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I told you I hate writing reviews. But this one is to you, dear fellow sufferer. Today I wandered around the deserted corners of St. Michel, thinking about how, with my healthy contented approving glances, this is my Paris. A marvelous city. A marvelous city that everybody breathing here, even a non-citizen, can claim to be hers. A marvelous failing city that feeds on the idleness of her past, with a stylistic nonchalance that is, at heart, an incompetence. And she knows this all too well, casting a cold eye.
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Chapter One. Fitzgerald wrote in some random book, “the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world”. Now, are we not at once enraptured and disturbed by the wild promise and sublime beauty of the scene where Issac and Mary sit on the bench facing the Greensboro Bridge? Why these two human beings fall in love is the biggest mystery. He hated her at the first sight. He hated all her talk about “the academy of the overrated” (she included Bergman, how dare her) and the negative capability. She is Paul from Midnight in Paris, the Columbia Professor from Annie Hall, the whore in the Whore of Mensa, Ellen Page from to Rome with Love. She is Woody Allen's archenemy – the original self-possessed pseudo-intellectual.
Now I'm writing all this on my inhibited memory, so bear with me if I get the lines wrong. Mary confessed, at one point, about her feeling towards the penis, that she's both attracted to and repelled by it. A Freudian moment . There's desire, and there's repression. And this desire starts with an absence, an interval, a (moment of) lack. Like homophobics whose repression of attraction is transformed into hatred, Issac is saying “no” to these pseudo-intellectuals because, the hell, who can say he is not one himself?
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I've discussed this with you: when the Columbia professor from Annie Hall started to talk about McLuhan in the queue, Woody broke the fourth wall to drag the real McLuhan into this scene , and “made” him say the following words:
Man in Theatre Line: Oh really, really? I happen to teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media, and Culture.” So I think that my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy Singer : Oh, do ya? Well, that's funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just lemme lemme lemme — [pulls McLuhan from behind a nearby poster stand] — Come over here for a second . Tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying. You know nothing of my work. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. How you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.
Alvy Singer: [breaking the fourth wall] Boy, if life were only like this!
He said, if life were only like this. To this fictional scene, McLuhan is God, in the sense that he is the real and the supposedly “all-knowing”. The whole scene has a disturbing flavor of testing God and demanding a miracle . Remember Ivan Karamazov? You do not tempt the Lord. If you tempt God you will lose all faith in him and will dash into pieces against the earth. Woody wants to be the God of Truth, like when Issac told Yale that he would like to model himself after God. But look closely at McLuhan's lines, and you'll be amazed by director's level of self-censorship. You mean my whole fallacy is wrong. His fallacy? This God of his is a God of fallacy.
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He hated Mary, because he is Mary.
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And because he is Mary, this is the gradual collapse of a history of narcissism. Just kidding. It’s too late, at this moment I suddenly don’t want to talk about philosophy, and I don’t want to write English. I don’t want to write about the Oedipus triangle between yale-issac-mary, how Mary is a specimen of a woody female character, or the double consciousness of the director. Maybe I should stop theorizing emotions that cannot be theorized and try to catch the wind. I watched the conversation they had walked out of the Fellini set over and over again, trying to find the nodes of love.
So I made a new discovery: not love.
Confronting Yale's biology classroom, he pronounced the name Zelda Fitzgerald.
See, I've always had this penchant...
...for what I call "kamikaze women."
I call them kamikazes because they crash their plane.
They crash it into you, and you die with them.
As soon as there's little chance of it working out...
...something clicks in my mind.
Maybe because I'm a writer.
A dramatic or aesthetic component becomes right...
...and I go after that person.
There's a certain ambience that's almost...
...as if I fall in love with the situation
.-"husbands and wives"
一An illusion of mutual understanding, a game between words, clichés. Godard said to say goodbye to the language tyrant. Vocabulary and fantasy make up this specious love. Adam Phillips said that we will never love a person as a whole, but love a gesture, a sentence, a smile – in a sense we are all fetishists – and this will be lost. Once the fantasy becomes reality, it will be lost. Woody keeps saying similar things over and over again. Do you remember that in Everyone says I love you, Woody's role (you see, such a role is always a director) Because of the intelligence of the psychologist, I learned about every fetish of Julia Roberts. With a fantasy of every dream, he can act as a perfect lover, rent a perfect room in Paris, and discuss the perfect Tintoretto and the perfect Bora Bora with her. However, she finally left him, "My dreams have come true, so I don't fear them anymore."
My dreams have come true, so I am no longer afraid and need it.
The scenes of Mary and Issac are very dramatic, a carefully constructed and carefully maintained world-fellini party, midnight Manhattan, rainstorm planetarium-when the scene slowly moved under the eaves, it moved day after day. , The scene quietly ended.
At this moment, tracy, tracy's face, in her absence, has become something that can be used to create dreams.
Why is life worth living? It's a very good question. Um... Well, There are certain things I guess that make it worthwhile. Like what... okay... um... For me, uh... ooh ... I would say... what, Groucho Marx, to name one thing... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues... um... Swedish movies, naturally... Sentimental Education by Flaubert... uh... Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra... those incredible Apples and Pears by Cezanne... uh. .. the crabs at Sam Wo's... uh... Tracy's face...
It is ridiculous that before he said Tracy's face, it was a series of labels and symbols, cultural capital. It's something Mary can understand but Tracy can't. The funny thing is that he also said to Mary, the Mind is the most overrated organ. When he expresses his love, he still has to use these cultural capitals as a frame of reference. He can no longer feel through these filters, he understands this. He constantly changed his novel, thinking that the beginning was too corny. And please pay attention, Sentimental Education, please pay attention. Is there anything more ironic than this?
It was too late, and the cat was fighting again, grabbing my persimmon to eat. Tomorrow I will write Chapter Two, about why I like Tracy.
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Chapter 3 is a bit self-willed, looking at Matisse unwillingly when writing. Keep it for now.
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Chapter 4
Sin and wrong, the end of the match, and Cassandra’s dream are all talking about one thing tirelessly: how much you can do for your status. Woody also said in an interview that this is an introspective Macbeth. In Manhattan, class consciousness is hidden in emotions and images-what you see is a private art gallery, Central Park opened only for you, an Invitation Only dinner, the camera is always upward, and what you can't see is lying on the street. Homeless people. Why is this a black and white film, and what does black and white mean? You say this is romanticism, it is an indescribable nostalgia, but I think that researchers in the 1950s mistakenly thought that there was no color in dreams. Dreams lead to the unconscious. There is never two things in the dream: there is no fighting between incompatible wishes – they simply resolve themselves into a compromise formation., there is no negation (the unconscious knows no negation, only “contents, cathected with greater or lesser strength”) . Simply put, the unconscious does not need to write instructions or petitions for itself. Black and white are unconscious revenge against morality. I have some very dark thoughts-brown water, the psychiatrist who called Mary for help at three in the morning-these all appear in this world gently and skillfully, without deliberation and explanation, but in Issac. The babbling, as always, melted in the complaint. The most interesting thing is that there is no order in this story. You can read it straight up, read it upside down, and split a page from the middle to read. It's all the same-the same story, the same neurosis.
Tracy's role is-she is a door key, you can look at the unconscious world through her lens, and see that this is really ridiculous, so you can start to analyze the contradictions and start to deny it. When Issac and Tracy are together, he can't stand Mary's stuff (you who want to discuss ethics, maybe you can think of Tracy as his moral foundation, but I don't want to think so). However, when Tracy quietly exited, he saw Mary alone. Especially, it was after an iconic Fellini dinner (I really like this passage/expression, is there something more like a dream than Fellini's dinner?), he "seems to be" in love with Mary. He believes that this sudden love is normal, and there is no need to reconcile with himself-like hidden violence against lesbians, understatement of class, perseverance to middle-class family concepts-he doesn't talk about these! Of course, he is an artist, and we should not be harsh on his social criticism. But when he sneered at Hollywood and nauseated with these cultural rubbish, I still shook my head gently. How to say it, we-especially, as players in the game, people in the play-always choose to see what we want to see, and ignore what we want to ignore. We always go back and forth between dream and reality, looking for the other one at a time, never ending. He-a blindly self-confident, blindly narcissist-can always find Tracy, and she always seems to not run far. Although in the end she ran away and gave him an incredible life comment.
PS "Your self esteem is like a notch below Kafka's."-if anyone ever doubts Woody's genius, this one-liner could shut them up.
PSS intends to add a chapter in thesis to expose the author's identity bias, and how that plays into the argument in this whole shit. I don’t know if Antonio will buy it.
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