Political Metaphors in an Age of Moral Anxiety

As a student of journalism, I dare not say that watching this movie will make you understand better than others, but at least the angle of viewing is different. A lot of people think it's a noir movie, I personally don't fully agree. I feel that compared to traditional film noir, the characters' good and evil morals are more ambiguous. Charles delays rescuing Ollie in order to regain his job as a big-paper reporter by reporting fame. But in the end, he also worked hard to save Oli's life, and Yu Oli also had sympathy for him in his communication. Olly's wife seems inhumane, but it is also because of Olly's deception that he came to this desolate desert town. Secondly, the props that are common in film noir: guns, common police, and detectives are also basically in an alibi. I prefer to compare it to the moral anxiety films of Antonioni et al, perhaps more appropriately called a gray film.

The film undoubtedly uses the entertainment of the mass media as a satirical focus, expressing through Charles' story a sense of powerless moral anxiety in the fast-moving 1950s of American journalism. In one of the scenes, Charles said to other reporters who came to report: "Now that I'm on the boat and you're in the water, let's see how you swim up." The moral anxiety of journalism is the moral anxiety of journalists. What is a journalist is a person who has the right to speak. In the 1950s, with the rapid development of American journalism, the shadow of the war after World War II had not disappeared, and the terrifying atmosphere of the Cold War followed one after another. There is also the anti-communist and xenophobic movement represented by "McCarthyism". That's why Wilder, an immigrant, turned a 1929 miner's distress into such a gray film that shows the dark side of human nature. It also explains why no one wanted to see the movie at the time.

Through his portrayal of the hardest hit area of ​​"McCarthyism"—the moral anxiety of journalism, Wilder has peeled off the bright and beautiful shell of American society for us, allowing us to see the core that has begun to slowly deteriorate, and the American spirit has already begun to deteriorate. died.

Charles collapses at the end of the film, at the feet of the editor he had mocked, staring straight ahead. Confused people are asking: Where is the road?

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