Like many other fairy tales of young girls who bravely pursue love, Chiyoko's father in Jin Min's "Millennium Actress" does not appear in the story. At the beginning of the film, there are only a few shots of his death. In Chiyoko's cognition, his father has only one name, and the specific image is suspended, becoming a signifier without a reference. The libido that the young girl Chiyoko was supposed to cast on her father lost her object, and the Electra (love father and mother) complex did not subside smoothly, so that as a traumatic driving force throughout her life, we might as well This story understands that Chiyoko pursues the dream of missing father's love to make an analysis.
For a girl in Electra, the father figure has two sides. On the one hand, it is a romantic image of a "lover" who is the object of libido; on the other hand, it is a practical image of a "protector" who takes care of his own life and keeps himself away from danger. There is undoubtedly an antagonism between these two images. The romantic image is based on the girl's fantasy, pointing to the father's name (opposite-sex identity), which requires the absence of the specific father, so as not to crowd out the space of the fantasy; the image of the protector is just the opposite, it relies on It is the concrete action of the father that points to the concrete image of the father, and the father in the functional sense must be present. The smooth transition of the Electra complex is largely due to awareness of this opposition.
What you see in "Millennium Actress", however, is that Chiyoko splits the image of her father into two halves: the exiled painter and the director. The former is the release object of the Electra complex she put aside, the key that the painter left to her and regarded as a treasure, which, if interpreted with the grammar of dreams, is the symbol of the male sexual organs. Like her father, he has only experienced a moment of getting along, and he will always be in a place beyond his reach in the future, no matter how much he runs, he will not be able to catch up. Chiyoko said, "What I really fell in love with was the process of chasing", suspending the result of the chasing. Isn't this a long-distance race caused by the traumatic driving force of the father's absence? Compare the land surveyor's pursuit of the "impossible" in Kafka's "Castle". The latter is shriveled, hopeless, and absurd, while Chiyoko's pursuit has a strong sense of pleasure, an act of repairing wounds. Being wrapped in "meaning" all the time (deep love for man), the trauma itself is overlaid with the perverted pleasure of the act of repairing the trauma.
The director faithfully followed Chiyoko through various dreams of chasing the exiled painter, but he was in a supporting role from beginning to end, and was not much noticed by Chiyoko. He has a certain status (his photographer and assistant is a symbol of status), immediately appears to protect himself in times of danger, and loves himself unconditionally. Isn't this the ideal father image in a girl's dream? But such a standard father image does not The romantic fantasy cannot be satisfied, and the original missing trauma cannot be repaired, so Chiyoko cannot have an emotional response to the director. To repair the trauma, it is necessary to pursue the absent "father's name". This double expectation of love (in the sense of Oedipus or Electra complex) is also reflected in Haruki Murakami's "South of the Border and West of the Sun", where the protagonist's feelings for his primary school "girlfriend" Shimamoto Emotion is the fantasy of an absent romantic image (Shimoto's image remains enigmatic in the later period), while the wife and daughter are present, safe, and real.
It is more interesting to analyze the image of Chiyoko's mother in the story. In the context of Electra, the mother appears as a competitor of the father, and the girl in the Electra period imagines that the mother uses various means to steal the father's love from her own hands, and this film The figure of the mother is a perfect example. The images of mother are her colleague Yuiko, her biological mother and witch, respectively, symbolizing the mother's ego, id and superego. They all obstruct Chiyoko's pursuit of "father's name" in different ways.
Yuiko is the character who most directly and unabashedly expresses her jealousy and hatred for Chiyoko. She appears as a competitor in Chiyoko's career as an actress, stealing the key that she considers her treasure. What you can see here is the typical "queen complex" in "Snow White", because she is jealous of her "daughter"'s youth (this youth is radiated by mobilizing libido to chase the missing pleasure), and hurt her . Stealing the key symbolizing the penis symbolizes stealing the pleasure from her. Swimmer has subconsciously realized that this pleasure is the source of her youthful charm. Porn jokes: A group of girls rode their bikes and sang happily all the way. The one who took them out for a ride felt noisy, so he said to them: If you make any noise, put the seat cushion on your bike. This is the relationship between sexual pleasure and vitality) . And that witch is Chiyoko's internalized mother superego image. Her specific identity is Chiyoko herself, who has lost the moisture of pleasure and has aged. She persuaded Chiyoko to give up this "meaningless" pursuit with a feeling of "love and hatred". Compared with her own mother and swimmer, her image is sublime, the power of a mother in a family that lacks her father, which is reflected in the privilege of power in this dream—thousand-year longevity tea and curse. The reason why she is Chiyoko herself in this dream means that the mother's superego has successfully colonized her, and the mother's admonition has been internalized by Foucault into a terrifying stare, like the invisible but ubiquitous eyes of the Dome. Needless to say, the biological mother is the specific self sandwiched between the two, the mother in the real world.
Let's recall that episode: When Chiyoko's mother died in the earthquake, she happened to find a painting by an exiled artist. What can be seen here is the synchronicity of the collapse of matriarchy and the progress of love (or the pursuit of the father's name). In Shunji Iwai's "Love Letter" there is a similar plot: a feverish Fujii (female) hallucinations in the hospital, the memory of his father's death and the green memory of the same name Fujii (male) in middle school flash alternately in a montage technique; It was her father's mourning period when Fujii (male) went to Fujii (female)'s house to return "Reminiscence of the Time Is Like Water" and express his love implicitly through it. Based on these, we can boldly speculate that in literary and artistic works, there is a synchronic grammar between the two.
The above analysis is based on the fact that this story is Chiyoko's dream. Finally, we might as well make a more radical guess: this story is not Chiyoko's dream but the dream of Chiyoko's mother. That is to say, creating the absence of the father in the daughter's cognition is also the mother's subconscious wish. In order to eliminate her daughter's competition and resist her sexual fantasies about her father, she split her father's name into two parts, the presence and absence, and suspended the part of absence, so that her daughter was chasing her life for nothing, satisfying own the desires of her husband. At the same time, for superego-style compensation (preconscious censorship), he puts himself in the position of being hated by his daughter and eventually tragically dying. This reminds me again of a vulgar porn joke: a widow cuts off her husband's penis on a war effort and hangs it on the wall for her "enjoyment". This is also an example of tearing apart the object of pleasure in order to monopolize pleasure, suspending half of it so that others can't get it.
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