One of the themes of this film is very deep:
Due to the technological development of modern society, people have lost their "jobs" permanently.
In one of the killings in the present tense of the protagonist Jack, a flashback of his childhood memory is inserted.
Like "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane, this is a key to deciphering its symptoms.
In his recollection, aside from the initial symptoms of cruelty to animals, the young Jack watched as the farmer ploughed the field with a sickle.
On the way to Huangquan at the end, Virgil pointed out to Jack again: This is the side of heaven, we will never reach it.
And Jack and his "materials" - victims and even murder - constitute the "art" of the degenerate (decay), the "heaven" that can never be reached, is the "poetic feeling" in which the farmer and the tool in his hand - the sickle are closely combined The state of poesis.
Jack is an architect by profession. But he never completed a construction project, so no one recognized him as an architect.
Because of his wealthy family, he was spared the suffering of being enslaved by wage labor.
However, this "freedom", and the desire to find self-satisfaction from other jobs, drove him to transcend his status as an engineer as a skilled worker and into the realm of direct handling of ideas as an architect.
When he asked his lay friend what was the difference between an architect and an engineer, she said that both drew pictures.
In his eyes, this is what an architect can do.
It is a pity that he can never achieve the intimate relationship between farmers and the earth through the sickle through the complex culture or the medium/tool of crime.
Why can't the depravity achieve a poetic dwelling?
Because the former is driven by the desire to die, while the latter is driven by the desire to live, the two run counter to each other.
As a result, Jack fell into nihilism and could only knock down the house again and again, without a motivation to support him to build the house.
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