The key clue to understanding "Youth Without Youth" is contained in one sentence: two lightning bolts and three roses. Sleepwalking between existence and nothingness. About the deconstruction of the theme and philosophy of "Youth Without Youth". "Youth Without Youth" is like a dream, blending between the consciousness and unconsciousness of experience, and revolving between the existence of meaning and nothingness. Like a surrealist painting, it seems incomprehensible, but it is actually a combination or dislocation of intuitive elements.
For the most part, it is suspected of being cryptic, but when properly interpreted, the cryptic is actually quite straightforward. Next, I thought I could interpret the film properly, avoiding overinterpretation, rambling, or, to put it in an unreliable slogan, going back to the film itself. I feel that if we look back at the film itself, although the narrative of the film is not perfect, its theme and context are quite clear and consistent, not as divergent and vague as it seems. Of course, there will be ambiguities, like the meaning of the roses in the film, but there will also be clear understandings.
The theme of "Youth Without Youth" is very clear, written in Chinese characters: life is like a dream, there is only Tao. This may be the mystery of the film for viewers who do not understand Chinese characters, but for viewers who do understand Chinese characters, its meaning is quite straightforward. The protagonist of this film is wandering between dreams and Tao, making choices and completing himself. The "Tao" in the classical thought of the Celestial Dynasty is roughly equivalent to the "logos" in the classical thought of Europe.
In this way, "life is like a dream, only Tao" can be transformed into "survival is like a dream, only logos". The broad original meaning of logos is "speech," while the specific rough understanding of the word is "concept". Then, the so-called "youth without youth" is actually a conceptual "youth". The reason why it "has no youth" is because youth as a concept is out of time, neither childish nor senile. Except in concept, eternal youth does not exist in reality unless a miracle occurs. Such a miracle happened in "Youth Without Youth": in the miracle, the male protagonist obtained "youth without youth"—a Taoist youth, a conceptual (logos) youth. Before this miracle, the male protagonist had spent his youth and life searching for logos—the origin of speech—but failed—encountering the void of meaning. After possessing a realistic logos-like youth, the male protagonist can achieve his goal of exploring the origin of logos-speech—or in other words, he completes the transformation of the meaning of life from nothingness to existence.
They're a series, and they're all familiar with "popular philosophy." To simplify this series, it is equivalent to: nihilism + existentialism. Originally, the meaning of existence and nothingness was not limited to human life. The meaning of existence is roughly equivalent to being, and nothingness is roughly nothing. For the mystery of existentialism (survivalism), existence or nothingness is associated with existence and its meaning. Therefore, "existence and nothingness" in this context are "meaningful and meaningless existence." In the sense that people think about this problem with self-consciousness, existence and nothingness are related to consciousness and unconsciousness, self and non-self. And what these rivalries get is time.
What is the time? What is used in this film is not time in the physical sense, but time in the existential (survival) sense. In this film, in the male protagonist's research on the origin of speech-logos, time is a concept, a symbol of speech-logos; in the scientific research madman Munro's rhetorical question to the male protagonist, time "expresses to human beings the most strongly defined state of ambiguity of the living situation." This is the quintessential survivalist time: time is the meaning and nonsense of the ego's life-a state of ambiguity between this meaning and that meaning, disturbed by the past and the future, and the ego's sense of this state of consciousness and unconsciousness, entangled with memories and expectations.
If one were to say that survivalism speaks of time as not time at all, then it might be reasonable, but it is happy to use such a misnomer. In this film, when the male protagonist attained a Taoist youth because of a miracle, he did not get rid of the anxiety of survival (the temporality of self-existence), but became an exile who lost his original identity; in order to get rid of the anxiety, he represented him The writings and feelings of the meaning are to be abandoned and finally die a bleak death in the snow—to complete his time—to survive, to return to nothingness.
The film begins with nothingness and ends with nothingness. This is a taoist cycle, not a temporal one. At the end of the film, the protagonist seems to be back in 1938 in the cafe in his hometown. In that cafe, the protagonist realizes that he sees his former colleagues like sleepwalking, and he tells the allusion of "Zhuang Zhou dreaming of butterflies". This is a sleepwalking comeback, not that the male lead really died in 1938. When he died, the identity document he carried could prove that it was his revised identity and that the date of birth was 1938. Calls from hotels to cafes can also attest to this.
For the protagonist, who exists in time, he has experienced miracles and has superhuman insight, but he still cannot get rid of the time spent in time. His life-survival time does seem to be like a dream, meaning if it exists, it seems to be non-existent. If it exists, it seems to be non-existent. The male protagonist realizes that the story of "Zhuang Zhou Mengdie" is also responding to the time. He breaks youth, abandons miracles, returns to time, completes aging, until death, which is a state of nothingness of consciousness.
"Youth without youth" is true both for Tao-logos and for existence-time. The youth of existence-time is not eternal, and the youth of Tao-logos is illusory. Tao-logos: from nothingness to existence, and back to nothingness. Existence is like a dream. "Youth Without Youth" interprets this cycle of Dao-dream through two lightning miracles. It seems that many viewers have overlooked the iconic significance of these two lightning strikes to the film's narrative.
The first lightning strike happened to the male protagonist, which contributed to his transition from nothingness to existence; the second lightning strike happened to the female protagonist, which contributed to the return of the male protagonist's experience from existence to nothingness. The temporal fusion of Taoism and dreamland is deduced from these two reciprocating experiences, and the religious-philosophical thought involved in it is a comment on this deduction.
The first rose is held by the (living) self, the second in front of the self, and the third in front of the (dead) self. The symbolism of the rose is so clear. To put it simply, the first rose symbolizes self-grasping, the second rose symbolizes you-love, and the third rose symbolizes the end of time-death. Where will the third rose be placed? Unless it confronts nothingness, self-existence in time has no place. The rose is the body of nothingness, the wreckage of existence, the haze between nothingness and existence.
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