The seemingly mad father, the mother who only regards her daughter as a machine, and the monotonous and stereotyped life of wandering and black and white piano keys pushes Erica into the abyss of split personality step by step: on the one hand, she is an accomplished and elegant piano teacher. A face of a successful social elite; one side is a single middle-aged woman whose desire has been suppressed for a long time, causing her to deform, a poor, inferior person who does not know how to express her love and desire normally, a person who can only learn from voyeurism and pornography The person who seeks the satisfaction of desires in his life, but deeply hates this satisfaction himself. And behind all of this is the middle-class achievement-oriented values that actually drive everyone crazy (and that should include Erica's father as well). Look at the terrified students waiting for the results of their exams, the agonizing children who feel that losing their chance to perform is losing everything, and they and their families are desperate and can't afford to fail. And all of this is undoubtedly what Erica has experienced, otherwise she could not have achieved such achievements, fame and status, and all this is undoubtedly at the expense of everything, sacrificing all life and experience that have nothing to do with piano and performance, All the desire to love and be loved. In this process, the body and its needs are seen as dirty, inferior, and should be rejected, while the arts related to the spirit are regarded as noble, higher than the desires of the body, worthy of pursuit, and from the utilitarian From an angle, it is also the best choice to gain social affirmation and praise, and achieve the status of achievement, which is in line with the achievement-oriented values of the middle class. Therefore, for the so-called spiritual pursuit and the accompanying aura of achievement, everyone, including Erica and her students, willingly slipped into this abyss.
What is the foundation of this achievement-oriented value? It is nothing else, it is the rational spirit advocated by modernity, also called enlightenment rationality - elevating the spirit, depreciating the body, elevating the rationality, and suppressing the sensibility (the origin of which is Descartes's mind-body dichotomy, which is not limited to space). expand). There is a scene in the movie, in the classroom, Kalam asked to make out with Erica, Erica said after bluntly refused, "Even if I have feelings, it can't overcome my reason." After internalizing the values of reason and achievement, under the long-term suppression of reason, in Ai's body, desires are distorted and placed, and there is almost no room for it, so even normal intimacy she can't do, rather than want Only expressed in a perverted form. Similar expressions also include Erica cutting her lower body with a blade in the bathroom for pleasure and finally stabbing the sharp knife into her chest, also expressing her disgust and rejection of the body by destroying and torturing the body. Of course, in the letter to Callum asking him to torture himself in various ways, this expression of deep disgust for the body was presented naked. Are these seemingly perverted ways of sex really what Erica wants? Hit her, bind her with ropes, don't stop even if she begs for mercy... No, when everything happened, she found that everything was not what she imagined, not what she wanted, she begged him in fear to immediately stop. What does she want? She doesn't know it herself. When social values taught him to become a piano professor and become famous and all this did not happen, she knew what she wanted, and after achieving this goal, she thought she had found what she wanted (sadomasochism), however, it was not.
When modern society points out to you that "achievement" is your beacon and "success" is the end point of your happiness in life, it actually tells you the biggest lie. Success does not guarantee that life will enter happiness. In fact, there is a next stop, and where is the next stop? It doesn't tell you. Therefore, you can see that there are so many people who get lost after the so-called success, officials, scholars... After they have achieved success in their external goals and met the expectations of society, they have nothing to do with themselves. Any expectations and constraints are gone, and you get lost in the path of self-indulgence.
The type of "elegant art" represented by the piano in the movie not only represents the harm of middle-class values to the mind and body of modern people, but also represents the suppression and imprisonment of human desires and instincts by rational spirit. This is undoubtedly the "iron cage of reason" of modernity described by Weber, in which people breathe hard and escape without doubt. Is all that hopeless? Is man destined to be ruled only by reason? Fortunately, Nietzsche was born after that. He called for the return of the body with a deafening voice and shouted the slogan "Everything starts from the body", marking the birth of a new direction of philosophy centered on "body".
This is not only a work reflecting the distorted psychology of human nature, but also a masterpiece of profound reflection and criticism of modernity, so it is not accidental that Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature with this work.
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