As a dream-making machine, the prosperity and development of film has always been inseparable from the literary matrix of dreams. Freud's dream analysis theory, born at the same time, also made an invaluable contribution to the supplementary development of film theory. Regarding Bergman's "Masquerade", I dare not pretend that I understand all of it, but I want to try to decipher this work based on my simple understanding of psychoanalysis.
In the first 6 minutes of the film, a series of clips projected by the projector appear in the film screen. These unrelated montage clips point directly at the film medium itself, which is also the film’s self-reference about the film element itself. In this dreamlike passage, in the last part of the picture shown by the director, there are dead people and life flowing with blood, showing the cruel and ruthless side of life directly to the audience, as if to foreshadow the next plot in advance. The first half of the picture is more like the scene that people encounter when they are in a state of unconsciousness and their thoughts wander aimlessly.
Then the movie begins to unfold. While filming the film, the currently hot actress suddenly suffered from a mental breakdown that made it impossible to continue filming. At the invitation of the doctor, the actress who was sent to the hospital went to the doctor's seaside hut to recuperate with the hospital nurse.
In the following development, we can know that the nurse is actually a personality split from the actress herself. And why there is a split personality, you can find some clues from the dialogue between the two people.
Through the mouth of the nurse, the audience can know that the actress has a child, but she does not like the child, it can even be said that she hates it. But at the beginning, she really wanted a child because she was ridiculed by others that she had no motherly heart. Human beings are a product of the environment, and ethics are interpersonal rules formulated to constrain the primitiveness of human beings. In the process of growing up, this external ethical rule is internalized into the superego in our inner structure, which is also the The subconscious mind hidden beneath the conscious mind.
The question that others have about whether the actress has a motherly heart is also the suspicion she has had for a long time, but it was pointed out directly today, which seriously stimulated the weakness in her heart. So she has to clear this suspicion by having a baby. But the child she gave birth just proved that she really lacked a mother's heart.
This result is inconsistent with her long-held moral values. Under the accusation of the strong superego, her heart is overwhelmed and gradually begins to split. In the end, he had a mental breakdown and could not continue to appear in movies. He began to have an avoidant personality tendency, feared all contact with the outside world, and classified the personality of a nurse.
In the life on the island, the actress seems to suffer from aphasia, and almost only the nurse speaks in their lives. On a quiet rainy night, the nurse confessed to the actress that she had had an affair. She had sex with two teens she didn't know while sunbathing with her best friend. And after returning home, he also had sex with his other half. After this she became pregnant. However, she reluctantly had an abortion at the strong request of the other half. After she finished speaking, she fell into tears while covering her face. It certainly shows how sad she is to lose the child.
But the nurse is an actress with a split personality, so this affair is undoubtedly a fictional story. So why did the actress make up the story? I personally think it's to make up for the split in her heart. The nurse could not guarantee the blood relationship of the child because of the sexual relationship with the teenager, and there was also pressure from her husband to request an abortion, so she was finally forced to accept an abortion reluctantly. The idea of abortion is actually what the actress wanted to do at the beginning, but the nurse has a reasonable excuse for this idea. The last mask is also to cover up the fact that she lacks a mother's heart.
The footage of the actress comforting the nurse that night shows that through such a fictional story, the actress's heart has finally reached a balance. Later, the actress began to pick up the plot of the script again, which also showed that her heart gradually became stable.
However, disputes still occurred between the two sides, and the two personalities began to split again. In the conflict, the nurse's strong demand for the actress to speak up forced her to face her true self, and the actress had to accept the fact that she hated her own child painfully. In the last shot where the two overlap, it is implied that the two personalities are beginning to reunite.
The scene of the filming that appears at the end of the film is another self-referential reference to the elements of the film itself, implying that everything that happened in the story is not real, but just an illusory dream.
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