Before discussing "Serious Man", let me talk about the first few works of the Coen brothers. Because although a creator will create many themes in his life, he often only discusses one or a few themes. This is also the meaning of Hou Xiaoxian's "a director only makes one movie in his life".
The Coen brothers received widespread attention in China after the 2008 Best Picture Oscar for "Old Nowhere". The reputation brought by the award made them quickly aroused the curiosity of a large number of Chinese audiences. But at the same time, "Old Nowhere" also made a large number of Chinese audiences cry out inexplicably. This is because the demand for movies from a wide range of movie audiences is still concentrated on the level of sensory stimulation. For most people, movies are just a pastime and entertainment project, which has neither practical significance nor a carrier of some profound and obscure humanistic claims. Movies like "Old Nowhere" should be said to require the audience to have a high level of knowledge and aesthetic literacy to understand and feel it. What makes many people wonder about "Old Nowhere" is precisely a theme that the Coen brothers have been creating for a long time-that is, to explore the relationship between contingency and destiny.
If you ask others, what determines a person's fate, I believe most people will answer that character determines fate. In other words, we generally prefer to believe that our own destiny is controlled by our own initiative. Of course, we will certainly not deny that the objective environment also affects our destiny. Therefore, when we use our subjective initiative to utilize, change or even create the objective environment, we are actually in the process of writing our own destiny. This is where most film and television literary works pay attention to the existence and destiny of human beings. In most of the stories we read, it is about a group of characters with different positions and motives each using their own abilities to practice their own will. These different wills often stand on opposite sides of value. As a result, the struggle between people and between people and the environment unfolded.
However, reading the works of the Coen brothers, you will find that there is a consistent theme in many of their creations. As I said before, they pay attention to the existence and destiny of mankind from another perspective-namely The impact of contingency on human existence and destiny.
Let's go back and understand the specific plot of "Old Nowhere", especially the most confusing and boring part of the general audience. For example, the end of the cowboy, originally he and the killer are rivals in the story, the audience will more or less look forward to the final battle between them. But after the cowboy showed his wisdom and bravery perfectly in front of the killer, he was inexplicably robbed and killed by another group of robbers who had nothing to do with the main story line. The killer's exit was also a bit peculiar. He suffered a car accident and then ran away. And this car accident is a completely isolated plot arrangement, it has nothing to do with the main story, the cowboys, and the property that the two sides are fighting for. Also, the old sheriff who traced the killer and the cowboy was even more depressed-he never really touched either the killer or the cowboy from beginning to end. All his efforts are in vain. His existence did not even affect the fate of the killer and the cowboy. The fate of all the characters in the film seems to be controlled by a larger and more mysterious force, falling into the dominance of impermanence and contingency.
Second, in "Burn after Reading"
, there have always been three keywords in the past creations of the Coen brothers: the contingency of fate, the subject of crime, and black humor. Among them, the exploration of the contingency of fate is their consistent theme. The black humor is like the tone of their narrative language, which is present in almost all of their works. The crime subject should be one of their favorite areas, but they have also photographed some other subjects. And this "Burn after Reading" is like a work that highly combines the three key words of the Coen Brothers. I think it is also a key to understanding the creative style of the Coen Brothers.
In the early works of the Coen brothers, such as "Blood Labyrinth", "Miller's Crossroads", "Ice and Blood Storm", "The Great Leboski", "The Absent Man", etc., are all crime themes. However, there are some oolong incidents or nonsensical sections that make the audience feel the absurdity of fate and the non-inevitability of cause and effect. And "Sister Milk Killer" completely distilled the black humor into a near-standard comedy. However, the story of "Old Nowhere" is unusually heavy, and there is almost no humor in this film. And the other film I will talk about, "Serious Man", is not a crime-themed story.
"Burn after Reading" revolves around a case in which Brad Pitt and Francis McDomond conspired to blackmail George Clooney, and Peter was killed by Clooney by mistake. The fate of the parties and some related people who were illogically changed due to the incident. This story is almost impossible to summarize. Incidents and emergencies emerge endlessly, making the characters unprepared. There is no character in the story whose destiny is in his own hands or embodied in the efforts made to change the objective environment. A mysterious force full of contingency and unpredictability controls everything, some very accidental and irrelevant factors are roughly cut together, so that the situation is always moving in the direction of unpredictability and lack of meaning.
At the end of the film, the senior government official asked the subordinate responsible for thoroughly investigating the case, "What lessons have we learned from this case?" I believe this is what all viewers want to ask. In the end, these complicated and inexplicable incidents are hidden behind the scenes. What lessons or profound significance? How should we summarize and summarize? However, his poor subordinate can only reply with a dumbfounded expression. So he scolded "What the fuck!"-this is actually a brilliant summary-"What the fuck" is the only attitude we can express when facing the absoluteness of fate.
3. What does "Serious Man" have to say
This film was released last year and is the latest work of the Coen brothers so far. After watching this film, I imagined that many people would ask, what the hell did this film want to say?
It's not that the Coen brothers haven't made an obscure film. In fact, they made a "Barton Funk", which caused many people, including me, to watch it very painfully. In that film, the Coen brothers blurred the imaginary space and the real space of the characters, and the plot switched back and forth between reality and surreal without prompting the audience for each switching point. But the puzzle that "Serious Man" brings to the audience is completely different. If you discuss the specific plot of the story, "Serious Man" can be described as very realistic and straightforward. It has no complicated plots and no confusing statements. However, I am afraid it is difficult for anyone to grasp the meaning of this story. And this is the question of most viewers-what is the significance of this story? The meaning I am talking about here does not refer to the meaning of "transmitting ideology through storytelling" that is widely disgusted by creators. What I mean by meaning refers to the theme of the story. What exactly the creator wants to show through this film. If you don't want to express anything, completely unconscious and unintentional, then I don't think anyone can create. Even if your creation is to deny the existence of creative meaning, then this is still a meaning. The theme of "Serious Man" is actually the old proposition of the Coen brothers-about the human situation under the contingency of fate. Of course, I'm afraid you will say that this is very similar to fatalism, it's an old talk, aren't there many films expressing this. However, almost no one's care and expression on this issue is as pure as the Coen brothers. Any of us can feel the impermanence and contingency of fate in real life. But as a narrative creation, if you simply portray this, the story will inevitably be fragmented and lack the backbone. The Coen brothers did. They do this almost all the time, but only this time do it most thoroughly. In their previous stories, the causality of developments was often severed, and the seemingly linear developments were suddenly complicated by irrelevant factors and deviated from expectations. As if to mock the audience, the characters in the story’s efforts to achieve their own goals, as well as the overall foreshadowing and trend of the plot, have almost clearly shown an overall picture in the audience’s mind, just like A painter has prepared a draft on the canvas and set the color tones. Onlookers thought that they would soon see the vivid details of the painting-but suddenly, the painter took out a spray gun and painted the picture beyond recognition, making everyone Stunned on the spot. But after all, when the Coen brothers did this before, they were not as direct and pure as this time. For example, although the characters in "Three Kings Escape" have been manipulated by inexplicable factors, after all, the story as a whole is legendary. , And the narration also reveals the tone of black humor everywhere. But "Serious Man" has nothing else.
The story of "Serious Man" is very plain, it is an ordinary life of an ordinary person. Although it also shows some elements about the midlife crisis, the generation gap between father and son, the culture of the Jewish community, and the conflict of values between American and Asian immigrants, etc.-the plot itself is still fragmented. You can hardly say that the patchwork of these elements contains a specific intention of the creator. In other words, there is no so-called plot meaning. At the same time, there is no signature crime description and black humor of the Coen brothers.
Perhaps because the story is too plain, the Coen brothers arranged a metaphorical fable before the start of the film-a couple. On a cold snowy night, the husband returned from the outside and said that he met a relative on the road, and Take him home. After hearing this, the wife was shocked to say that this relative was already dead, and the devil must have followed. Then the relative came in. His wife questioned him, but he categorically denied that he was dead, claiming that the wife had a wrong memory. In the end, the wife pierced the relative's heart with a knife, and the relative staggered and ran out. The story ends here.
The Coen brothers arranged this short story to reveal the theme of the film. This story is full of doubts. It neither explains whether this relative is a ghost or a ghost, nor tells what happened to him. So this story has four possibilities: this person is a ghost, he was stabbed to death by his wife, and died outside; this person is a ghost, but nothing He was stabbed to death and escaped; this man was a human, he was stabbed to death by his wife, and died outside; this man was a human, but he was not stabbed to death by his wife, and ran home. For the frightened old couple, although things happened, nothing was left. They have no way of knowing the truth of the matter. Regarding the inference of the four possibilities, they could neither prove any of them nor falsify any of them. In other words, there are many possibilities in the object world, but everything is unknown-neither predictable nor verifiable.
The next lesson in the story that the protagonist, as a professor, is responsible for is once again a metaphor for the theme. He told about the hypothesis of "Schrödinger's Cat" in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a complex and profound science, I don't understand it. However, there is a well-known difference between quantum mechanics and traditional mechanics, that is, traditional mechanics from Newton always has definite answers to the changes of physics that can be calculated and verified. For example, if you drop a one-kilogram iron ball at an altitude of 10,000 meters, the altitude of the iron ball in one minute can be calculated by a formula, and the result will not be wrong no matter how many times you test it. All physical changes in traditional mechanics, including all physical phenomena such as kinetic energy, potential energy, temperature, mass, speed, etc., have definite formulas and answers. However, when natural sciences developed into the microcosmic realm, scientists were surprised to find that physical formulas that had never been falsified in the macroscopic world actually did not work in the microscopic world. In the world of particles, even if you completely master all the relevant data of a particle, you still can't calculate its movement rules. Quantum mechanics was proposed to solve this unpredictable law. Quantum mechanics uses probability to replace the inevitable cause and effect in traditional mechanics. For example, for the same period of test, quantum mechanics gives the number of occurrences of A, the number of occurrences of B, and the number of occurrences of C... But it can never be given like traditional mechanics when explaining the macroscopic world. Definite answer. So physicist Schrödinger once made a famous hypothesis (quoted from Baidu Encyclopedia):
Because before the measurement, the state of a particle is ambiguous, in a mixture of various possibilities. For example, when a radioactive atom decays is completely probabilistic. As long as there is no observation, it is in a superimposed state of decay/non-decay, and only when it is measured can it randomly choose a state and appear. So let's put this atom in an opaque box to keep it in this superimposed state. Now Schrödinger imagined an ingeniously structured sophisticated device. Whenever an atom decays and releases a neutron, it triggers a chain reaction. The end result is to break a poison gas cylinder in the box, and at the same time there is a poor one in the box. s cat. The thing is obvious: if the atom decays, then the gas cylinder is broken and the cat is poisoned to death. If the atom does not decay, then the cat is alive and well. Quantum theory believes that if we do not open the lid for observation, we will never know whether the cat is dead or alive. The cat in the box is in a "dead and alive superposition state"-both dead and alive. Decide (not discover, but decide) its life and death.
In-depth discussion of the hypothesis of this "Schrödinger's cat" is of interest to scientists, and the connotation expressed by borrowing this scientific hypothesis in the film is: fate is impermanent and unpredictable, there is no formula to calculate, and there is no way to accurately test it. . The law of causality does not exist, or only exists outside the realm of human cognition. These are not only the concepts of quantum mechanics, but also a way of narrating the essence of existence by the Coen brothers.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the meaningless nature of life that we all have a pathological pursuit of meaning, and even deceive ourselves. Whether it is traditional foreign religious methods, domestic political ideological methods, or personal idealistic methods, without exception, they are trying to give life a meaningful interpretation. Movies, or other forms of literary and artistic works, of course cannot answer the meaning of life. But they can express concern for the human situation. Just like you are in a dark field with absolutely no light, it does not try to describe everything about light to you, but just gently puts you on a warm fluffy coat. The film concludes with an ancient wisdom: accept with simplicity everything that happens to you with a simple heart. This is the most warming proverb I have ever heard.
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