In the main discourse on male growth constructed by Freud, the "Oedipus" complex is explained with the help of the story in the famous ancient Greek tragedy "Oedipus the King". He must go through an Oedipus stage, in which he subconsciously has the desire to kill his father and marry his mother. If he cannot finally overcome this desire, the process of his personality formation and development will be blocked in some way, resulting in a certain psychological "fixation", a certain pathological condition, and even a mental illness/mental illness. But most children grow up conscious of the authority and threat of the father; in psychoanalytic terms, the threat of "castration" from the father. They will be compelled by this threat to transform their mother's identification with their father, beyond the Oedipus stage, to grow, to turn their desires from the mother to other women, and finally to make themselves a father/real man.
First of all, we can grasp the film from a social level. Whether in the East or the West, the traditional relationship between father and son has a clear class nature. In Europe, fathers are even regarded as the incarnation of gods in this world. In China's "Three Cards and Five Constants", "the father is the son" is also impressively listed. The power and authority of the father's image makes it natural for a son to obey his father's will. Coincidentally, the biological parents of the protagonist of the film themselves have a disparity in class - the judge and his maid as the defender of the national order and the holder of the badge. The identity of his illegitimate child was even more intolerable in the society at that time. As an almost destined arrangement to embark on a leftist path, the protagonist's subconscious father-seeking complex and instinctual desire for a patriarchal government make him step by step closer to the ruling class represented by his father, at the expense of the former Give him warm but not firm friendship and love.
As for his class-contradictory parents, the expression of love for each other is a wrestling of indifference and rejection. When social ideology is brought into family life, they simply do not realize the importance of passing on family affection to their sons, and lose their proper human character. During this period, the mother repeatedly emphasized to her son that "we don't need him", intending to extract the image of the father from the son's mind and achieve the purpose of occupying the son.
Even if the father's image is forced to disappear from the family due to the mother's rejection, it is still conceivable that even if the three of them live in the same room, the indifferent father who doesn't know how to express his love does not meet the son's psychological expectations. On the contrary, the strong and ruthless mother has always played the dual role of parent, but it is incomplete. Therefore, the male stimulation that the protagonist needs in the process of growth cannot be satisfied, which directly leads to the gap between father and son and the estrangement between mother and son. And the implementation of patriarchy completes the lesson of paternal love in an impersonal and destructive way that is difficult for us to understand, forcing the son to challenge himself. Driven by this kind of power, the protagonist has no choice.
This "castration" threat accompanies the protagonist's entire upbringing. We can even think of a father's denial of his son's identity as a powerful patriarchal oath. When the protagonist's original imagination about his father was frustrated, he naturally developed a strong desire to return to his mother's body, and said to his mother "we don't need him". However, the image of the mother at this time is not the tenderness she longed for. The lack of a "mother" at the psychoanalytic level makes the protagonist's desire for her mother's warm embrace projected on the office girl - when she first appeared on the scene, her body was plated with a layer of The soft light of motherhood. But the protagonist is always driven by the threat from his father, and therefore gives up his warmth.
So far, the growth presented by the protagonist of the film appears to be in the shadow of patriarchy and lack of mother. Under the suppression of this deformity and near perversion, the protagonist has never stopped fighting against the fate of "castration", which is different from many today's men who have been tamed without resistance. From this point of view, one cannot help but sigh at his father's good intentions. Although almost every contest ended in failure, his life was always supported by this powerful driving force. And it is undeniable that he has benefited from it to a certain extent: his academic and career excellence is a mess, although these are but the ladder of revenge on his father.
However, the most violent struggle of the protagonist's "anti-castration", that is, the last battle in the attic-Chinese audiences seem incredible, the axe in the hands of our father does not exist in our cultural genes-although physical strength He has clearly defeated his father, but an irresistible fate has come - like his father, he is ruthless because he can't express the tenderness of his beloved - he threw down the weapon that could kill his father, Abandoned his half-hearted goal. On another level, he made the last powerless resistance in a failed way, so that he did not escape the fate of "castration" in the end.
This frustration with the inescapability of fate will be sequestered in the male for life and released by his eventual fatherhood. In the world of men, there are only men in the end, and the woman who meets again at the end is already a story that belongs to another world.
View more about Character reviews
