ahead, her expression became tense, and her breathing quickly became short. What did she see? I don't know, because the movie ends here. What do you think she saw? Can only guess.
To try to answer this question, we must first try to solve another important question, that is, does Elma really have a family superpower of time manipulation or a genetic psychotic episode?
I am more inclined to the latter. All the time jumps and repeated scenes presented by the protagonist due to manipulation of time in the film are the result of the mental patient's chaotic memory during the onset of the disease. It is presented in the form of superpowers, so that the audience can experience the whole event with a sense of confusion with the protagonist. If the audience is told from the beginning that these are the results of the protagonist's mental illness, the effect of the whole film will be greatly reduced. And if the protagonist really has the ability to control time, then the whole film will be much worse. It is nothing more than the protagonist practicing superpowers, using superpowers to understand the truth of his father's death, and then changing history to bring his father back to life. . (What’s more, the consequences of manipulating time to change history are completely ignored. You must know that there is more than one person who has the ability to manipulate time like the protagonist. How to reconcile so many people’s changes to history so many times? I’m afraid we can only throw parallels. The universe is the panacea theory for dealing with time travel.)
Does it make sense to explain all the plots in terms of mental illness? I re-watched the film and became more and more convinced of my point of view.
Elma had a deep knot in her heart that her father left her alone that night, and had always hoped to get an explanation from her father, which disappeared with her unexpected death. The mental history of her father and grandmother is another heart disease that she cannot ignore. She persuaded herself to break up with her beloved boyfriend on the grounds that she did not want to settle down and did not want to lead a repetitive and monotonous life. In fact, she was worried that she would suffer from the disease one day in the future. Ruined this family, ruined each other's beautiful life. And she was not optimistic about her sister's marriage and even matched her sister with the bartender intentionally or unintentionally, all of which were subconsciously blocking her sister, hoping that her sister would not enter married life like her, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the family.
In the quarrel with her sister, she expressed her true thoughts: we are broken people, and broken people break people. We are people with (mental) defects, and people with (mental) defects will ruin other people's lives . (This translation is my personal understanding is different from the Chinese subtitles on the Internet)
Then she drove away, thinking that her sister could marry her perfect person without any mental burden, but she was under enormous mental pressure to force herself to break up with the person she loved. How much she wished she could be as free as her sister No scruples, no burdens, no sacrifices made for the family's illness. Violent mood swings induced her mental problems. Her father's figure appeared in front of her, a car accident occurred in her absence, and her family's hereditary mental illness broke out completely.
Psychiatric patients will have problems with the perception of the outside world, such as auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, etc. Another important problem is the loss of control of memory: they have difficulty distinguishing whether the memory in their brain comes from their real life or from their own hallucinations , dreams, and imaginings; they have heard other people’s stories or watched film and television works but may mistake some situations for their own experiences; they also lose the ability to perceive the time when the memory occurs, and they are not sure when the memory occurs. Know the sequence of memories; distant memories can become particularly clear, and events that have just occurred can be completely forgotten. Sections of memory are disorganized and disordered in the minds of mental patients, and people will inevitably show a state of madness. (Of course, the severity of symptoms varies a lot for different people at different stages, and these symptoms are also the basis for my judgment below.)
Elma understood the disorder of these memories as "superpowers", and these illnesses became the source of Elma's "superpowers". How exactly does it perform? I'm looking for some plots to talk about:
Super power performance 1. In the ward of the hospital after the car accident, Elma inadvertently manipulated the time and asked her boyfriend to visit her.
The principal of the kindergarten came to visit Elma, and there was a scene of forest all around. This scene did not appear out of thin air. It actually came from a painting given to her by her former boyfriend. Memory has become a kind of taboo. For the purpose of self-protection, the brain feels that part of the memory about her boyfriend is blocked, including breaking up in the car, moving out of the house and visiting the hospital (her brain even leaves the boyfriend, the principal of the garden, etc.). Come in, the boyfriend who appeared when these two memories crossed has been tampered with as a male nurse. If you don't believe it, you can go back to the second episode. If all these details are superpowers, these details are completely unnecessary, so the director has been revealing them under the appearance of superpowers. The fact of mental illness, there are many more details), so her boyfriend had just left, but she completely forgot when she turned her head, and complained to the principal that the first person to see her was not her boyfriend. But the good memory of that painting remained, and it turned into a scene of meeting with the principal. When the principal said that your boyfriend had just visited, her brain pushed back the memory of her boyfriend's previous visit, so it seemed that the two parts of the memory were reversed, creating the appearance of manipulating time and changing history.
Super power performance 2. Elma constantly experienced the situation of waking up in the hospital bed and talking to her mother and sister, and she fell into the reincarnation of time. The father appeared and said that Elma had some ability to help him, and if she agreed, the reincarnation could be ended.
In fact, after so many reincarnations, only the experience of waking up for the first time is a real one, and the rest are all speculations that she generated while sitting on the bar at home after she was discharged from the hospital. Concerned about her mother, she felt regretful about her sister's performance, so she replayed the whole process in her brain again and again, until the last time she took the initiative to apologize to her mother and listened to her sister's beautiful expectations for the wedding and her future life. But in the film, it was shown that her father used her superpower to let her go through reincarnation again and again, making her feel that she could also use this ability to change her imperfect past.
Here are some details, the image of the father comes from an old photo of her father smoking when she was sorting out the photos with her mother; the cake-making competition scene that Elma passed by when she fled was from the cake advertisement on the TV opposite the hospital bed, and the host was The parents of my sister's fiancé; once in reincarnation, I had a conversation with my sister in the "Cactus Garden". The cactus landscape in the garden was derived from the scenery around the pyramids in Mexico (the last episode was briefly reflected), and the whole family went to Elma when she was a child. My father said that his research also stemmed from a conversation here; and the aforementioned forest scene was drawn from her boyfriend's drawing, so the imaginary plots in Elma's mind were all born out of the real world. must be bound by this.
Super power performance 3. Father trains Elma to manipulate time to make keys appear and disappear.
This relatively simple thing is nothing more than a few keys on the table, and the memory of taking it from the table alternates back and forth. Even Elma thinks that this is simple but useless. The reason for this conjecture is that the illness has activated a long-standing childhood memory in Elma's brain. In that memory, her father trained her to use her consciousness to control the water in the cup, so she conformed to the previous promise that her father would use her superpowers to help her father. The plot, naturally imagined the scene of her father sitting next to her and training her to use super powers to change keys. This shows that the father had mental problems very early, and he believed that his family had some kind of super power to manipulate time and space, and he tried it on his daughter.
Super power performance 4. Negotiating with the security guard who met for the first time. By sensing the memory of the other party, he told the story of her missing sister, which moved the security guard to obtain the information that the laboratory was broken into and destroyed in the past.
When her boyfriend was talking to the security guard, Elma learned that the other party lost her sister by observing the security guard's screen saver photos, but it was not necessarily because of her disappearance. It might be due to an accidental death, etc., but if it wasn't for her disappearance, she would not be able to impress the other party with her father's story. , so Elma just took a gamble and got it right. But in order to reflect her super power, the brain actively blocked the screen saver, which made Elma feel that she felt it through super power. This kind of amnesia about what just happened happened before when my boyfriend visited the hospital, and later when I asked the female assistant boyfriend "Slim Arm" for questioning, because "Slim Arm" insisted that he was not there at all that night. Elma's superpowers are completely ineffective, which is equivalent to denying Elma's ability, so her brain again rudely blocked the memory of the question just now, so Elma turned around and went to ring the doorbell to find the "thin arm". "When questioned, her boyfriend immediately stopped her and told her that she had already questioned.
(As for how Elma learned about the security guard’s sister, there is also a possibility that Elma saw the missing person posted by the female security guard’s house when she was a child, so she has this memory deep in her memory. Knowing the name Sophia, of course, Elma's brain will automatically make up more content, creating the illusion of perceiving the entire life of the female security guard through her superpowers.)
Super power performance 5. At my sister's wedding, I publicly said that my sister cheated on the bartender. I regretted it very much, so I turned back the time and stopped talking about it just to praise my sister.
This kind of plot has been shown in many films. The characters quickly rehearse the consequences of an important action in their hearts, and then perform another behavior in actual action. According to Elma's character, she will indeed make outrageous actions, and she herself knows this, so this time she had to anticipate the consequences of acting according to her own wishes, and after finding that it would cause a major incident, she took other actions in actual actions. a peaceful way. At this time, it was difficult for Elma to distinguish the real world from the imaginary world. She regarded the different results of the two worlds as the result of her manipulation of time.
Super power performance 6. Manipulate time to return to the laboratory on the night of the incident, and find that the intruder is the mother, and the quarrel between the mother and the father, and the mother also admitted this later.
Elma wasn't there that night, so the scene doesn't come from some memory. He got a list of people related to the incident from the female security guard, which not only contained the name of the female assistant's boyfriend, but also her mother's name, because the mother, as a family member of the person who died in the car accident that night, would definitely be questioned by the police and recorded. And there is no need for the mother to hide from the police that she has been to the laboratory. After all, she also wants to know the cause of her husband's death. There is no need to lie to interfere with the investigation, not to mention destroying the laboratory, breaking into it, and being discovered. , and even school surveillance and security should have records. Elma has known the name and image of the female assistant since she was a child. Because her father would take her to the laboratory for experiments, she would naturally know the female assistant. In addition, she had read the relevant news and other materials in the attic. What happened in the lab that night had many ideas, but the interloper puzzle piece was always missing to put together the most plausible panorama.
So after she learned in the file that her mother was the intruder, she immediately made up the picture of the night: the mother came to the laboratory to find her daughter (because the father often brought her daughter to the laboratory for experiments in private, and the daughter was arrested that night. After taking it out of the house, then the mother came here naturally to find Elma), there will be a quarrel between the mother and the father (the mother will come directly without calling, in order to catch a current, so I can use my daughter as an experiment I confronted my father on the spot, but I couldn’t find my daughter, so it was inevitable to have a big fight. My parents had quarreled about this at home), and my mother would accuse my father of focusing on work and young and beautiful female assistants (the father often worked Later that night, his father died in a car accident with his female assistant, and Elma had seen photos of the chaos in the laboratory. She thought that her mother must have been angry and smashed the equipment and tore her face with her father).
While this imaginary memory provided an answer to the question "Who was the trespasser?", the fact also disappointed her because it showed that the break-in to the lab was not linked to her father's death (if it was, it would mean The mother is the murderer, which is something Elma dare not imagine), trying to find out the cause of death by tracing the intruder will not work, but the name of the female assistant's boyfriend appears in the file, and Elma has another investigation. Clues, the brain subconsciously blocked this brain-filling plot, so that Elma could focus on the new subject of investigation (but did not forget it, but was moved to the back of the timeline to connect the imagination of her father running out of control and running out of the highway).
Super power performance 7. Manipulating time Witnessed the process of his father's car accident, and took his father back to the night of the accident, and made a decision not to answer the phone and accompany his daughter.
Only by knowing the cause of his father's death can we find a way to change the past in a targeted manner. Elma did everything she could: Investigate the female assistant's boyfriend and found that he had alibi, ruled out love murder; the research sponsor found nothing, and the other party not only denied that it was related to her father's death, but also denied her father's research, saying That research is meaningless (here her super ability to perceive other people's memory is invalid again, if there is a super ability, it is too much to say that it is not used or not used here), no matter whether the sponsor is telling the truth or not, she is incapable of investigating this clue. went on. Facing the fact that the truth may never be known, Elma used her "imaginary superpower" again. She recalled the imaginary memory of her mother after breaking into the laboratory, and continued to make up the scenes before and after her father's car accident: The mother left and the father never came home, and the female assistant no longer believed in the study, and said she would report the father's illegal experiments on children. In the face of the fact that the research that took a lifetime of energy could not continue, and ended up being betrayed and separated, my father could not face this fact, but he could not change it, so he deliberately drove off the cliff on the way to take the female assistant home, in order to complete the life cycle. Final control. ——This is the most reasonable imagination Elma can make based on the current information.
This imaginary completes the entire process of the night when my father died, and the rest is how to use superpowers to change this history. So when the picture of the night her father took her out appeared in the mirror of the kindergarten, she flew over and completed the last paragraph in a coma that she thought she could save her father.
Scenes like the above constitute the main plot of the whole play, and the father becomes the guide in the whole process. The father often appears suddenly. In fact, it is Elma who is calling him. She needs to shape the spiritual image of the father for the current various Unreasonable explanations to appease her heart and give her a direction to move forward. If there is no spiritual image of her father, Elma will fall into a madness that she cannot explain.
In the attic, Elma found her father's blackjack game console, which was used by her father during his lifetime. Elma witnessed her mother's quarrel with her father, and her father had been holding this game console. In order to understand her father's state of mind at that time, Elma imagined the scene where her father handed her the game console, and believed that her father was guiding her to use the game console to anchor to the real world. When Alma was seeing a psychiatrist, the doctor asked her, "Do you think you're using this game to create distance between you and what you think is a hostile world?" Alma heard this For some reason, she stopped the game in her hand, thought for a moment, and said, "Maybe." Elma, who has always been outspoken, did not immediately deny it, but thought about it seriously because she thought it made sense. , originally wanted to use the game to return to the real world, but because the game isolated her from the real world, she did not play the game again, because she knew that being isolated from the real world and indulging in her own world was a symptom of a mental patient , she wants to avoid, but she also can't take the medicine prescribed by the doctor, she is worried that this will lock her in the real world, never see her "father" again, and the manipulation of time will not happen again, this is also before it is confirmed Everything was just an illusion of a mental patient, and she dared not confirm it. Because the unexplained death of her father who left her after leaving her back then was a knot in Elma’s heart that she could never let go of, and the illnesses of her grandmother and father were also the boulders hanging in her heart. People’s psychological protection mechanism is sometimes Choose to escape or even forget the problem unconditionally, and sometimes force yourself to solve the problem, even by deceiving yourself to solve it. And the superpower that "father" made her practice is making it possible for her to solve these two problems, so she must go down this road and find the "truth" that can comfort herself.
Like the mathematician Nash in the movie "A Beautiful Mind", he was entangled with schizophrenia all his life, and finally realized that his illness could not be cured. Getting along with yourself and accepting your (mental) flaws is the best way to live with your (mental) flaws. So I think this show is not a mystery-solving journey of a superpower, but a spiritual journey of a family-hereditary mentally ill patient seeking spiritual relief.
(In addition, in terms of storytelling skills, the purpose of the screenwriter is to keep the audience confused about whether they are superpowers or mentally ill during the viewing process, so the development of key plots should be shown in the form of superpowers. Advancement is used to maintain the audience's recognition of superpowers; at the same time, the fact of mental illness should be foreshadowed and hidden behind the appearance of superpowers, allowing the audience to carefully observe and think and find that it can be explained from the perspective of mental illness. The cause and effect between the two is left blank, and requires the audience to imagine and connect them, which is also the charm of this show for me. "Beautiful Mind", "Fight Club", "The Sixth Sense" This type of film first misleads and confuses the audience with a seemingly real appearance, and then reverses it at the climax of the film. The audience turns back and finds that the original doubts and unreasonable points are explained at once. Therefore, The difference is that "Undone" does not have a clear reversal in the end, it keeps this doubt until the end, and leaves the task of explanation to the audience.)
So, here's the question, not so much what Elma sees as what you want to see as a viewer. She believes that she saw her father come out of the hole and confirms that she used her superpower to save her father, no problem; she believes that the father she saw again is a continuation of Elma's imagination, and she is still using the spiritual image of her father to guide her future life , there is no problem; I even feel that it is another Elma who comes out, because the father's matter has come to an end, and the other Elma will take over the task of his father and accompany him for the rest of his life.
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