Treating the masses as blunt objects is a good thing for some elites. Then let's look at how the director portrays the elites from all over the world. Huang Shilang opened his mouth to speak English and was Westernized, so he obviously drank a lot of foreign ink; Zhang Muzhi once followed General Cai Songpo and went to the Japanese military armament school; Ma Bangde always wore a long gown and worked as a teacher with the most characteristic of Chinese intellectuals. Now it is clear that among these three kinds of talents, the representative of the European school, Huang Shilang, is doing the old business of the comprador of the 19th century foreigners who sold tobacco soil; The representative of the Oriental school (obviously they are the most favored by the director) can not escape the situation of the marginal intellectuals in the biographical history books, who either fall into trouble or rise up. When Zhang Mazi was planning for the future of Lao Qi, he said that he would first send him to the East, then to the West, then to the South, and then back to the North. But the movie is clearly saying that no matter whether you have been to the East or the West, once you return to the North, you will not be like a bear.
But the masses are stubborn and the elites are corrupt. How can this history be written and filmed? So those who write history and those who make history must create a hero, and this hero must rise to the top and respond to the scene; this hero must be popular with the masses and put all people in suspension; this hero must also write books and wait for him to take over the world. The heart of the scholar is in his heart. After the hero came out, everything was settled. The main task of contemporary mainstream films and the official history of the past dynasties is to create such a hero. When he raised his arms on the screen, I don't know how many people got that "imaginative comfort".
So "Let the Bullets Fly" has a lot of pomp, but it only used such a big pomp to visit the historical home once. This time I am not imitating a specific event or a specific character, but imitating the process by which these events and characters become events and characters. These processes have linked most of China's modern history. Therefore, "Let the Bullets Fly" strictly speaking, even if its box office is good, it cannot be regarded as a commercial film. Because the definition of a classic commercial film is that it can soothe the viewers' setbacks in reality, allowing them to temporarily forget the cruelty of reality in an hour-and-a-half dream, and obtain spiritual "imaginative comfort"; Or in the one-and-a-half-hour mainstream ideology's "inquiry" of the subject, bridging the gap in the mainstream ideology in reality. But "Let the Bullets Fly" ignores all of this, neither comforts nor heals, what it wants is parody - parody of the process in which history came into being. This is also the reason why he takes the drug in the corners and corners of the film (that is, funny lines, quick and monotonous editing, etc.) go down. It is a joke to say that you want to earn money by standing. If you really want the rabble to take out the money, you have to squat even if you don’t kneel.
Therefore, there are comments that Jiang Wen's personal heroism in this film is inflated to a surprising extent, which is both true and false. Jiang himself dare not speculate on his character. As far as the film is concerned, Zhang Mazi's behavior is also a parody of heroic behavior, in order to achieve the purpose of dismantling heroism. If he really has a heroic heart, who will he save? Is it the numb public that he finally sees through, or is it the shameless elite who are vying for money? Don't you see Zhang Mazi's lonely back after the bunker was bombed and the treasure was divided up. So this is not heroism, but a new term can be derived called nihilistic heroism, with heroic actions but no heroic heart.
But is nihilistic heroism historical nihilism? The masses are raging, the elites are festering, and heroes are made by people, so what is our history? This is the biggest suspense in the deep structure of the film. From Chen Sheng and Wu Guang to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, from the princes and generals Xiang Ning has a seed to the Tian Chao Tian Mu, Jiang Wen chose the most simple and most exciting "fairness" for thousands of years. But that's fair enough. The masters of the hemp bandits are all here for money, and Huang Shilang has done a lot of evil. The slogan of fairness was put forward by the hemp bandit at the beginning, but he actually saw that this "fairness" was the scarcity of the Goose City and the biggest weakness of Huang Shilang. Therefore, fairness was the slogan of the hemp bandit from the moment it appeared. When Lao Liu was attacked by Hu Wan in the noodle restaurant, he used false justice to stab himself and even self-dissect, and this justice instantly became the slogan of the other party. Next, the driving force of the story is directly replaced by revenge for the sixth. Master Huang Shilang is for wealth, and hemp bandits are for revenge. There are only two exceptions, one is a bandit leader, and the other is a prostitute. The latter is naive, confused by the appearance of fairness, and has a gun to split the money; as for the former, as I said earlier, Jiang Wen’s heroism is also right and wrong. What’s wrong is that within the entire story structure, heroism must be Parody and deconstruction, he sees this; he is right because he still believes in some of the simplest things, knowing that it cannot be done. Shiro died, and Goose City didn't change anything.
If we don't discuss Jiang Wen's views on the public and the elite for the time being, but in terms of his method of deconstructing history, it is quite brilliant. But in the end, the fulcrum of history is placed on fairness, but it shows that it is well versed in and familiar with the public's mentality of equal wealth. From this point of view, his description of the public in the film has been verified through the screening practice of the film itself - demeaning populism and using populism. This stand, although it is not without sloppy stand, is thrown into the arms of today's reality. Similarly, the anti-intellectual tendencies seen everywhere in the film are also catering to the gap between today's elite discourse and popular discourse. In this sense, "Let the Bullets Fly", which is the best Mandarin film to watch this year, caters to the deep psychological demands of the contemporary Chinese people's "equal wealth and anti-intellectuality" (this is why it is better than those blockbusters that cater to the public's visual desires). A more sublime place), will surely become an important document in historical psychology. Rewatching this film many years later, those jokes may have lost their laughing points, but through this film, latecomers can get a glimpse of the need for fairness and real elites in China in those days.
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