Introduction
Elias Canetti once quoted an Indian folk tale in Crowds and Powers: The laundryman had a donkey that could carry heavy loads. In order to feed it, he put tiger skins on it every evening and put it in the neighbors. People Tanaka, no one dared to approach it. One evening, a guard in a donkey's skin ambushed in the field, intending to fight the "tiger" to the death. The donkey in the tiger's skin was full of food and drink in the field, and when he saw the "donkey" in Tanaka, he suddenly became lustful and ran towards him with a neigh.
There are quite a few interesting points in this story, in which the laundryman is like a deity in charge of "skin", but his existence is completely entrusted to the donkey in the story, and the donkey in tiger's skin is matched with the guard in donkey's skin. The best part of the fun is that the donkey's erotic desire after it is full, which also led to its death. What is terrifying in this story is how scarce the human element is! Cunning, greed and fear surround this little god of the field, but only the love of the donkey moves us in the twilight, and that's why the alarm is lifted.
I put this little story about "camouflage" at the beginning, because it's very relevant to the subject we're going to discuss next, and hopefully, it also shows why we still need to revisit "Delusional Agent" today.
Notice, the entire article will contain multiple incoherent chapters with a total of more than 10,000 words. Friends, if you are in sync with my brain circuits, I am very happy that you can take away the treasure inside; if you find that I am talking nonsense, you are welcome to point out the fallacy; if you just don't have the time and patience to accompany me on a reading comprehension adventure , why not choose another opportunity? The rest of life is still very long.
Chapter Summary (First Edition):
1. A new understanding of the concept of agent
2. People without shadows; shadows as agents
3. What is the mascot?
4. Knotted bat
5. The role of TV violence
6. Escape into daydreaming
7. Domesticated animals
8. Animation and monsters
9. Animation and horror
What is the agent for?
Delusional Agent is one of my obsessions, but one question has always bothered me: what does the concept of "agent" mean? Does this really refer to a person? I think that before entering into the specific interpretation of images, it is necessary to first clarify the concept of "agent" itself in the understanding of "Agent".
Judging from the English translation of Paranoia Agent , if the Agent is understood as a special agent detective as the name suggests, the position of the protagonist will automatically slip into the Ma Ting agent, which is what I thought a few years ago. But looking at Ma Ting's performance in the whole play, this kind of setting is actually very unconvincing, and even putting the title of paranoia agent in "Twin Peaks" with "paranoia agent cooper" as the protagonist is not enough. Appropriate, because the real protagonist is clearly the mechanics of that world itself.
In my later studies, I discovered that agent/agency (actor) is one of the central issues in the field of sociology, and "Delusional Agent" is the closest to the sociological vision of Jin Min's works. As far as I understand it, the reason why traditional sociology does not recognize actors other than individuals is that it hopes to save people from "delusions" in one fell swoop, and to draw a line from philosophy and metaphysics in order to open up a field for sociology itself. area. Such a requirement of "do not multiply entities" will inevitably fail to respond to unmeasurable variables, and there is no way to convene a wider society.
The fact that society does not have to reach Durkheim's "anomesis" as violent backlash to justify itself, his opponent Talder understands this more clearly, many agencies other than individuals can unknowingly Entering agents to achieve their purposes, as in ANT theory, actions have actually been occupied by inhuman external forces.
Actors don't self-evidently live in a real world, ranging from classical tragedies to comedies, novels, plays, and films that provide a vast training ground for what makes us act. A belated fruit.
Then, the real question emerges, if we regard "Baby Boy and Marumi" as the "delusional agent" in the title, can such art objects (Art Objects) represent the delusional action in the field of sociology What about the Paranoia Agent? Regrettably, even Latour himself would deny this if we stay only in the field of sociology. Because the artwork itself cannot be socialized, it has no mouthpiece to defend itself in a responsible society, and even the path of the sociology of art is mostly between artists, institutions and fields. Presumably you will also question this assertion when you see it: Should sociologists believe that an image has the ability to act on its own?
If we take "art" in the broadest sense as a system for changing the world, rather than a propositional code about the world, it is possible to enter into obscure delusional action. The book that responds most forcefully to this question is Art and Agency, by which author Alfred Gell ranks among the most dynamic theorists in the anthropology of art. Art objects, of course, do not act on their own, Gell pointed out, but they can be integrated into social behavioral systems as secondary agencies :
"Agent" means those things that initiate a particular type of causal sequence in which events are caused by acts of will or intention, not just a union of physical events. A proxy actor is a source of action in its vicinity that 'causes an event', and as a result of the exercise of this proxy, some event occurs (not necessarily a specific event 'intention' of the proxy).
Physical/physical causal chains consist of 'events' that can be explained by physical laws that ultimately govern the entire universe, and 'actions' initiated by agents that are caused by their own 'intentions'. The agent is the source of causal events, the origin, independent of the state of the physical universe. In fact, the nature of the association between an agent's beliefs, intentions, etc. and the external events he/she causes through 'action' is very philosophically debatable.
To sum up, the magic of agency lies in the ability to perform multiple causal bindings with a non-inductive and non-physical will , as we saw in "Delusional Agents," where Marumi and Bat Boy both act as Some volitional entity carries out its own actions and takes the whole mystery of the fermentation into itself.
shadow as proxy
In the ninth episode, Jin Min made a " people who lost their shadows " unit, which is a wonderful pen in the history of Japanese tv animation. When we are worried about the safety of the trio, we can think about it: Did the animated characters originally have shadows? Do animated characters really 'die'?
We always involuntarily bring the rules of real life into the fictional world, so we often ignore the fact that the paper man has no shadow (only a standing painting), think of the " laundryman's donkey " we mentioned at the beginning.
Perhaps we think that the formation of shadows is simply a lack of light, or an unnecessary accompanying phenomenon, which contrasts with peoples who never trace shadows in their paintings, for whom painting itself is a projection of the world.
It's problematic when an animated character finds out he's a paper man, and viewers who see Toshi Kon as an essential film director are completely blind to animation's most horrific expressions. As everyone knows, in the animation world, there is no camera and the domination of the phenomenal world. There is only a deformed god and an empty ancient house .
Let's recall that in "Weima's Ministry", Weima's greatest fear is to be objectified into a " fake image ", but unfortunately, she is, a moving image without shadows. Of course, the animation here is not an inferior medium - " live-action performances have no chance to achieve this irony, and there is no effective means to directly penetrate into the imaginary and symbolic worlds ", which is what all later imitators of the film missed. Understanding: Second-rate directors try to move from reality to fiction, while great directors wrap reality in a torrent of fiction.
Returning to the definition mentioned above, in Alfred Gell's "agent" theory, the shadow is naturally the agent of human beings, and this extremely restless form has been considered to be closely related to the state of human beings since ancient times. What has really exploded since modern times is the frontier of shadows and ghosts, which come silently and inhabit the thread of every action. They gladly acted as echoes of the world, occasionally in the murmur of telephones, faintly discernible in the quiet noise of Gulf cables, flying through thick clouds.
Critics have debated for centuries Shamiso's famous novel "The Shadow Sellers," trying to name the book's shadows. To me, losing the shadow means completely losing the ability to resort to agency, always trapped in an insurmountable chasm, lost in the gap between two words. Few people know that what we call the "soul" that bridges this distance.
mascot
"Delusional Agent" raises the question through Malomei: What is a mascot? If we want to define these cute things that people turn a blind eye to, "the ambassador who introduces some inhuman existence and its movement with his own static image and tries to vouch for it".
In Japan, the magic of images has never lost its fans, and the eight million Shinto gods have been transformed into mascots in a consumer society. On a map of Japan, a large number of mascots are spread across the surface of the globe. The little gods stand proudly at the junction of totems, fetishes and idols . They are not only the border of a huge country, but also a comfortable commodity that can be grasped.
The mascot belongs to the same family of mask (mask) and mascara (mascara) in terms of English etymology. It was invented in the 19th century in association with fetishes and witchcraft, and its roots are in Among the ancient totem beliefs.
Sometimes seemingly peaceful signs often have a violent origin, and Freud found a slain father behind the totem as the first animated (animated) image of the primordial mind. .
We can think about the fact that those vicious criminals are more likely to be regarded as a cultural symbol and appear in the streets through artistic processing. The best footnote about Spielberg's "Jaws" is that the model shark became a hot toy for kids on the beach. There is a similar hint in "The House of Weima", the transition from siren to toy car. Didn't Wei Ma himself step on the junction of totems, fetishes and idols?
According to Richard Halpern, a 16th-century drawing of a meat pig by Borugel the Elder may be the first approximation of an advertising mascot in art history: a ham with a knife on its back, running for hundreds of years in an unnamed field.
The funny cruelty of human beings has been vividly displayed in the mascots. Just imagine that we can let a chicken sell another chicken, and let a cow brag about the fatness of its compatriots. These figures are representations of the fidelity of the host's commodity , but representations of betrayal and bloodthirsty to their fellow men .
" To make you appear so that you may be blinded " is the embodiment of what Freud called the logic of disavowal , and every time I look into it, my stomach cramps. Jin Min's talent lies in perfectly grasping such paradoxical laws and serving them to the double-binding mechanism of the totality of images.
knotted bat
Let us stop at the two meanings of Representation for a little extension. The first half of the 20th century, as a blowout period for modern art, should have marked the twilight of the ancient category of "representation", but in Jean-Luc Nancy's view it was the opposite, when so many images were needed to give shape to things ( make things present), so that each genre, group, and party scrambles to forge its own image.
For example, the fascist logo prototype is taken from the ancient Roman beam , which symbolizes the authority of the dictator. As a symbol of unity and strength, the image of this bundle of sticks has always reappeared in fantastic places: in the coat of arms of the republic after the French Revolution, in the seat of the statue of Lincoln, on coins issued by the United States during World War I. Until it became the orthodox symbol of fascism, the ancient Roman rod became the embodiment of nightmares, or " delusional agents " in the literal sense.
In the same way, hasn't the juvenile bat always been a national sporting device that is harmless to humans and animals? What Phallus was referring to was a flash of broad sunshine, but what was this annoying bend?
If you don't resort to a huge physical impact, but just intuit the shape, you can see that the shape is similar to a positive ✔︎, if you look more closely, you will find that it is a ✔︎ bound with a ✗.
As early as in "The House of Weima", Jin Min designed the image of the King of Viruses (Bug King) around the shape of the hook. When he exited the scene at the beginning, he threatened to continue to spread disaster and chaos. Maybe it is the whole scene. The "culprit" of the farce. At this point, it is not difficult to conclude that the bat in "Delusional Agent" is also a "bundle bat" : a powerful symbol originally used for alertness and unity, in the mutual reinforcement of violence and truth, it finally stumbles into a delusional dream , becomes the negation in the affirmation, the shadow under the sun.
appreciate tv violence
The relationship between Baseball Boy and Marumi is quite complicated. If we say that they are different from each other, how should we understand so many expressions of duality; if we say that they are one and the same, why is Marumi protecting Yuezi from Baseball Boy? Woolen cloth?
I could go to great lengths to lay out the arguments, but there is a way to sum it up in one sentence: go to the Twin Peaks set next door, and you'll find that the two shows actually overlap a lot in terms of inspiration. In other words, knowing the relationship between Bob and the one-armed man and the dwarf will also clarify the corresponding relationship in "Delusional Agent".
Gnomes once said: They came from a place where the birds chirped and music filled the air, and there were many of the same rooms in that place, where the same stories were played out . Where do you think that place will be? It's funny, it's on TV . (The birds chirping is the sound of electricity, the music is the TV background music, and there is a similar soap opera in the room)
The baseball boy also came from a similar place. Like its predecessor, BUG KING, it was on the endless prairie, and it stood on the classic interface of the Windows system.
Reading this, you may ask, am I implying that Twin Peaks and Delusional Agent are both reflexive meta-fiction works? Well, if all the hints are combined, this is all the more remarkable.
Baudelaire, who complained that newspapers spilled blood on Parisian tables every morning, could not have imagined the situation of 20th-century television viewers. Television is not just the embodiment of mass entertainment, it is also a massive arson device. For TV, it is an inexhaustible energy source that allows viewers to enjoy violence with peace of mind. This sense of prohibition is exactly why TV attracts our attention time and time again.
We've never actually had so many serial killings, but we did have a one-on-one series where we were told there was a lot of fun in killing before the serial killer was brought to the rescue. Bob in Twin Peaks, though brutal, brings energy to TV (Garmonbozia), which is why Mike the One-Armed and the Gnome hunt down Bob but relatively indulge him.
David Lynch talked about the phenomenon in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1990 that the public , accustomed to the violence rendered on TV, thinks killing is a lighthearted and pleasant thing, which is very important to him. Language is truly morbid . "Delusional Agent" also follows a similar line of thinking in its handling of the baseball boy's attack. There is no blood and pain, only a new look. Being attacked can even prompt the victim to look at his life through a new lens.
So why not do it? We are always willing victims in our imaginations of terror, and we even hope to regain our confidence in the drama of life through the lens of delusion, and that is the joy of being a victim. In the fourth episode of the second season of "Twin Peaks", the one-armed Mike described Bob like this: He is BOB, eager for fun! He wears a smile. Everyone run . (He's Bob, always having fun! He's smiling and everyone runs away.) Yes, everyone runs, except the slow one, and the guys who stop voluntarily.
"Delusional Agent", like "Twin Peaks", is a one-of-a-kind foray into television by film directors, which inevitably brings about a paradigm shift from the big screen to the small screen. The former's thoughts on tv animation condensed into "Baby Boy", and the latter's reflection on soap operas created "Bob". They are both superficial and violent deities that are staged on TV day after day. The innocent crowd picks its own victims, suitable for everyone to watch while eating creamed corn (Garmonbozia).
To sum up, Bob, like Baseball Boy, are both humanoid incarnations of the concept of "violence", but they are not violent madmen who are designated as the "root of all evil", but gods associated with the operation of the two worlds. To continue the analysis on this basis, we only need to introduce an anti-common sense concept: Generative Violence, which not only brings energy to TV and life, but also brings similarities to the people on the show. effect.
It's not hard to understand, just review the hint from the episode: the first reaction of everyone who was attacked by the baseball boy was relief! Not only did they come out of their previous state of crisis, but they succeeded in reaching reconciliation with themselves . For them, of course, violence is not just about being slapped for no reason, but being pulled from horrific depths back to a seemingly peaceful surface. Bat Boy, like Bob, is a shallow deity, and many people worship them for it, even though Myth means a lie.
Violence is productive, how is it possible? Aristotle would also ask himself the question: what exactly do people see in tragedy that makes them mesmerized, and what brings them back to themselves in tears. He draws the conclusion of Catharsis (catharsis, purification) from the fact of expelling fear, pity, and harmful things, but this is far from real production. Nietzsche viewed this view with contempt. He knew very well that in the violent ritual of Dionysus, the most important thing was the birth of the sacred , and only the presence of the sacred ensures that it is both true and false The poignant music was finally preserved in the form of tragedy.
Eternal Reincarnation is the time after reconciliation from a state of crisis and the constant cycle of the game of divine violence. Tragedy is indeed ready to accept and affirm the deepest pain and emptiness of life, but only if the sacrifices are continually offered, so that the god torn to shreds promises to be reborn. From this perspective, Dionysus is also a "delusional agent," while Bat Boy and Bob are contemporary incarnations of Dionysus.
escape into a daydream
The bat boy in "Delusional Agent" not only dominates the city's stage, but also the fate of all imaginary worlds. Viewers can accept this work as a pure mixed-type animation, but Jin Min's ambition is more than that. He wants to smash shoujo manga, tough guy manga, soap opera, RPG games, and all other related modern myths in a delusional form. , and in the end what he wanted to capture was the whole real world that regularly feeds on delusions.
The human geographer Duan Yifu once wrote a monograph on "escapism".
Jin Min is actually difficult to be called a "dream" director. In my understanding, what Jin Min has repeatedly drawn throughout his life is self-centered light sleep, that is, "daydreaming" , rather than abandoning light A desperate expedition to the depths of consciousness.
This has two implications: one is that, by definition, this kind of dream has nothing to do with REM or the psychological self (I), it resembles a circus-style amphitheater . The dreamer stands alone in the center of the stage, intoxicated by his own desires, but he is surprised to discover how many pairs of prying eyes are hidden in his soul! The house is full of strangers, and the world of dreams will inevitably collapse to reality and society indefinitely. This can be understood as a joke of Jin Min: "A dream is the fulfillment of a wish? Maybe, but whose wish is that?"
The second is that dreams are manifested in broad daylight, just like Apollo in ancient Greece was called the "God of Dreams". They shape the expression of reality, but they are unknowingly mixed with paralyzing nerves. Toxins, which Kim called the "weird sun" in the book. In the latter case, the social reverse dream collapses. Therefore, the blinding light of the sun has been frequently used as a transition to the next stage since "The House of Weima", and the refraction of the sun in "Desire" heralds the harbinger of the spread of the fantasy plague.
As his contemporaries toiled in the dark theater of horror, he rediscovered and recreated the grammar of white, the white of paranoia.
Nightmares are unsettling, daydreams bring smiles, and that's exactly what Hiraizawa's tune is for. What are the conditions for laughter in "Desire"? Laughter and danger are not diametrically opposed. Phenomenal OP, the hollow man's laugh at the end of "Texas Chainsaw Massacre".
domesticated animals
"The domestication of an animal that can make promises—isn't that the kind of dilemma that nature poses to itself in relation to man? Isn't that what man's real problem is? " Nietzsche wrote In the first sentence of the second chapter of "On the Genealogy of Morals", it still has the beauty of the pre-sentence of a musical sentence. In this book, an independent man tames an animal out of a promise to the future. Slowly, the promise turns into a chain of debt, and in the end, everyone becomes a domesticated animal one after another.
Think of every character who was named an animal in "Desire". In episode 7, Jin Min rarely expressed his compassion for meat at the table of the wise, and the invisible shackles made them into dishes and sent them to Ma. Lumei's mouth.
The story of "Dead Generation" is very simple. A little girl's puppy was crushed to death. The promise made to it finally became an unrepayable blood debt, and the responsibility had to be passed on to a "passing" bat. Young man, yes, "he killed him, he killed him".
Loyalty is rewarded with hypocrisy, and Malume's ghost reciprocates hypocritical loyalty to its master, reversed and symmetrical: "It's not Yue Zi's fault." Again, it's a double bondage that, on contemplation, makes one cringe and tear. If you think about this scene in the last episode from the perspective of circular cause and effect, isn't the convulsion that makes the young confinement uncomfortable to curl up an early warning of the torrent of guilt that never comes? (Similar to the tears on Ellen's cheeks in the first episode of "Giant")
The premise of all the analysis in "Delusional Generation" so far is that it forces us to admit that the origin of delusion is not profound (such as subconscious), but historical . It might be said that only when we are disturbed by history do we venture to appeal to a depth, but isn't that another transfer of responsibility, another form of delusion?
Animation and Monsters
Mr. Wang Dewei once mentioned such a creature in "History and Monsters", "There are beasts in the western wilderness, their shape is like a tiger and its size is two feet long, its human face is tiger feet, and its tail is ten feet and eight feet long. , In the chaos of the wasteland, the name is 梼杌."
The tau was the beast we call the Stitch Monster today, but it didn't stop there. In its genealogy,掼 monster, a rotten tree, and an evil deed that cannot be tolerated by the law, but also a record and warning of history and evil deeds . Each generation of us has fought against monsters and invented the monsters of our own time, but in the end it is our narrative that makes it invincible .
If we wish to promote goodness, we must expose ourselves to our bad deeds, and seek readers’ greedy eyeballs with wild beasts. The pursuit of “goodness” has instead become an infinitely delayed goal . Before the apocalyptic mushroom cloud rose, a giant beast like Godzilla had never been imagined, and no one expected that the blood of the giant beast would nourish these many works, and "Delusional Agent" also belongs to This wonderful pedigree.
"Mythical monsters are combinations of elements that are often unique to different creatures, and if the number and speed of substitutions are sufficient, the diversity of monsters can appear infinite and seem to 'marriage' with each other. When dogs and gods, beasts and angels, and When all such opposites oscillate fast enough, they quickly become a whole, but not in some harmonious "synthesis" sense.
Entities begin to merge, and those entities never really merge; the result looks like a jumble of sporadic fragments borrowed from the composition. If an illusion of unity arises, it will include fragments of previous opposites, arranged in a disordered mosaic—a god with beastly features, or a stitched image of a god-like beast .
The process is similar to movies, when many images are seen in rapid succession, they create the illusion of a single moving image. In the same way, in the last episode, Ma Lumei, who devoured everything, actually became the missing body of the city's berserk desire. It is the self-desire of the world and the final image of the image - Becoming Animal . As long as this swollen bubble is burst, everything will release the pure desire of all the characters in the way of movie rewind.
animation and fear
A fundamental feature of baseball-boy urban legends is that the creator of the myth has no power to take back the existence he or she conceived . As long as there is a sure and credible figuration in the first place, its existence will continue to be confirmed among the snowballing words of subjects, and like any virus, only affirmative words will remain. When it reaches its final stage, it will cease to be a subjective creature, nor an objective being, but ascend to the shape of a shapeshifting deity in an empty room in our minds.
Few people regard the communicative effect of animation (perhaps I should say, the communicative effect of animation?) as one of its essential characteristics, and this is the rudiment and foundation of all ancient religions - the most authentic animations are those in our minds images that are constantly being generated . I still remember the feeling of curling up on the sofa as a child, when horror was always pervasive and ubiquitous, the half-closed door, the shadow under the cabinet, the dress fluttering on the balcony seemed to hide Conan-style shadows , and worst of all, without the means and courage to falsify.
We can imagine an art of animation whose source is divine fear, offering "animation" as a sacrifice to the silence of an empty house, in which, though things remain the same, there is always something ancient moving within, in gaining life.
Hayao Miyazaki once criticized Tezuka animation for shoddy production, but Tezuka's own understanding is: "Three-frame shooting method" is for such an animation, which can be produced by laymen if there is a chance, and completely get rid of Disney's method. This means that in Osamu Tezuka's eyes, the energy of Japanese animation doesn't depend on a cult of painting, and still frames don't make you deny the vividness of animation, as long as it promises movement . Too often, a static figure invites you to do your best to participate in the realization of its life, and this type of animation works in the way of imprints rather than jelly.
When talking about the similarities between Japanese animation and American animation, Yasuo Otsuka cited the earlier animator Da Gong Yuanzhang's handling of still frames. He believes that in terms of Japanese understanding of performance, the more important thing is the presentation of "signature movements". Just like in Noh, the performance of Kabuki is almost mechanized. All the dance steps are all the movements with the center of gravity downward, showing a solid sense of volume. Stand still at all times.
This might be a manifesto for what anime fans would call "Keda-ryu" painting (from one pose to another), but on second thought, wasn't it the empty house in the background that was overlooked during the pause in Noh? " In that moment, I am the stone and the tree, and I am the agent of wabi-sabi. "
In the realm of fear, there is as much counterintuitive knowledge as there is. The thriller scenes in Jin Min's works are slideshows that alternate between action and stillness, usually a still being chasing a fleeing person (such as Pushkin's "The Bronze Horseman"). The old woman with cobwebs in "Millennium Actress" comes from images from the past, "Fake Weima" in "Weima's House" is an image of a computer, and the baseball boy is born out of childhood graffiti drafts. Abandoning their pictorial momentary mobility, they become ubiquitous "animations"; in terms of their static appearance, it makes the blood flow faster and the adrenaline rushes. However, running away does not escape the danger of falling into non-existence. On the contrary, running away means being unable to face the delusion, which gives the opportunity for the spread of the metaphysical plague. This is what we call "fear".
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