(Text / Xiaoqi)
In Dogville, an old-fashioned American town, one day suddenly broke into a mysterious woman, Grace . This is a town with harmonious residents and a strong democratic atmosphere.
Tom , a writer in the town ( the representative of the town's "conscience" and the bearer of profound thoughts) urged the villagers to keep the woman and set a two-week limit for Grace to win the trust and support of the villagers with her charisma and hard work. And the mechanism of villagers' voting decides her where to stay. In the end, Grace won the unanimous vote of the residents and settled in Dogtown.
However, as the police's search became more and more strict, the villagers' attitude towards her gradually changed, and they even believed that she was the embodiment of disaster.
Although Grace is still working day and night, it is difficult to break free from her tragic fate:
A townsman raped Grace with the threat of a whistleblower during a police raid;
The boy Jason asks Grace to beat him to satisfy his abusive needs, only to report Grace's "guilt" to his mother after being satisfied.
Grace tries to escape from Dogtown, but is shackled and belled by people after she fails. Since then, people have insulted her more casually, and even Tom has taken off the mask of kindness.
Grace became a dog in the town, worked and suffered, and her kindness and nobility were gradually eroded.
No one in the town could have imagined that this woman's mysterious life experience would make the humiliation at this moment a disaster in the future.
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The story takes place in a small town that resembles a "Xanadu" but is actually a purgatory on earth.
This bubble utopia, which is extremely distorted, opposed, and exclusive on the outside and inside, provides a breeding ground for a very critical social fable that reveals its dark undertones everywhere. Aside from the unique and alternative story setting level, the biggest feature of the film is its form between drama and film.
"Dog Town" is a practice that combines stage play and film and television art , and well uses theatrical elements such as screen, narration, and stage setting.
The whole film adopts the prologue and the narrative structure of the drama from Acts 1 to 9 , which accurately summarizes the development of each part of the plot or the trend of Grace's experience, and creates a clear structure of origin, inheritance, transformation and integration.
This reduces the audience's eager attention to the plot direction and the fate of the characters to a certain extent, but instead directs the audience's attention to the obscure, grass-snake and gray-line characters' psychology and behavioral logic.
The narration throughout the whole process not only introduces the background information such as the geographical location of Dog Town , the cultural situation and the changing weather season , but also delicately describes the inner activities of the characters , and even directly explains the events that happened to promote the development of the plot logically .
minimalist props
On stage effects and sets, the director used the concept of minimalism for ultra-stylized arrangements. The scope of the house demarcated with chalk, reduced to the necessary furniture and tools, the dogs and cultivated vegetables of the dog town in the form of chalk drawings, the invisible walls and doors... The objects other than the characters are simplified, In abstraction, everything that has nothing to do with connotation has been symbolized and clicked. As a result, the object image is deprived of the possibility of distracting the guest, and the restraint and interference of space on the expression of the film's connotation are subtly eliminated. Director Lars von Trier said: "This technology is like a psychological magnifying glass, which is closer to the characters." Behind the broken and detached look and feel is the abundant expressiveness of the characters and the coherence and authenticity of the characters' psychology. In addition, the pure black nighttime background and the white light overexposed daytime background, and the limited, cramped, and narrow dog town space presented in the overhead shot together create an extremely isolated, closed, and dull sensory effect, which effectively magnifies the The hypocrisy and ugliness of human nature.
daytime background
night background
Brecht , a German drama innovator , created and advocated the "alienation" stage art expression method, which is fully reflected in "Dogtown".
What is separation?
Simply put, it is the method of defamiliarization, which defamiliarizes or even bizarre the content and expression methods presented in the film, and jumps out of the comfort zone of the public. Familiarity makes people numb and throws thinking and criticism in the comfort zone, while appropriate defamiliarization allows the audience to withdraw and think usefully during the viewing process.
"Strip away the self-evident, well-known, and self-evident of an event or person, to create surprise and curiosity about it . " In Brecht's view, the process of alienation is the process of artificial alienation from the familiar.
In this way, on the surface, these people or things suddenly become extraordinary, surprising and puzzling, which naturally leads to thought-provoking and ultimately new understanding.
Going back to the text of the film , the God's perspective of the full top-down shot at the beginning or end of each chapter , the perspective privilege granted by the invisible wall, and the presence of the voice-over (voice-over) always imply that the viewer is estranged from the story, constantly confirming the viewer's The "bystander" position helps the viewer to maintain a state of calm analysis and accurate criticism.
Overhead shot at the beginning of each chapter
invisible wall
The minimalist setting allows the viewer to "play", and then builds the artistic effect of "closeness in distance, familiarity in strangeness".
With the above-mentioned structure with ulterior motives, the spiritual tentacles of "Dog Town" probe out a small and small space and a limited network of characters, break free of all constraints in the most symbolic phenomenon, and achieve pervasive and overflowing. Metaphorical social allegory.
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good and evil
With the appearance of the missing person notice and even the slanderous wanted notice, the villagers realized the additional risk of hiding and decided to continue to take Grace on the condition of extending the working hours and deducting the salary.
Wanted notice posted by police on Independence Day
On the private scales of the townspeople, Grace's contribution to their economy (although to the extent of exploitation) is no longer able to balance the guilt and anxiety of harboring "criminals" and breaking the law.
In order to make up for the imbalance and emptiness in their hearts, the residents of the town are covered with the legitimacy of the "majority" and the rationality of economic considerations, conforming to the "chain of evil" , enslaving and insulting Grace, and men treat her as a way to vent their sexual desires A tool, women use her as an object to vent the negative emotions of hard life.
On the surface, there seems to be a huge sense of separation between the kindness and simplicity of the residents of Dogtown at the beginning and the selfishness and ugliness later, but the essence or fundamental motivation is consistent.
Tom believes that the residents of the town are indifferent and selfish, and the appearance of Grace is a gift from the town and an opportunity to transform the spiritual world and soul quality of the town residents, so he proposes to take Grace.
The good deeds of the town residents, on the one hand, are a refutation of Tom's critical conclusions, and on the other hand, they are also self-anesthetic exhibitions of conscience and virtues. The starting point of his good deeds is to seek inner peace and self-satisfaction, and the perspective is inward.
In "Dogtown", good and evil are by no means a simple binary opposition. Good and evil are the same in the most secret and primitive motivation. They are both driven by human nature, and they are the same thing in different forms. It's just performance. "Human nature is inherently evil". Violence and evil are primitive impulses that rely on potential energy and inertia. They are the weakness of human nature and the performance of animal instincts. Goodness is conditional and self-glorifying.
Grace is shackled after failing to escape
It is worth mentioning the names of Vera's children. They are Dalia, Olympia, Diana, Athena, Pandora, Jason and Achilles .
Except for Jason, the names of the other children are taken from the names of the gods in ancient Greek mythology, and only Jason is a common English name. Like the universality of his name, this child embodies the complexity and darkness of human nature, and also confirms the dark nature of human beings from the side.
In addition to the people of Gouzhen who are the theme of evil, there are two other characters worth discussing: one is Tom , who thinks he is morally superior and has advanced thinking. Baikong's heart and the ridiculous face of extreme hypocrisy.
The other is Grace , the heroine who claims to be a saint and always practices the concept of empathy and absolute tolerance of Christianity . The evil under her impregnable and splendid moral tower has gradually awakened, surging and gushing out.
With the power of the father, the logic of evil finally replaced hypocrisy and hypocrisy. The punishment that used violence to control violence and acted for the heaven finally appeared.
Grace's abuse of power was like the overwhelming majority of the townspeople used to do, under the guise of democracy. In both cases, power seems to promote and breed evil, but the real evil is in nature.
Thinking, aspiring Tom, morally virtuous Grace, is nothing but evil racking her brains and trying her best to glorify herself, and in that sense, all are evil. Thiel's criticism is not aimed at a certain region, nor only exists in fictional stories. His spearhead is not only directed at American society, but also pointedly pointed out that the entire human society, which is running happily in the material tide, is the most rooted in human nature. The kindness and love are gradually fading away.
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groups and individuals
The concept behind the violence of the people of Dogtown is a big word with innate rationality and unquestionable correctness— democracy .
This democracy is the cover of its human weakness, the last dam before its social functioning collapses. The insensitive, selfish, indifferent people of Dogtown barely maintain a harmony full of opposition and loopholes under the light of democracy, until the appearance of Grace breaks the balance of Dogtown.
The mechanical cycle of labor, the polite socializing without spiritual communication, and the plastic neighbors are all shattered by this uninvited guest.
Democracy, after this hard-maintained stability was destroyed, gradually became a tool and support for the violence of the people of Dogtown. This system, which represents collective interests or maximizes interests, exploits and oppresses individuals as it should, resulting in the tyranny of the majority.
There is a detail in the film : when the people of Dogtown voted for the first time to decide whether Grace should stay or not, Grace could stay only if it passed unanimously (the unanimous principle here also reflects a certain immaturity of the town's democratic mechanism. ).
Of course Grace did too, and the residents unanimously agreed that she would stay.
However, in the past two weeks, Grace has obviously failed to gain the favor and trust of a few residents. So, in addition to the motive of showing one's kindness, is there another layer of cause and effect, another logic? And does this underlying logic have something to do with Grace's tragic ending?
It is not difficult to find that in an extremely closed environment like Dogtown, both good and evil are extremely contagious. Using crowd psychology to explain, this is a kind of group blind thinking.
Due to the occlusion of information and the relatively small number of people, the individual's thinking and judgment are easily degraded and atrophied by collective pressure, resulting in a high degree of consistency of opinion arising from conformity. Collective rationality and collective moral superiority are deified, resulting in blind exclusivity.
"The Rabble" expounds the emotional characteristics of group impulse, gullibility, emotional exaggeration, intolerance, and domination, and these emotional characteristics polarize group beliefs and behaviors. This is Grace who enjoys exaggerated goodwill and suffers inhuman violence at the same time. deep logic.
Grace has always forgiven the atrocities of the people of the town infinitely, because "if I were one of them, I would do the same".
Shadow wants to ask everyone, "If you were a member of the village, would you be a naysayer? Would you not fit in?" You know, silence and bystanders are also part of violence, can we escape the whirlpool of this crime? Everything here is just like the world in which the madman lived in Lu Xun's description. "Cannibals" are unconscious social roles, and no one can escape evil.
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The real dilemma of Christianity
The film has Christian shadows everywhere.
The mysterious life experience of Grace mentioned at the beginning is closely related to this level of interpretation. Tom betrays Grace after being exposed by Grace and her hypocrisy.
A few days later, the gang's convoy came to the town. The fact is that Grace fled to refuse to inherit the mantle of her father's gang leader, and all the missing people and wanted notices were just a coup devised by her father to find her daughter.
This kind of trick can be said to have the greatest effect on the residents of the small town. At the end of the film, Grace decided to use her father's power to clean up the town, let her father's men shoot the people of the town, and personally knew Tom, leaving only one dog.
Grace's high degree of moral purity, Tom's mission to transform the townspeople, brutal atrocities and great tolerance, and the massacre in the name of "redemption" at the end of the film all point to the context of Christianity.
Some netizens "said words" like this: The heroine's name Grace has many meanings in English.
The first explanation is "grace" and "mercy", and most of this grace and mercy comes from God.
The second is the favor at the personnel level. And this echoes the image of a devout believer like Grace, Joan of Arc, and savior created in the film.
Following the inference that "Grace symbolizes and represents God", is the massacre at the end reasonable? This is not Jesus' self-sacrifice to atone for mankind. This is in the name of "redemption", using power and death to wash away sins, and it is essentially anti-Christ. Is Grace Really God?
In the film, there is a dialogue between Grace and her father about "arrogance":
Grace: Why shouldn't I be compassionate?
Father: No, sometimes you should be merciful, but it's only fair that your standards are the same. You are wrong and should be punished, and so are they.
Grace: They are people.
Father: Are people responsible for their actions? Sure, but you don't give them a chance. You forgive them because you think your morals are higher than others, which is extremely arrogant. I love you, but I've never met anyone more arrogant than you, and you call me arrogant.
My father's words were piercing. Grace's self-positioning is higher than ordinary human beings with transcendent morality ("they are human", the subtext is "I am not"), and no matter how self-improvement is psychologically, she will not be God himself after all Therefore, we cannot overstep our duty to try to forgive and judge something.
Dostoevsky said: "I only worry about one thing, that I am not worthy of my suffering".
With the blessing of power, Grace decorated "revenge" with "salvation", brutally slaughtered Dogtown, and completely degenerated from a morally flawless "saint" into a dragon. She was completely immersed in her own suffering, fell below the moral high ground she was struggling to maintain, and made a meaningless and even self-denying escape.
It is very interesting that in the highly sculptural sets and props, the little porcelain figures that Grace has exchanged for her hard work uses clear objects.
Grace believes that these little china figures are "a product of her encounter with Dogtown", and they prove that no matter what, her suffering pays off.
But the little porcelain was finally broken by the mother of the seven children in front of Grace (Grace's revenge for her was to let her witness the seven children being shot one after another, which is pure revenge), just as Grace The self-destruction along the way is meaningless. Her suffering is fruitless, and she is not worthy of her suffering.
Such a tragedy is rooted in the contradiction between Christian belief and real society. If absolute tolerance transcends the doctrine and is applied to the practical level, it will lose the support of human nature, breed greed and sin, and in the end only achieve its own arrogance.
The operation of modern society requires the guidance of "justice". Grace's flight destroyed the practical rationale of Christianity's "absolute tolerance" from within.
"Dog Town" adopts a very unique stage play form, achieves the effect of "alienation", and uses this form to shape a utopia. Then it gradually, comprehensively, and sharply revealed its true face, effectively "dystopia". This social fable shows the survival dilemma of too many modern people. Dogtown is like a knife, slicing dreams and showing the dirt under the texture of social human nature.
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