- a brief analysis of the text form of "The Unreasonable Man"
"Architect" magazine No. 134 (August 2008), Zhou Ling's article "The Genealogy and Types of Formal Analysis" mentioned architectural works Three methods of analysis: structural analysis, symbolic analysis, textual analysis. Structural analysis is the most basic, and other analysis methods will be based on it. Simply put, a work of art can be interpreted in many ways, which can be analyzed from a political, psychological, symbolic, social, philosophical, etc. perspective, but the morphological analysis of a work of art is always an unavoidable element of analysis. Here I try to split and analyze the narrative structure of the film "The Unreasonable Man", hoping to spy on some of the author's inner expressions by reading the structure of the film carefully.
As shown in the picture, I divided the whole film into four chapters, Summary, Love, Doubt, and Turning. The summary part is 30 minutes, that is, from the beginning of the film until the male protagonist overheard the dialogue. The function of this summary is a bit like a big frame, and all the characters in the movie are described in detail, a bit similar to "Titanic". No." in the description of the characters before the ship collided with the iceberg.
The love part is 35min. In fact, this part includes the love development between the male protagonist and the female protagonist and the whole process of the male protagonist murdering the judge. The reason why we use love instead of murder as the title is not because of the lack of importance of murder in it. Instead, this structural division method is mainly divided from the perspective of the heroine 1.
The suspected part is 15 minutes, and it is the female lead who suspects the male lead's murder, and seeks and collects evidence for this.
The turning part is 10 minutes, which is the ingenious ending of the film, which has both formal meaning and viewpoint expression meaning.
The structure of the text can be divided into various forms. The basis of the author's classification is the change of the heroine 1's feelings towards the whole event. In the following, the author will interpret the contents of the four parts one by one, in order to spy on its art form.
Chapter 1 Summary
The summary may seem like a prelude to the story, but it plays a very important role. First of all, it is like a frame, which describes the characters in the movie one by one; secondly, it is like an introduction, and this introduction is not only the introduction of the characters and scenes, but more importantly, the introduction of the theme of the film.
The summary begins with a very rough character description, which I call "character browsing." That is to say, all the characters at the beginning of the film appear, which reflects everyone's attitude towards the male protagonist and outlines the decadent characteristics of the male protagonist. It is somewhat similar to Stephen Chow's description of the characters in the poor town in "Kung Fu". One character appears one after another, and the characters appear very naturally, which outlines the poverty scene of the town.
Next is the description of the two philosophy classes of the male protagonist. The author believes that these two classes imply two core issues of the whole film: 1. The contradiction between love and family and legal rules; 2. How to live, to self more meaningful. Therefore, these two lessons have a guiding commander effect on the theme of the entire film. And the use of classroom as the introduction of the theme has a strong sense of form.
In the subsequent plot, the author marked the scene between the male lead and the female lead as yellow, and marked the scene between the male lead and the second female lead as red. It can be seen that basically in the "Summary" chapter, the two Interspersed, basically symmetrical in the number of occurrences. This formal relationship I think was designed to explore the first question I raised - the difference that two women embody when confronted with "love and law" contradictions.
The gray blocks are some auxiliary plots, most of which are transitional, but by no means unimportant. For example, that cocktail party not only emphasized the male protagonist's loss of the meaning of life and his suicidal tendency, but also brought out the appearance of a female student in the Department of Chemistry, which paved the way for the subsequent coincidence in the laboratory.
The whole summary chapter seems to be loosely plotted, but it is actually very rigorous. From a formal point of view, it is like a cleverly woven flower basket that advances the plot step by step.
Chapter 2 Love
As shown in the picture, in the part before the murder of this chapter, the roles of the female lead and the second female are basically alternated, and after the murder, the male protagonist chooses to fall in love with the female lead, and there is basically no scene for the female lead. . From the perspective of narrative form, for the first question, the roles of female 1 and female 2 are basically equal. The reason why female 1 has more scenes is that the author believes that the roles of female 1 and male lead are to better explain the first. Two questions.
At the end of the first chapter, the male protagonist gets the motivation to live-he wants to kill this bad judge for the whole society. This kind of activity is different from the previous protest marches and charity activities. It is a real bad guy for the society. As the monologue of the film says, "I no longer feel dizzy or anxious, and I can finally usher in the freedom of my own choice." The film here points out the theme 2 "How to live more meaningfully to myself" - the method is to use the film express the views of the characters.
In fact, this theme is common in Woody's films. Woody's philosophy is different from classical philosophy. He is reluctant to discuss a unified philosophy, and pays more attention to the meaning of philosophy to himself. To make an inappropriate analogy is like abandoning the Mahayana in favor of the Hinayana. While most of Woody's films promote this state of life, the twist at the end is also a satire of it. But I think this is just satire rather than criticism, there are complexities and contradictions in it.
Chapter 3 Suspect
The relationship between this chapter is very simple. It is the process of collecting evidence of the crime of the female lead against the male protagonist. There are three evidence collections in total. The first time was the conversation with the female No. 2, the second time was to peep at the male lead's house, and the third time was through her conversation with the chemistry girl. Through these three evidence collections, the female lead could basically conclude that the male lead was murder. murderer.
The most interesting part of the whole process is that the female No. 1 and the female No. 2 responded to their male protagonist's crime, one was nervous and the other was relaxed. This is to explain the theme 1 "emotion and law" in the next chapter. Some natural bedding.
The chapter at the end of the turning point of the fourth chapter
is very exciting. It can be seen from the diagram that the structure of this chapter is very neat.
The first is the different attitudes of the female lead and the female lead towards the male protagonist being the murderer. Here, the theme of the movie 1 "emotional and legal contradiction" is pointed out - it is also described in the perspective of the characters in the film. Then things took a turn, and the female lead forced the male lead to surrender. After that, the first girl reconciled with her boyfriend, and the second girl divorced her husband. In the end, the male protagonist had an accident, and the whole story ended with a monologue.
The two themes of the entire film were first introduced by two philosophy lessons, and then expressed through the mouths of the characters in the film. The artistic handling is very clever, but the point of view is that of the character in the film, not the director. So what is the director's understanding of these two themes? Expressed in the last monologue in the film, "The whole incident is like a painful lesson. Let Abe (male protagonist) say it before is a lesson that you can't learn from textbooks." If the director tells you the answer, is it different from what the textbook tells you? The most important thing is experience, and life tells you the answer.
Conclusion
The author analyzes a correlation between form and content from the narrative structure of the text. It can be seen that Woody's polishing of the story is very artistic, and the fit between form and content is very high. What is even more powerful is that Woody expresses this degree of fit very naturally. He does not specifically emphasize the structural form of the film, but its formal beauty permeates it. Of course, maybe Woody also discussed other topics in this film, such as love, marriage, etc. This is normal, after all, it is impossible to cover all the content of a film in one article.
There is also an article in the "Architect" magazine explaining the interpretation of the work, saying that the interpretation of the work is actually a re-creation of the text, which does not necessarily have to be traced back to the author's original intention, but requires one's own complete understanding. I forgot which issue this article is from, but I still hope that my interpretation can be close to the author's original intention, at least not bad.
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