unobtainable freedom
Rick has an intellect that controls everything, and he invents, creates, and even destroys reality to make the world meet his will. It can be said that he is a person who has obtained the maximum freedom.
And Beth, who had just experienced a failed marriage, was helpless in front of this conflicted family. Beth's love for her father, Rick, was chaotic, and being abandoned by rick as a child didn't make her hate him, but revered him even more. She envied that Rick could just walk away when he had a problem without having to face it. This is a world where ordinary people want maximum freedom, without any complications. But the reality is not like this. Beth has to choose between marriage and father. She has to choose to face her bad psychological state. She needs to complete the psychological counseling given to her by school. She has to choose between such a situation. Facing the truth in an awkward situation. In fact, she knew from the beginning that Rick was avoiding psychological counseling, and she knew that she was psychologically dependent on her father. But she would rather believe the lies she made up, because covering up problems is the usual way for the weak to solve problems.
God is dead, Rick is his own God, he can be turned into a cucumber, and can even rely on intelligence to manipulate situations in the most unlikely situations. As the psychiatrist Wong said, Rick controls everything. He doesn't need to be coerced by social pressure like ordinary people, he doesn't need to get up every day to squeeze the subway, he doesn't need to swallow his voice to report to the boss, and he doesn't need to squeeze a smile to his colleagues at any time. In his world he can drop all pretense and act out of personal preference without any burden. Just as Rick hates the government, there is no one person or organization above him. Rick's strength and the "infinite freedom" he has can't help him gain inner peace. Dealing with family responsibilities and facing his inner pressure makes the powerful Rick choose to escape, which is the contradiction of Rick. Rick who is absolutely free is not free only when he faces his heart.
Opposite to freedom, we ordinary people need to choose all the time. Choice is what the existential philosopher Sartre called a kind of unfreedom, because choice is premised on sacrificing another possibility. Those who choose to leave the lively Beijing and Shanghai to settle down in small and medium-sized cities have the deepest experience. No matter how you choose to escape, in the end, you need to make a choice no matter what. This is actually the most obvious. In the animation, some of Dr. Wong's patients turned out to be people with a habit of eating shit. As an audience, we can easily understand the absurdity of eating shit, but we can't see the same absurdity that we often show. Under pressure from Dr. Wong, Beth had no choice but to face his own bad situation, but this was only for a brief moment. At Rick's suggestion, Beth, who had just come out of the psychiatry clinic, chose one of the things she was most familiar with: escaping the reality she couldn't bear in alcohol. It's the writer's biggest mockery of real life.
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