Therefore, the American middle class is not destined to be happy, just because they (she) are middle class. They can’t enjoy the life style of the big chaebol that is detached from ordinary life. They still have to think about the problem of survival. Here in Mendes, it is mainly the problem of raising children; they also disdain the rough life of the working class, which is "no ideals." "They or their ancestors who have been chasing one or two generations up come from this group, and they don't want to go back to this group.
Although the above is only an external condition, it explains to a large extent the dilemma of the middle class, at least in the dilemma in Mendes' movies-half-hangers who can't go up or down, all live in the shackles of tea, rice, oil and salt. What is fucking is the greatness of the universe or the spiritually beautiful heart.
Middle-class housewives like Ai Boer ("Road to Revolution") can easily arouse our sympathy by putting it in that movie alone: they are born to pursue freedom, but are trapped by marriage and family, that is the other side. Paris, which is free from possibility, is only a possibility after all, and it has not become a reality. So we couldn't help thinking, what if she went to Paris? Things may really get better. Lester ("American Beauty") may also be sympathetic to us. Although he does not have his own "Paris", his boring life is full of despair.
However, "Moving for the Child" subverted all of the above. When the moral word "family responsibility" is added to Mendes's story, all attempts to escape from a boring life have become irresponsible escape behaviors. The whole movie uses five middle-class families as examples to tell us: The reason why you are unhappy is because you always feel happy elsewhere. In Mendes' view, this is almost a common problem of the middle class, an unchangeable common problem. And this sentence just became the answer to Ai Boer's "Paris" question.
If "Road to Revolution" has a director’s commentary, I think, when Ai Boer wanders alone in the woods thinking, what Mendes wants to say is: "My dear, you can’t change your life even if you go to Paris. It’s useless to go to Antarctica.”
Bert considered that his parents wanted to get close to his granddaughter before moving to their girlfriend Verona to live near them, but their parents quietly said that they would move to Greece and feel life (irresponsible 1). After a long-term marriage, Verona’s good friends’ family felt that life was meaningless and became unscrupulous. They laughed at their children arbitrarily (irresponsible 2); Burt’s fake cousins are intellectuals and spirits in liberal arts. Cultivators, they don’t let their children come into contact with the “convenient” modern life, and they call themselves close to each other (irresponsible 3); the family of Verona University classmates have a superficial view, but secretly they live a depressed life because they can’t give birth to their own children. Life, there are "abnormal" (I don’t think this is abnormal) hobbies (irresponsible 4); Burt’s sister-in-law ran away from home, abandoning her husband and daughter, and Burt regarded it as a typical irresponsible ( Thinking of Ai Boer, irresponsible 5). It is through this irresponsible 1-5 premise that Burt and Verona deduced their initial mistake, that is, they considered the living Burt’s parents (middle-class family) when choosing their place of residence, but ignored Verona's deceased parents (to describe their beauty through memories, the important thing is that they are different from the first five families, they have little money, but they are "happy").
Assuming that happiness can be inherited, (Bert and they certainly hope that their daughters can inherit happiness, and there are several places in the film suggesting the role of inheritance,) Burt’s daughter will inherit happiness from the mother’s side ——The offspring of a working class, the offspring of a class that can have a sense of happiness.
Therefore, returning to the "Paris" problem, through the intertextual interpretation of "Moving for the Son", the problem that Appel faces is not whether a family can be happy, but the problem that an entire class can never be happy. . The answer to "getting out of boring family life" lies not in Paris or Greece, but in the Ai Boers themselves. They lost the ability to love (Frank's words), and their middle-class identity keeps them in the process of catching up and looking forward to the future. Or some kind of "beyond shore" existence, they didn't want to but did not dare to look in front of them, because there was only anxiety in front of them. So when they feel that life is boring, they will always lack the motivation to change the current state of boring life. But in Mendes’ view, what is even more decisive is that even if they want to reinvigorate their lives (as Ai Boer once wanted to do), they can only rely on the sad imagination of “Paris” as motivation, and once this This kind of imagination is also deprived, so all that is left is sinking or death.
Don't talk about "responsibility" with the middle class, they have imagination beyond life, Mendes may think so.
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