The talent of Sam Mendes convinced me that every character in the film, regardless of the number of scenes, was portrayed with flesh and blood, telling many stories in a radial space centered on the street. This film has always been positioned as a description of the "middle-age crisis", but I have also seen the "adolescent crisis", "character crisis", "communication crisis", "plain crisis" and "confidence crisis"... Is it "American beauty" or "America's crisis"? ? And this society full of "crisis" is more than just "America".
Countless self and others, countless déjà vu in the past and repeating mistakes in the future.
Two families
Lester and Caroline are the host and hostess of Family One, and they have a daughter, Jane.
This family is simply a typical representative of most of the families in the society where the hostess is about 40 years old. They sleep on a bed every day under their own quilts. They haven't had sex for a year or even longer, and they have no interest in quarreling. Women often chatter about trivial matters, sometimes with family members and sometimes with neighbors. The man gets up in the morning and masturbates in the shower. He said: "This is the highest point of my day, and the rest of the time has been declining." My daughter was in high school, and she saved up money to watch other people's children for several years. For breast augmentation surgery, she rarely communicated with her parents. First, there was nothing to say, and second, the parents couldn't understand it.
The economic downturn of a man’s company will face the danger of being laid off; although a woman is not particularly successful as a real estate agent, she bears a large part of the family’s finances, just like all the people who mainly bear the family’s finances. Authority, the music and event arrangements for dinner are all decided by the woman.
I will smile when I see them. They are all too real. This state of affairs accounts for a large part of families in which the married life lasts for more than 15 years. Plain, no passion, lack of communication, every family member feels dull but uses habits to support the continuation day by day. What maintains the integrity of the family is only family affection and sense of responsibility. Family affection can only be experienced when it encounters ups and downs, and day after day without ups and downs, only each member's acquiescence to his role is left, and even no one seriously scrutinizes such repetitions. Life is just as natural and logical as the existence of every organ that grows on the body, letting it go on like this.
The male owner of Family Two was once a U.S. Navy colonel. The hostess is withdrawn, and her role in the family is more like a nanny. There is also an 18-year-old son, Rich.
There are still some such families in society. Men are the authority in the family. Everyone is obedient to what he says. He is conservative and arbitrary. He always looks at things with absolute right and absolute wrong, and never forgets to remind him. The people around him have been in exchange for respect or awe. A woman is the most loyal supporter of the authority of a man. The man said that she would never dare to talk about it, and she would obey blindly like a puppet. A man’s expressions are simple and rude. Violence is his weapon to maintain his position of authority. No matter who it is, he will fight each other if he doesn’t know how to do it. Their son is a handsome, sensitive, slightly neurotic boy, a DV youth, with the temperament of an artist.
It is difficult to judge the proportion of such families in society, but I am sure they exist, and they are definitely not rare. The freedom of everyone in the family is pitifully small. Even men who are superior to their wives and sons like a monarch have become narrow-minded because of their limited social cognition and tolerance. Resistance has always existed in such families, but the result of resistance is often suppressed or expelled by authority. The choice is either submission or separation.
Two families are on the same street, and they can observe each other through the window. The children's love for each other makes them meet. The children are envious of each other's family, one because there is too little freedom, one because there is too little discipline; one because there is no father's example, and the other is because the father's example is too paranoid. Too little freedom makes you unable to find yourself, and too little discipline makes you incapable of caring. I think of a saying, "Every family has scriptures that are hard to recite." People are like this. What they can get becomes a bondage, and what they can't get is an ideal. Moreover, the duality of all things affects people, and the more profound experience is always the bad side. How can we overcome the plain crisis and the crisis of communication?Jane, the daughter of
three young
family one, looks down on her father and does not have any warm feelings about family life. Her temporary ideal is to save some money for breast augmentation surgery. Parents can never understand her heart. It's not that watching a performance at school as her mother imagined made her feel the warmth of the family, and her mother felt so self-righteous. In her heart, they might as well not go to the show.
The warmth of the family cannot be remedied, and nothing can be used to make up for it. The feeling of warmth permeates my heart little by little in the countless details of life. It is an accumulated height that cannot be reached at one time. Children don’t talk to their parents because they think their parents will never understand. This is the problem of generation gap, and this problem will always exist in family life. I yearn for a life with a lot of freedom, and I grew up in an environment with a lot of freedom, but it is difficult to judge whether this kind of full freedom is good or bad. I used to complain like Jane that my parents rarely restrain my behavior. At that time, I always feel abandoned by the family. But I know more clearly that my parents don’t restrain me because they don’t care, but the way they care is different. What they can do is to use their parents' identities to subtly and use the power of example as a guide. I should be considered a lucky kid. Jane is actually very lucky, but her father's lack of success has reduced the weight of the role model too much, and she has not yet understood the sadness and helplessness of unsuccessfulness. The greatest benefit of such young people growing up is to know that they must be responsible for their own choices, and they have no right to blame others.
The second son of the family, Rich, grew up under the restraint and protection of his simple and rude father. When he was 15 years old, he was sent to a military academy by his father because of smoking marijuana. Use this coercive method to let his son grow up to be what he desires. Richie, who came out of the mental hospital, changed his personality, from a blatant rebellion to a violent act. He used a period of legitimate part-time work experience to cover up his income from marijuana trafficking, and used pure urine exchanged from a pediatric nurse to cope with the drug test his father had to conduct every six months. He learned to use his father's most admired soldier method in exchange for trust in his father's violence. His greatest pleasure is to use DV to record all the beauty he saw. Those beauty may be a pigeon that died on the grass, a woman frozen to death by the road, or a plastic bag floating in the wind. Jane, who still looked at him through the glass and took off his shirt to expose the girl’s breast... Finally, he was expelled from the house under his father's arbitrariness again, and he who was expelled could only get the cowardly mother’s sentence, “Get outside. It’s raining, put on a raincoat!”
Many children around you grew up in an imperfect family. This imperfection is not necessarily a lack of family members, but more of a complete family but lacks warmth and tolerance. . Such children tend to be delicate in thinking, emotionally unstable, and more or less neurotic. Most of the time they are fragile and cute, but sensitive and distressing. It was as pure and transparent as the tears that Rich was about to drop when describing the plastic bag that was fluttering in the wind. "I beat you for your own good." Too many people have heard their parents say so. The painful part will be quickly forgotten, and some will remain as an untouchable penalty zone or a source of a little bit of hatred. I felt that Richie had a sense of pleasure and relief when he was expelled by his father, otherwise he would not fabricate the most unacceptable story of his father in exchange for the result of being expelled. I believe that no normal person can truly hate the parents who gave their lives. After a moment of hatred, after a period of unforgettable depression, what is left is the family love that is thicker than water. The love of parents for their children is unquestionable, even Richie’s rough and tough father shed tears for the children...
Too many parents try to turn their children into an ideal state, and this ideal often comes from the childhood dream of being a parent. It's just that many times they will forget the fact that they have not realized that dream, and if they go along according to their arrangements and wishes, the child will only become the second of them. There are also some parents who helped their parents fulfill their dreams when they were young, but if this continues and inherits, isn't it a cycle of dislocation? The role of children is always to help their parents complete their dreams, and their own dreams can only be fulfilled when they feel sorry for them in their middle age, and try to impose them on the next generation again. I am a little afraid of this dislocation cycle, because it lasts too long and too long, and it has transcended many lives. In the United States, only a few families like Rich may have this problem, and some of them will come to an abrupt end under various reasons, but in China, it is hard to imagine how long they will stay.
An Qi, Jane's female classmate, is a pretty girl. She always talks about her experience of socializing with various men, describing to others how she has been infatuated by all the men who have seen her since she was 12 years old. She often speaks foul language, vulgar and vulgar descriptive topics. She is very interested in sex, not only keen to tell others, but also keen to inquire about others. Her ideal is to be a model, who can often appear on the cover of magazines. In fact, in fact, too many things were made up by her, and she was even a virgin at all.
Girls are all vanity, and some vanity can be completely satisfied through the love of men. So they always make up or exaggerate. Especially for 18-year-old girls. And An Qi is an extreme reflection. I have seen many, many girls like this. They make up stories of Fenghuaxueyue to satisfy their vanity. The heroes in the stories have at least one of the advantages of handsome, cold, golden, tall, talented, or whatever. The kind that will attract countless eyeballs if placed in the real society, is a single-minded model who only takes one scoop of three thousand weak waters. Every girl walks over at this age and is the most brilliant period in her entire life. . There is also a part, just relying on fiction can not satisfy vanity, so they went to prove it, just like Angel. They will show their strengths in front of a man intentionally or unintentionally. Even if they don't want to develop a relationship with that man, they still need admiring eyes and words of praise to be affirmed.
Girls are still prone to inferiority complex, and more often, that inferiority complex is concealed with arrogance and indifference. For example, An Qi said "Ricci is a lunatic", the most fundamental reason is "he never looked at me more"; when Lester learned that An Qi was still a virgin, he restrained his desires, and An Qi unexpectedly Panic asked: "What's wrong? Am I not beautiful enough?"; Rich used the most honest evaluation to expose An Qi's heart. She sat on the stairs and wept in fear, and finally seduce Leicester to prove herself... …Actually, An Qi has a lot of inferiority complex in her heart, and she has to use arrogant behavior and indifferent behavior to cover it up. There are also such a group of people in life who carefully wrap their inferiority complex with the most exposed arrogance and even conceit, and once they are hit by someone, they will suffer from pain until they become angry or even hysterical. This is a kind of "character crisis", and the only thing that can get rid of this crisis is an objective and correct understanding of oneself.
The process of growing up is painful, and it is difficult to find the things lost in growing up. No matter how we reach out to resist, we will eventually find that young people slip away at a certain moment. On the last day of 2002, I sat among thousands of people and heard an old man say "Your life has been reduced by another 20 minutes". It turned out that I didn't even want to say goodbye to youth, but he left without saying goodbye. Our puberty ended in the complex interlocking of various emotions, and the puberty of another group of people came.
Four loves
The feeling between Leicester and An Qi is a bit far-fetched in terms of love. More specifically, it is Leicester's sexual fantasies for girls or An Qi's affection for Leicester.
Lester did not have sex with his wife for a long time, and even when he wanted to improve the situation, the two people who had already risen in temperature quarreled because they were afraid that the beer in their hands would stain the four thousand dollar sofa. Naturally, both of them no longer have "sexual interest". When he saw the intimacy between his wife and lover, he could still ask blankly, "Does the burger need some sauce?" Before meeting Angel, Lester just masturbated in the bathroom in the morning to solve his physiology. On demand.
The appearance of An Qi gave Lester a goal in life again. She was as immature as "Lolita" but also had a yearning and imitating mature. The girls at this time were really attractive. Because Lester overheard the conversation between An Qi and his daughter, he began to exercise so as to "make himself look better when he is undressed." He found some passion again, quit his job, sold his old car and bought it all the time. The coveted sports car. I even went to work in a fast food restaurant, trying to find the good feeling of "working in a burger restaurant to make money and having sex with a girl every day" when I was young.
The end of this love is that when An Qi took the initiative to give her to Leicester for the first time, Leicester restrained herself and gently put her head on An Qi's chest.
This love originates from fantasy and ends with responsibility. The responsibility here is not the responsibility of the family, but the responsibility of protection. In this kind of "year-old love", there is often one aspect that plays a parent-like role, and the Electra (mother) is almost everyone's complex. I never want to judge an extramarital relationship as "non-decent", because it is always right to love someone, even if there is a deviation in the choice of objects. In a relationship that causes bad results, it is not the love itself that has the problem, but the excessive demands derived from it. I am even grateful for the passion Angie gave to Lester, which has triggered a hopeful light for life that I haven't seen for so long.
The fantasies about the daughter’s classmates are the same as the fantasies about the celebrities. Even when the Oscars were awarded, the guest humorously said, "Who hasn’t coveted her daughter’s classmates?" I
also remembered a fashion magazine a few days ago. The discussion about men’s "Lolita complex" seen on the article. This is not dirty, it is not obscene, this is the yearning for innocence and beauty in the human nature, and it is absolutely not wrong.
The love between Jane and Rich is the most natural and reasonable. The two young teenagers who are in love are both classmates and neighbors. They can appreciate and understand each other, and they can comfort and warm each other apart from the unsatisfactory family life.
Just like when each of us is in love, even if the other party proposes to elope, we really ran away together.
There is also a pair of gays in the movie. I did not hesitate to write about them in the part of love. The relationship between homosexuals is very close and kind, and they even have the same name (different surnames) called Jimmy. They will visit every newly moved neighbor and give them some small gifts. They go to work and do morning exercises every day. Don't shy away from homosexual relationships.
Homosexual love is also love, but the two parties in love are of the same sex, and other attributes are exactly the same. There are more and more things that reflect homosexuality. I don't have any special views on homosexuality. I think they are natural and normal, and they are not inconsistent with ethics. The solution to the homosexuality problem is to be more tolerant of the crowd. When it becomes a matter within the normal range, it is no longer a problem. Among the rules governing people's behavior, morality and ethics are also inherited from history and people's default rules. Only the law is a hard and fast rule.
Caroline and Bird (I can't remember the name of that person) is a standard extramarital relationship. Both of them are dissatisfied with life in a flat but still-maintained family. Both have a common language in work and life, and they can find a little shadow of themselves in each other, and before they find out, they think that they are the only ones. With such characteristics, two people can meet each other's physiological needs...
The proportion of such extramarital affair is certainly not small. They can fulfill the wishes that cannot be realized in the family, and they can discover each other's passion that has been consumed by ordinary life. They can Like every young couple who loves deeply, they are full of gratitude and desire for love, as long as the premise is not to affect the families of both parties.
I’ve passed the age of impulsiveness, I’ve known for a long time that not everything I like must be owned, and I don’t even bother to re-experience the process of going from being crazy in love to being indifferent or even touching. I don’t want to regroup. I am tired of everything that the family has to give...So only the tacit love is left. The ending of this kind of love is either troublesome because of exposure like in the movie, or it can't be solved by tacit understanding, or just Really break through everything and come together, but happiness tends to live up to expectations. Too few can have a perfect ending.
Such extramarital affair is still happening constantly, everywhere, for a moment. As long as people cannot learn to be satisfied, such things will not disappear. They all say "dissatisfaction is the upward wheel", but it's just dissatisfaction, and whether this upward step is to step up a step or fall into an abyss, who knows.
Love is a problem that humans can never let go of, and a topic that people can never give up. If our ideal is not to fight for communism for a lifetime, how can we ignore love?
There are many kinds of love, including those that are so dull that only family affection and sense of responsibility are left. People who can tolerate dullness will get unusual happiness there. People who can't stand it are going to find new love. Well, love is always right, but remembering the harm that often accompanies love (no matter to whom) is always wrong. Keep the love and keep the hurt away...
When the first protagonist of the movie, Lester, finally understood what he should do and smiled sincerely at the past photos of his family, Rich’s father shot Lester to death—because of that In a misunderstanding of an absurd situation, the navy colonel concluded that Lester and Rich had the most unacceptable homosexual relationship. At the same time, Leicester's wife was taking out a pistol, either using threats or intimidation, she didn't want to be tired of responsibility anymore; An Qi regained her confidence in Leicester, and she put a smile on her face and dressed in the mirror; Rich and Jane lay on a big bed looking forward to a happy life after elopement... As if all the beauty has come, but in Leicester, life has also come to an end.
My heart is like being thrown into a stone in the calmest lake, the ripples are getting bigger and wider, and the whole shaking heart is sinking and sour.
I was exhausted because of my wordy. This Hollywood movie allowed me to type on the keyboard for an afternoon. But I can’t stop the continuous thinking in my brain. I saw myself, my parents, my friends, my friends’ wives and children, my friends’ families, I saw them arguing or ignoring each other, and seeing They are small as individuals in society and huge as a whole around me... Is
everything beautiful or crisis? Is it the crisis of the United States or the crisis of all mankind? ?
Always remember the DV record repeated three times in the movie-a plastic bag flying in the wind. The old wolf sang in a song: "Mike, your life was like a plastic bag flying away." The movie and the lyrics are talking about our complete helplessness and helplessness.
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