A nightmare needs another nightmare to end.
This is a film full of symbols, and the Coen brothers are testing the audience's comprehension ability, and anyone who swallows it and gets by will be excluded from the game. If there is to be a self-contained explanation for the film, it must clear up its eccentric plethora of symbols -
Funk: a talented playwright, unwilling to follow the crowd, the puzzles and challenges he faces will be the final something to explore. In other words, he is just an introduction, one of us. He allows us to further see the world in this movie. The existence of "Funk" and "Non-Funk" makes this world colorful. And full of ideals, disillusionment, sorrow, and struggle.
Hotel: A waiter who appeared out of thin air, a dying elevator operator, two neat rows of guest rooms, this is its original appearance. It was a comfortable prison, a prison where the body was allowed to move in and out, and the mind was gradually corrupted. It has unexplainable magic, it slowly drains the free thinking of the "funks" and turns them into the walking dead of business and power. Since Fink moved inside, he has been manipulated by the magic in it, and he gradually lost his original creative talent and became a nerd. In this free prison, he was asked to slowly drain his life.
Fallen wallpaper: The beginning and the end of the film are wallpapers with dark flowers. This is a beautiful skin wrapped in huge greed. If the world is temporarily at peace with us, it is because of its cover-up. But greed made it impossible for him, so the skin slowly peeled off and filthy saliva flowed out.
Small frame on the wall: a beauty in swimwear looks out at the blue sea. But everything in the frame is dead, it doesn't have the face of a beautiful woman, it doesn't have a wide sea, it frames every possible extension, restricts Fink's thinking, stifles his free thought, and makes him change in front of the typewriter Become a pool of gradually shrinking dead meat.
Charlie: The character in Funk's nightmare, a disruptor of the existing system, who has to remain anonymous. But the prison and the nightmare are destined to be destroyed by him. He stopped Fink's stupid actions to call the police, killed the police of the guard road, and burned down the prison-style hotel with his will. His liberation was violent and the only one in the real world. feasible. From all the devastation and destruction he caused, Funk was liberated once.
The Death of the Female Secretary: The female secretary is a ghostwriter, a kind of lubricant that really makes the original world run smoothly. Her one-night stand with Funk did not end in the reconciliation of freedom and slavery, but another nightmare of Fink put it to an end, when she was inexplicably killed by a mosquito "bite". From then on, Funk's mighty arrogance disappeared, he began to become cowardly, and revealed his nature, under Charlie's "rescue", Funk finally completed his script, a product of free will.
Producer: A shit-filled idiot, a chattering vindicator, a staunch enforcer of the current system, whose wealth and power as an officer represent his identity. He circles Funk and falsely kisses Funk's sole, which is nothing but tempting Funk to fall into this abyss and become the machine of wealth and the walking dead of power. Fink's final script makes his dream come true into bubbles.
Drunkard: A person whose soul has been eaten, maybe he was as rich and ambitious as Funk, but in the end he was buried in power and money, numb and dead in the bite of thousands of wine bugs.
Bible: A false spell to block "vampires", an impossible self-salvation, its true form is the devil's spell to control free will. In the hotel, Fink once questioned the dying elevator man with the Bible, and the old clapper's affirmative answer should have wiped out his last bit of faith.
Typewriter: It's just a machine, and Fink's choice is to be either the machine or the man who runs the machine.
The final seaside scene: This is the beginning of a confused new student. Fink went from being blind and arrogant and confident at the beginning to gradually understanding the ugly world, and finally returned to the beginning of another world. This is the beginning of a real self-thinking. Funk saw the living beauties, the boundless sea, and the reefs in the stormy waves, so the world was real and life was real. Although he was still full of confusion, the nightmare has awakened.
The self-justification of the symbol should allow us to have our own interpretation of this film. In my opinion, this film is a metaphor for the struggle of free will being suppressed and anti-suppression. It also satirizes the business and depravity of Hollywood. The difficulty and complexity of art, just as Funk's journey from loftiness, loneliness, confusion, cowardice, fear, self-confidence, and finally to confusion, Charlie's words are like a blowout: "You are just a traveler with a typewriter. The final collapse of a prison represents the victory of hope, but Fink is still confused, perhaps he still needs a redemption and true self-redemption.
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