The title of the film is "Half Nelson," which means the duality of the protagonist Dan's personality. In front of his students, he is humorous, knowledgeable, kind, and full of justice; in his own life, he is lazy, cowardly, drug-addicted, and contradictory. In the end, what really prompted Dan to face himself again was through the eyes of the students. When he felt that the students were extremely disappointed in him, Dan saw the best in himself. Finally, he plucked up the courage and decided to work hard to be a complete version of himself.
As Dan mentioned when he talked about conflict and contradiction in class, the two sides of contradiction in Western culture are mutually exclusive and incompatible, while Eastern philosophy contains a third form, that is, you have me and I have your intermediate transition form. This is the idea that the film is trying to convey. Although Dan sometimes suffers in this conflict, he still strives to do two and a half, but when the conflict intensifies to the point where he can't bear it, one of the two sides of the conflict must be eliminated. 0.5 becomes 1. The movie doesn't give us 0.7 or 0.8. In this way, the film still believes that there will be no separate and juxtaposed cultures, and that convergence is an inevitable trend.
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