When a person dies, he does not choose heaven, but puts on sheets and becomes a house spirit. The reason why he chose to be a part of this house is roughly for two reasons, one is that before his death he somehow felt that he was tied to this house, and his life manifested through this dwelling; the other was that as long as he was sad The wife still lives here, and as a house, she can accompany her, and his life and her life can be intertwined through her dwelling.
This means that he becomes part of the house, permanently attached to the land and unable to leave. He wanted to stay here to protect his grieving wife, but found that for his long "life", his wife was just a moment. He stubbornly drives away every "intruder" to his home, and does not allow his dwelling to become someone else's dwelling. A modern house for subletting, because of the existence of ghosts, has become an ancient "home", only willing to connect with one family. So, he turned into a haunted house and gradually run down.
Although he is a house spirit, his attachment is not a physical building, nor his personal life experience, but the ideal of a house as a home.
He saw his origin: when the pioneer family came to this land, they wanted to build a home of their own. When they died of Indian arrows, the whole of the house was just a fence, but the land was branded with the mark of the home, and that was the moment when he was born as a house: the reason why dwelling became dwelling came from The obsession with the home and the efforts to build the home with one's own hands, this obsessive construction behavior turns the site into a place.
He saw his own dwelling: the two drifted here, living in a house that did not belong to him. This modern migratory lease-style dwelling, the dwelling has lost the perfection and sweetness of his hometown, a pre-modern dwelling model no longer exists. But he was different. He felt something lingering around him, something that belonged only to him: his own ghost. This allowed him to establish a connection with the house that transcended others, as if his existence could only be manifested by inhabiting it; and the house, through their inhabitation, became a home. A Heideggerian quaternary that he could feel, but his wife could not. Finally, on the day he was forced to move, he died fatefully and chose to be the home itself.
He also saw the demise of habitation: the connection between man and land was lost under the constant change and impact of the modern city, his house was torn down, and a building was built on the land. In modern space, they become the symbols on the chain of signifiers. People think they can control their own lives, but they are actually puppets at the mercy of them. The connection between people and the land has been completely cut off, but he still lingers here, with the obsession to find a home, but his dwelling has passed away, and he can only die as a house spirit.
But he couldn't die. Because he is dead. He can only start from scratch again, endlessly reincarnating in the demise of habitation, to experience his own destiny that must end. Of course, he can terminate this cycle at any time, annihilating his soul in a moment of ecstasy or complete despair. Just like his neighbor, the ghost in flowered sheets who had long forgotten the meaning of his existence, sighed: I don't think they will come back, and then turned into smoke.
If you look at this movie as a love story about waiting and waiting, it's really beautiful. But I prefer to think of it as a history of the demise of Heideggerian dwelling; a memory of building and dwelling that we have no experience with, and therefore no forgetting; a story of love, land, dwelling The epic of home and home.
The ending is actually optimistic. The bond between people and fixed places represented by the house spirit in the sheets is destined to die. But that kind of aura can be continued by attaching to other things: for example, the music he wrote, which he left her as a gift, replaced the house she had turned into, and became her memory of him. Another example is that she stuffed a piece of paper in every place where she lived. The imprint of life carried by the words was a gift she left to him. After he read it, it disappeared.
This can be regarded as fulfilling the prophecy that literature will kill architecture.
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