Maybe we all have gaps in our hearts, looking forward to being filled.
My mental activity when I watched "Ordinary People" was like this: At first, I thought it was showing the confusion of adolescence. Then, I sniffed out the unannounced class bamboo fence. Later, I think the best thing about it is that it cares and accurately portrays the thoughts, thoughts, and behaviors of young people who are about to enter society. The love and sex of young people, sensitivity and cowardice, discrimination and alienation, face up to each other in the painting. Finally, I realized that it actually expresses the process of how a person builds himself up.
Like the title of the play, "Ordinary People" does not tell the ups and downs. Its plot is very everyday and the protagonist does not have a special halo. Such a title seems to say that this is just a story about ordinary people. However, this story is not that ordinary. Because it also involves how we should be ordinary people. Cornell and Marian just want to be ordinary people, have an ordinary life, ordinary love, but we have discovered from their stories that being an ordinary person is not that simple. Because you live in a world, in a crowd. All the external forces of the environment will act on you, and the release of all your internal forces will also trigger a response from the environment.
I don't want to say that Cornell and Marianne are incomplete. I want to say that they have their own gaps that need to be filled. Cornell lives in a single-parent family. His mother raised him, and his father was completely absent in his life. This may have affected his gentle and gloomy character. Compared with most people, his family background is very ordinary, and he has no regard for Marianne. His self-confidence was very weak, and he couldn't believe that Marianne would love herself. He didn't have the courage to show himself differently in front of everyone. He didn't seem to have an opinion or a hobby. He didn't even dare to stand up and defend his lover. One of the things he does most often is to integrate into the crowd, even if it requires wronging himself and patience with others. Marianne lives in a family full of violence. The newly deceased father was once a violent element in this family. After the death of his father, the shocked brother vented all his bad feelings on Marianne. The mother indulged and protected her son's excessive behavior everywhere. At the same time, his brother was jealous of Marianne's cleverness, and he kept humiliating her and bruising him. The mother never advocated justice, and her indifferent expression was undoubtedly a kind of cold and violence to Marianne. Such an environment made Marianne never experience the feeling of being loved. She almost believed that she had a trait that she would not be loved by nature. The lack of family warmth caused her sensitivity and low self-esteem, which then turned into aggression. And the long-term humiliation and denial led to a flattering personality in her relationship.
Such two people collided together. They could be complementary. Marianne can give Cornell self-confidence, and Cornell can give Marianne a feeling of love. But what they are burdened by themselves can also hurt each other. For a long time, the latter situation prevailed. They didn't get what they lacked from the other side, only aggravated their original harm. Cornell was unable to express his true feelings in his heart and escape his due responsibility in love. And Marian needs that kind of strong clarity to get a sense of security. But waiting in exchange for disappointment and misunderstanding. On the last side of the eve of graduation, the two still did not establish a smooth communication bridge, and blessed each other in violation of their hearts and broke up.
I think so, many people, maybe everyone, have an inner gap that needs to be filled. We dried up for too long. Finally, there was a rain. We feel filled and feel that what we need is rain. The sun came down and the rain dried. We dried up again, hurt again. We are disappointed. So we filled ourselves with mud, filled ourselves with sand and gravel, and even filled ourselves with corrosive solutions. And all this will only make us more crippled. Real incompleteness, a self-made incompleteness.
But is it really that complicated? Are we really incomplete? Does what we need really comes from the outside world? That's why I finally came to the conclusion that this play is about a person's self-building process. Although Marianne and Cornell are complementary in a certain sense, the meaning of complementarity is not that I can only rely on you, you can only rely on me. The gap in our heart is a kind of near-natural preservation. It originates from family or growth, but it is not caused by ourselves. Therefore, it is not our fault, nor is it a pathological incompleteness. So I said, that is just a gap. The gap needs to be filled, but it is not the outside world that fills it, not outsiders, even Liang Shanbo, Zhu Yingtai, Romeo and Juliet's kind family members cannot establish the other's self. The ultimate practitioner and almighty leader of self-establishment can only be ourselves. Cornell and Marianne can hug each other, support each other, and share nourishment for each other's self-building, but they have to rely on themselves after all, don't they? They took a long detour, but fortunately, they found the answer and found themselves. Marianne banished herself from the kingdom of love to the world and nine layers of hell, until her inner voice reached the limit and surfaced. For the first time, she made her own voice.
She finally found herself and returned to her lover's side. And began to pay attention to their desires and express their needs to their lovers.
Cornell received psychotherapy when he was on the brink of emotional desperation, and gradually soaked and flattened his long-entangled self. He no longer denies other people's affirmation of himself, and muster the courage to show the outstanding part of himself. The most important thing is that when love encounters the crux of the problem, they learn to open their hearts to communicate, explain, and eliminate misunderstandings.
At the end of the story , Marianne decided to stay, while Cornell chose to go out. They chose a different life. The good thing is that this is their own choice. Will they be together, or will they not? Is the answer still that important? They have become the normal people they want to be.
In fact, when watching "Ordinary People", I remembered my experience in my youth, of my denial of myself over the years, and the love mirage that I had turned out to be. When my world finally becomes bigger, when I finally wake up from my dreams, and when I finally establish an independent self, in fact, I feel namelessly melancholy. The self who was ignorant but so condensed before, I have never been stranger to it forever. Perhaps this is the price of growth.
(Official account: Duan Xuesheng)
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