The film features three women. In 1979, the heroine Dorothea was 55 years old, and she was born in 1924. In 1929, the United States ushered in the Great Depression. The economic crisis that started in the United States has swept through many capitalist countries and has long-term effects on the American economy, people's lives and cultural ecology. And this is just the beginning of Dorothea's life experience.
The film borrows Jamie's narration to introduce the life that Dorothea's time brought her, "When she was my age, people drove sad cars and lived in sad houses with only old houses. No money, no food, no TV. But people were real then. By the time she was 16, the war broke out and she had to drop out of school. She dreamed of being an Air Force pilot, and she really went flying school, but before she finished, the war was over and she became the first woman to work in the drawing room of the Continental Can Company. Then she met my dad, had me, and they divorced. In People of her day would never admit that something was wrong."
Dorothea, like our grandmothers, is a storyteller. In their lifetime, they have experienced too many social changes and transitions.
Dorothea survived the Great Depression, the war years, and the independence and rise of women at a young age. What the times have given them is stubbornness, tolerance, uncompromising, and calmness to the years. She is diligent, skilled, and full of intellectual charm. But at the same time, as an aging generation, she is also facing the problem of the generation gap with the new generation. She doesn't understand the modern punk culture, and the sexual indulgence of young people. She even asks whether she is trapped by her own era? But when she went to a nightclub to experience modern society, she was very disappointed, and she had difficulty accepting the clothes, fashion, taste, music and ideas that children liked.
How does she cope? The new era is like a river that occasionally intersects but eventually flows in parallel, still living confidently in a world that belongs to her and does not belong to her.
Jamie, who was trying to understand her mother, read to Dorothea what he had seen from the book Born and Gone: The Sufferings of an Aged Woman, "I am social, curious, and clear-headed. All I want is to get to know people and make them want to know me too. I doubt I'll ever remarry and be so close to another person, but I'm always in the shadows. Take off my clothes, I'm more than my ex-husband More attractive. But sexually and socially, I'm dated, he's not. I'm afraid to show my affection to a man, and if I do, he might see it as an offense I should have fulfilled my little mission and disappeared." This passage deeply describes the heart of Dorothea, who is approaching old age, who are lonely, confused, restrained and at a loss. However, Dorothea calmly said to her son, "I don't need a book to understand myself." She is arrogant, stubborn, confident, and walks forward without looking back with the vicissitudes of life.
At the end of the film, Dorothea, on another birthday of a happy, comfortable and rich old age, soars in the sky in a biplane, looking at the world in front of her with a happy smile.
This generation of women has experienced the misfortune of the times, but if life does not overwhelm them, they will live their lives in peace of mind. My grandmother and Dorothea were the same generation, a few years younger. They went through the eight-year war of resistance against Japan, the civil war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and finally entered the era of reform and opening up and peace. Like Dorothea, these women who were not directly crushed by fate, but who were swept away by disasters, were branded by the times as being diligent, thrifty, restrained, tolerant, self-confident and conforming to the destiny. Today, they are still living in a new era, detached from the era, living in parallel with us in the same time and space. You don't need to understand each other, you just need to respect each other, and you can spend the last time comfortably.
The second woman written in the film, 24-year-old Abby, was born in 1955. She is the representative of those young women who are rebellious, strong-willed, sober and independent. "She grew up in Santa Barbara, everyone was happy, and that drove her crazy. In 1973, she moved to New York, read Art school. New York made her feel normal because New York was a mess." Abby knows exactly what she wants, she has music she loves and loves to share; she pursues and explores the art of photography persistently and eventually Achieved; she had a problem with her uterus and the doctor advised her not to have children, but she ignored the doctor's instructions and eventually gave birth to two sons.
She was a feminist, and she gave Jamie books that she thought would give him a woman's perspective. They are My Body, My Body, Sisterhood is Powerful, The Politics of the Orgasm, and the book Born and Dead: The Sufferings of an Aged Woman. In spite of Dorothea's obstruction, she did not care to talk about "menstruation" in public, believing that it was a natural trait bestowed on a woman by fate, so she should not be ashamed to talk about it.
Abby and my mother are the same generation. Dorothea was able to work and survive independently in society because of her school education, while my grandmother did not receive education because of the times. She spent her whole life as a full-time housewife, but they gave them the character and character of the times. There is no absolute gap in traits. The gap between my mother and Abby was insurmountable. Ordinary women born in China in the 1950s had just gone through the Cultural Revolution in their teenage years. They had not received much formal school education and had to enter society to become self-reliant laborers. They have suffered from hunger and hardships. They cannot get the same pay as men for equal work at work, and they have to support their husbands and children when they go home, and face heavy housework. They are a repressed generation, and it is difficult for them to form their own independent personalities and thoughts. When they enter their old age, they basically rely on their children in life, especially spiritually, to survive.
The third woman is 17-year-old Julie, a representative of rebellious teenage girls, born in 1962. She smoked, drank, stayed out at night, indulged in sexuality, and was full of confusion about life. She plays with life and is toyed with by life.
A television clip of Carter's 1979 speech "Crisis of Confidence" is shown in the film, "It is not a sign of pleasure or reassurance that people are showing increasing disrespect to government, schools, the press and other public institutions. A fact and a warning. It's a crisis of confidence. We can see this crisis and we're growing doubts about the meaning of life. We're losing solidarity and common purpose. Too many people who value self-indulgence and Consumption, but we have found that owning and consuming material does not satisfy our thirst for meaning. We have always believed that we are in the great movement of human beings themselves, contributing our part to the pursuit of freedom. We are At a turning point in its own history, on the road to division and self-interest, lingering with a misunderstanding of freedom, the road must lead to failure." This is the background of Julie's teenage years.
She is dissatisfied with life, but does not know how to change; she is dissatisfied with herself, but does not know what real growth is. They live righteously in a world created by the evaluation of others and lose their own value judgments. They drifted with the flow, swept up by the waves of the times, and were thrown away ruthlessly. Confused and dazed, they spend their days in a daze, with a long road ahead. However, Julie, who has passed through adolescence and confusion, as a representative of ordinary women, with a strong sense of female identity and a desire to be independent, will still enter a fairly normal life track, "I will start oral contraception. Medicine, I'm going to NYU, I'm not going to talk to my mom, I'm going to fall in love with Nicholas, we're going to move to Paris, and we're going to decide we don't have kids."
There are many older colleagues around me who belong to this age group. When they were teenagers, the national political situation began to stabilize and the economy gradually recovered. They were able to receive a certain degree of cultural education. enjoy a certain economic capacity. Can quickly adapt to the new era and changes, have their own ideas and judgments about life, and can put them into practice. They help their children selectively, but they are no longer attached to them spiritually. Chinese women in the 1960s were a generation that really began to have a sense of independence and a desire to explore life.
The film also has a side dish, middle-aged male William. As a representative of ordinary men, he is nothing compared to the three women who are rich in life and spirit. For his analysis, I will not repeat it here.
"Twentieth Century Woman" is a film very similar to the novel, with large monologues and narrations. The past is presented through the images of black and white documentaries, and the events that will happen in the future are spoken by the people of the present, giving people a "defamiliarization" experience. The screenwriter of the film was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay at the 89th Academy Awards in 2017. Limited by knowledge and observation, the analysis of the film is rather brief and subjective. In the future, as your knowledge grows, you can look back and savor the difference from today's analysis.
(The picture comes from the Internet)
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