First of all, I would like to make a statement. In fact, I am more disgusted with the conclusion of the big truth from the movie. But sometimes I see a really cool movie, so I can't help but do such a thing. Therefore, what I wrote and what the director wanted to express may not be the same thing at all.
Imprinting is the core of this film. If an article I wrote before is "the world of the watch", then I should first make a statement of the "world of the inside" (not necessarily accurate, because I inferred from some details in the world of the watch):
American old man The man raped and killed his sister a long time ago and escaped the justice of the law. As a reporter, he was from all over the world, so he met Xiao Tao in Japan, and after getting Xiao Tao pregnant, she abandoned her. Then (half a year later) he came to Japan again, hoping to take Xiao Tao to the United States to live a happy life. On the way to find Xiao Tao, he saw the body of a pregnant woman on the boat that looked like Xiao Tao, which made his inner sense of sin begin to be affected. wake. In the brothel where he slept, he started telling a prostitute (not a ghost prostitute) about his sins, and because of his desire to cover up and torture his inner sin, the police finally shot the prostitute who listened to his story. , and was imprisoned for it. In the end, he was poisoned in prison.
The above can be said to be basically my personal conjecture about the inner world. We can see that in the surface world shown in the film, it is a projection of the inner world. The outer world is the imprint of the inner world.
From the beginning, at the beginning of the film, the body of the pregnant woman on the river is red-haired, which is in line with the characteristics of Xiao Tao in the man's impression. And combined with the plot of the man holding a dead baby in his arms and singing in prison at the end of the film, we can imagine that the baby is the sin of this man, from the pregnant woman at the beginning to the dead baby at the end, in fact, the whole film can be seen as A process of abortion is how sins surface little by little. And the receptors of this sin should be the man and Xiao Tao. So I deduced that the floating corpse on the river was Xiao Tao. At the beginning of the film, Xiao Tao's ending was explained.
Second, analyze the character of the ghost prostitute. If we understand ghost prostitutes in this way, then it is not difficult to understand why ghost prostitutes tell strange stories. A ghost prostitute is an imagery of a man's guilt, making an abstract emotion into a real person. The face of a ghost prostitute represents the ugliness and conscience of a man. This is very crucial, and if I don't understand the transformation of this point, I think this movie is indistinguishable from ordinary horror movies. Next, I will elaborate on several aspects:
the story of ghost prostitutes. We can completely divide the story of the ghost prostitute into two parts. The first part is how did she come to this world? The second part is how did Xiao Tao die? According to my previous analysis, the first part of the story should be the traces of how men feel guilty, and the second part of the story should be what the man thinks of Xiao Tao after being abandoned by a man. In this way, it is very clear. Let's take a look in detail:
The source of a man's guilt is his incest with his sister, and in the end he kills his sister. In the ghost prostitute story, the ghost prostitute itself is a product of incest, a child born after an adulterous brother and sister. This corresponds exactly to the man's guilt and incestuous adultery, and at first the man tries to erase this guilt (as if the mother of a ghost prostitute tries to kill the ghost prostitute as a baby), but he fails. As the sense of guilt increases day by day (the ghost prostitute also grows up day by day), the man finally can't bear the torment and kills his sister (and the ghost prostitute can't stand his father's adultery and kills his father) , I believe that people who watch this film carefully will notice that the ghost prostitute had a struggle in his heart before killing his father, and I believe it is also a portrayal of a man's heart when he kills his sister. The process of abortion is actually a process of eliminating guilt. The abortions before the ghost prostitute was born was a process in which the man's guilt of committing adultery with his sister time and time again was dissolved by the man himself.
Let's look at Peach again. If the story of the ghost prostitute is what the man imagined about what happened to Xiao Tao, the first version, that is, the first story told by the ghost prostitute, is a man's beautiful imagination of Xiao Tao. First of all, Xiao Tao said that his family is rich and noble. A man may not be able to accept the fact that a ghost prostitute is a prostitute, but he tries hard to make the person he loves a woman of noble character through the mouth of the ghost prostitute. , a person who is not willing to sell both the body and the soul like other prostitutes, so in the first version of the ghost prostitute's encounter with Xiao Tao, Xiao Tao is aloof. However, at the end of the story, Xiao Tao committed suicide, which made the man's guilt start to intensify, because Xiao Tao's suicide can be said to have a direct connection with this man. Just imagine, if someone committed suicide because of you, or was killed by someone else, which one would lessen your guilt? So the man said loudly to the ghost prostitute after the first story: "No, this is not the truth, you are lying to me, I need the truth!" The mental state corresponding to this sentence is: "No, she is not my fault. There must be other reasons for the death!" So the man conceived a story in which Xiao Tao found out that the ghost prostitute had stolen the ring and blamed Xiao Tao, and finally killed Xiao Tao through the hands of the ghost prostitute. As a result, the man's guilt was once again dispelled. After listening to the story, he said, "You killed Xiao Tao, yes, that's the truth!" Why is he so sure about this version of the story? Because he felt he could shirk responsibility. But he had to face himself, because he realized that he was lying to himself, and the cause of Xiao Tao's death was because she was pregnant. This is what the man finally understands and finally dares not say through the mouth of a ghost prostitute. In this way, there is the final transformation of the ghost prostitute. On the one hand, the mutated little hand is the only conscience of the man, and the little hand wants to hold the ring, which shows that the man's conscience thinks that the ring is not stolen by Xiao Tao, or that he knows it from the beginning. There is no such thing as stealing the ring. In this little hand, it means that the man is facing the ugliest side of his heart, and the one who wants to kill Xiaotao is the man who dare not face the ghost prostitute himself, kill Xiaotao and kill him. He took on the sins that belonged to men. The man saw that the ghost prostitute was so ugly and shouted "monster". In fact, it was just a mirror, and all he saw was himself. He raised his gun, the first shot hit the ghost prostitute, the ghost prostitute said, "This is not going to kill me", the second shot hit his only conscience - the little hand, so the fallen It's peach.
About the windmill and the looming white woman. The windmill represents the emergence of a man's guilt, and each rotation of the windmill represents a man's guilt pouring into his heart, including: when the ghost prostitute begins to tell the story, when the ghost prostitute has an abortion, and the windmill in Xiao Tao's hand. And the woman in white looming, according to a friend of mine's guess, should be the man's sister. Maybe this is not a ghost, but it is indeed a man who seems to have seen what he did before. In the scene where you recall what you did in the past, you unconsciously have some hallucinations, and the strange face by the window and the looming white woman actually appear in the heart of a man.
About the ending. The man ends up being poisoned by the guard (note the guard's line ("Wait for something interesting to happen"), and notice the director gave a close-up when the guard poured water into the basin, clean water, nothing else things), after eating the meal provided by the guards, the man found a dead baby in the water basin, and at this time, Xiao Tao, his sister appeared in the cell. What do the dead baby Xiao Tao and his sister have in common? They are both dead , It can be said that in the end, the man died. But he was not freed, but in a prison cell, accompanied by his own sins - the people he killed, including the fetus in Xiao Tao's belly - forever and ever stay in this hell.
The sin that we are always afraid of and dare not face, exists in the back of our consciousness. Only when we are finally powerless to kill it, it will tell us about it in the image of a ghost prostitute Our own truth, though, the truth behind consciousness, is often cruel and ruthless.
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