The worst nightmare is a long string of sunny days...
When asked were you happy in your life? Goethe replied: Yes, I had a happy life, " but ", he added immediately, I can't recall a single happy week. As natives of the digital age, we tend to think of happiness as an uninterrupted series of increasingly pleasurable enjoyments. However, Goethe believed that true happiness is the process of overcoming unhappiness and all kinds of troubles. He warns us not to think that your life is a process of collecting gifts. Picking at random from endless entertainment, you should spend your life Seen as a long struggle, solving one trouble another follows, and the side effects are often unpleasant.
True to the title of the film, El Salvador is surrounded by visible and hidden pain. The rich-colored background is intertwined with abstract and absurd medical 3D anatomical drawings. Accompanied by uncomfortable music, the protagonist begins an accusation of "pain": "I began to understand my body through pain and disease." In his sixties, he found that his mind, in addition to being a source of pleasure and knowledge, contained countless possibilities for pain. The first type of pain is physical pain. Due to the life-threatening work in the early years, as a result, in recent years, all the ailments such as shoulders, neck, waist, abdomen, eyes, ear, nose and throat have been visited. The physical pain made El Salvador inconvenient in space and his career came to a standstill. The occasional choking left him unable to breathe, and even the powerful painkiller OxyContin did little to sting in his back spine. The film does not deliberately exaggerate the success of a great director in his twilight years, but instead presents an ordinary person who is trapped in illness and age as a vulnerable person. Salvador's indictment has not stopped, and he is still suffering "abstract punishment", or "pain of the soul" as he calls it. On the surface, the pain of the soul contains fear, anxiety and alternating episodes of depression; further understanding, it also tells the unsolved "heart knots" of the protagonist when he reminisces about the past, including the death of Alberto, the star of "Taste". The breakup of the disagreement, the hard parting with the first love Federick, and the nostalgia and guilt for the deceased mother, etc. The pain of the heart is a constant flow of tenderness in time, it is present in the memory, and the conflict is even worse because these "heart knots" in the real world are still present.
The private narrative perspective of the film enables the protagonist to share all kinds of expressive and unspeakable pains of life with the audience, and builds empathy with the audience. Pain inevitably brings discomfort, but the film's delicate emotional anatomy, like a scalpel, does not stop there. Reconciliation and relief are deeper propositions in life. Inside and outside the film, the director deliberately blurs the boundaries between the film and the real world. In the end, when Salvador concentrates on his career and records his flowing consciousness, the struggles and frustrations of life appear particularly moving in his gentle narrative. The originality and authenticity of life are tender, and at such an age as Salvador, immersing in the original appearance of life may be the greatest wealth of life for an individual.
Outside of the movies, real life lacks any reliable structure for us to rely on. Sigmund Bowman often uses a metaphor to describe this "fluid fear": We are walking on a minefield, and we are all aware of the surrounding Surrounded by explosives, but we don't know when and where it will explode. The real life of an individual is not in the gap between the past and the future as Arendt said. Even if we consider and calculate more carefully, our cognition may still be overturned by the upheaval of tomorrow. The pain and danger of life are not like wolves in the forest. Parents only need to tell their children to stay at home and stay away from danger; on the contrary, danger is like what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck called "risk society". "(risk society), "risk" means that at best we can only calculate the probability of disaster, but probability is a very vague concept.
Like the name of the movie, life, whether it's pain or glory, is all about these things.
David Freyd
Jan 3, 2022
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