In the process of watching "Red Desert", the plots and sentences in Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and "Woman in Love" kept popping up, the same neurotic characters, jumping back and forth between lust and death , destroying the blurred images under capitalism, "There is no doubt that there seems to be a desire lurking in your heart, wanting to have your chest cut open." - "Woman in Love" Lawrence. Today I will try to open the coat of "Red Desert" and feel the alienation of people in the industrial society brought by Antonioni.
The Alienation and Separation of Human Beings in Industrial Civilization
sexual alienation
"I want to have sex" "He hasn't seen a woman for two months" The heroine in this film is similar to Lawrence's female characters, and like Lady Chatterley, he drifts away from her husband and children and begins to Maintaining an ambiguous relationship with a lover, the husband's sex in the movie is castrated, we can't see a trace of human desire flowing on his face, and even loses his humanity, which is specifically described in the movie. "He's like a vulture ready to plunder...a bankrupt factory or a lonely woman." "No, come on, you're destroying everything."
Sir Chatterley in Lady Chatterley's Lover lost his reproductive capacity during the war, so he even decided to inoculate his wife with a lover so that she wouldn't end up dying. In an industrial society, the family has completely become a tool for men to exploit the oppressed classes, women’s personality status is weakened and reproductive status is extremely important, so sex becomes alienated, no longer a perfect collision of two healthy bodies, but Complete the creation of labor. This is reflected even more thoroughly in the workers, the families of the working class are divided and divided. The long working system leads to no relationship between husband and wife, and no longer have sex. Sex is only to create more labor force for factory owners and capitalists. In capitalism, this layer of exploitation was first uncovered by Engels, who started with the family in the primitive society in "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State", pointed out the monopoly family under capitalism, and showed the interior of the family. Fragmented relationships between men and women, and between workers and factory owners. It is also reflected in the movie. The rich factory owner is looking for a lover and tumbling in the mud of lust, while the smoke that never dissipates from the outside world and the eternal sense of alienation between people make them no longer get what they get in sex. It is ancient Greek-style health, spiritual and physical satisfaction, but irrational, even crazy, suppressed and released lust. The wife watched her husband flirt with other women, a group of people intertwined, shivering with sexual madness at the touch.
Alienation of people "I am sick, I will feel...split, body...already...separated." "I am so scared! Like a wall, street, factory, color, crowd, every One thing is all around me here." People in the industrial society run into walls everywhere and lose themselves in the continuous smoke. This is the case with the heroine in the movie, her spirit has been seriously damaged, she thinks she has The disease was split into two pieces, but I didn't know how to solve it, so I could only find a lover and live in loneliness and disorder. We can't help but think about a question, what kind of society does she live in? What happened to capitalist society? Marx gave the answer in The Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie is increasingly eliminating the means of production, the fragmentation of property and the population. It densifies the population, the means of production, the property in the hands of a few... The worker becomes a mere appendage of the machine, all that is required of him to do is extremely simple, extremely monotonous and extremely easy to learn operation.
At the beginning of the movie, the heroine walks in the towering chimneys that breathe smoke, and the harsh industrial noise constantly pollutes our ears; at the end of the movie, the heroine and her friends are by the smoky river, the shadows of people in the camera No longer exists, only a vague shape remains, and people are fragmented in a confused and boring life. Excessive working hours, tedious and mindless mechanical labor, a life of constant exploitation, and a harsh industrial environment. People are more and more disgusted in industrial society, repressed in the narrow space of the factory, the characters in the film are not as great as Marx, shouting "Proletariat of the whole world, unite." So they can only constantly dissolve the individual existence, In order to strive for harmonious coexistence with their surroundings, their emotions are only fear and confusion.
"What am I going to do with my eyes? What to see?" "You want to know what you want to see, and our school knows how to live." The heroine chooses to escape in a terrifying environment and seek physical Desire; seeking the wandering of the subconscious in the dream; seeking the comfort of the child, but there is no doubt that she has been failing all the time, and can only see in despair and pain, and do it with her eyes. And her lover feels the same way. How should ordinary people survive in an industrial society, how should people not be industrialized, not alienated, and thrive in nature? Of course, the people in the movie have no answers, and Antonioni has no answers. , and we may be able to find the answer in the Selected Works of Marx and Engels, to find the existence of "the ceiling is green". "I dreamed that I was lying on a bed, the bed was shaking, and I saw the quicksand was drowning me, getting deeper and deeper." - "Red Desert" heroine lines
"Even though it was May and the land was green, the country was bleak. It was pretty cool, there was smoke in the rain, there was some kind of exhaust in the air. People had to fight to survive. No wonder the people here are ugly and rude "Lady Chatterley's Lover" Lawrence "Our age is, after all, a tragic age, and that is why we are reluctant to treat it tragically." -- "Woman in Love" Lawrence So ours What about the times? The oppressive environment, yellow chimneys, and polluted water seem to have disappeared, but fragile and sick people, working overtime, people are divided by the fast modern society, divided into ghosts wandering in the subway one by one. The phenomenon still exists. How do we not treat it tragically, how do we survive, these are the questions we should think about after watching the movie.
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