Coincidentally, before watching this movie yesterday, I just watched Laura Mulvey's article about the root of the pleasure of film is the duality of voyeurism. This movie can be regarded as the image expression of this article. I mean, it's not a repetition of the logic of traditional narrative films, but a critique of the logic of pleasure in traditional narrative films done in a repetitive way. In fact, it is not at all about discussing the boundary between the virtual and the real, or the fundamental purpose is to present how the interplay of the virtual and the real itself is an important dimension of how a literary expression or a film story is possible, rather than discussing and presenting this opposition between the virtual and the real. If it is the latter, it can completely distort the narrative and the truth. Several times when I thought Ou Rong was going to do this, he used cause and effect other than the telling of the story to tell the audience that what the boy told was not false.
According to Mulvey, the pleasure that cinema satisfies lies in two dimensions of safariness: the function of the sexual instinct, the aggression and the controlling gaze; and the libidinal function of the ego, the ideal ego The gaze of projection and identification. How exactly we as viewers are projected into this dimension.
The two groups of families that were invaded in the film were very distinct middle-class families, especially the image of the French teacher, who deliberately tried to outline the image of this slightly conservative middle-class intellectual. As for the boy Claude who was invaded, he was as heterogeneous as oil dripping into water. To a certain extent, this heterogeneity itself is also due to his indistinctness. His words are full of charming power. He is not violent, and it seems that he has never been dominated by any intense emotions. But he stirred in the story. He walks into a family as if we were casually opening a book, and this similarity is magnified in the episode where he enters the teacher's family, because it all seems to happen so easily, almost so easily. illogical. The boy's words, and himself, are the embodiment of traditional narrative cinema.
Laura Mulvey discusses that an important presupposition for the source of pleasure in traditional narrative films is the female image of a "spectacle" nature, but due to the castration anxiety brought about by women themselves, although men control the film's characters , and appears as a narrative representative, but in order to escape such castration anxiety, there are only two ways to choose. One is to repeat the original castration anxiety, explore the mystery of women, classify women as sinful, and carry out investigations on this sinful object. Degrading, punishing or saving to balance; the second is to completely reject the channel of castration, transform women into objects, and in serious cases may become sexual inversions. In the efforts of traditional narrative films to obliterate the boundary between film and reality, the audience melts into the coding of the film, and experiences the whole story among the male characters, just as they experience our life. "It is the viewing position that defines the movie, that is, changing the viewing position and exposing the possibility of viewing"[1] The inner logic of Ou Rong's film seems to correspond exactly to Laura's argument: as a controller and The narrator's Claude, as the searched and rescued woman (and later Jenna) trapped in Raphel's father and son. But when the film within the film, the story within the story begins to overflow, Ou Rong has begun to criticize and overthrow the pleasure structure of this traditional narrative by breaking the fourth wall. There is clearly a triple peep here, Claude peeking in reality, the teacher peeping in the work, and we peeping through the film. As the audience has the self-awareness of a French teacher - the one who is fascinated by the story, the plot, but the whole logic of pleasure happens in the second peep. When the boy walked out of the story and walked into the teacher's life, when this kind of peeping brought about the consequences of breaking the balance of reality, I believe every audience would feel horrified. Because this overflow disrupts this controlled pleasure experience, voyeurism begins to deconstruct and disequilibrate. The best thing is that in the end, when the two of them start to code the story together, do they think that we are also in this kind of coding, and the overflow caused by this imbalance of pleasure may one day overwhelm our lives.
[1]: Laura Mulvey, translated by Wu Bin, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Film", from "The Pleasure of the Gaze: Psychoanalysis of Film Texts" edited by Wu Qiong, 16
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