This is a film review of female addicts Part I and Part II.
In terms of narrative methods, the film generally adopts the reentry method of narrative-flashback-narrative, and the flashback part is composed of the self-reported experience of the heroine Joe + Joe/Seligman's on-the-spot opinions and associations. While the film is advancing gradually, the suspense of Joe's situation in the title is gradually revealed. Personally, I feel that the heroine’s self-report has a kind of intermittent linear growth diary. If you contact the director’s other works, the director may have the interest of narrating chapters, but for this movie, Joe’s retrospect of each stage of himself is a fragment of Joe’s life. The presentation became a bit passive. In other words, childhood, youth, and adult Joe are narrated separately by Joe who talked with Seligman on the spot, but in fact, childhood Joe can be narrated by youth Joe, and youth Joe can be narrated by adult Joe. Create a more three-dimensional narrative network.
------Character shaping and story core------
When Joe is constantly affirming her instinctive sexual desire, the secular moral code stands on the opposite side of her, because under the measurement of secular morality, her desire has become "excessive", "corrupting the ethics of husband and wife", and "profane." God’s" and need to be restrained and healed. The heroine's self-report is summed up as: she went from sexual obscurity to sexual rebellion to the experience of facing up to and defending her sexual desires, and gradually came to know herself.
Intellectual Seligman’s opinions are interspersed with Joe’s self-reports. Although he can understand Joe’s experience and considers himself a feminist, he cannot empathize with a natural and heterogeneous desire, so he is always conscious or not. Consciously carry out moral exhortation. This kind of moral exhortation is a kind of gentle negation. He hopes to incorporate Joe's heterogeneous desires into an understandable and existing cultural background, but he has never been able to face up to this heterogeneous desire for existing cultural backgrounds. The exclusion that culture may cause. I think Seligman presents a kind of rational conceit and cowardice, which stems from the pursuit of integrity while ignoring repulsive factors, and for the same reason, he fears that there are some restless and provocative factors in the whole, which endanger the integrity and uniqueness of the whole.
This is manifested in the movie. It is Seligman like a search engine, often making incorrect word meaning associations in places where empathy is needed. You can imagine when you throw into the web search box because of a certain emotional fluctuation. When you come up with relevant words and sentences, the responses you get are uncommon search associations that have nothing to do with your experience and somatosensory. This kind of tree-like divergence of concepts is presented in the movie with audio-visual materials. In this film, it is the director’s method of portraying the role of Seligman. At the same time, this is also a film element of Von Trier. Some people say that the impression is It looks like a movie essay, and I personally prefer to call this element a "search engine". (This element is also used in Feng Trier's recent work "This House Is Made By Me".)
When Joe is undergoing sex addiction treatment, he first smears the mirror at home. After contacting, Joe sees his childhood in the mirror of the treatment club. The concealment and reappearance of mirror can be understood as the concealment and reappearance of self-desire. This is The epitome of Joe's journey.
On the other hand, Seligman's "mirror" seems to have been concealed, his instinctual desires are concealed by his later desires for knowledge, because dealing with words seems to be able to cross the erotic desire and reach the object, and it seems that in this way the intellectual can grasp a "clean" object. However, the result is clear. When emotions and knowledge are disconnected, he can only make search engine-like unsympathetic associations. He cannot experience the pain of a pedophile man like Joe, because he often resorts to desire in morals. At the end of the film, when Seligman’s sexual impulse came to the fore, he did not hesitate to discard all the previous moral rhetoric in an attempt to molest Joe. The reason is the same as Seligman’s character, because Seligman’s knowledge , Morality and lust have a tendency to split obviously. In extreme cases, he can only choose one of two choices. Therefore, in his heart, Joe is not only a respectable self-seeking woman, but also a venting woman. woman.
Many people criticized the director for arranging Seligman's ending reversal to be too abrupt. I also agree that there is such abruptness, but the consequences are not the role motivation, the ambiguity of the character, the rupture of the plot (because of the previous analysis, Seligman made the reason for this. It is sufficient), but the reversal at the end of the film leaves the audience lacking room for sympathy and understanding, and it is possible to put a completely negative impression on him, which is equivalent to pushing the interpretation of a character to a corner at the last moment. Was Seligman a wolf wearing an exquisite cultural mask? If the ending reversal fixes the audience's impression of the character here, then this "one table, one inside" way of shaping the character would be a bit explicit and thin.
Seeing human nature from moral discussions is the director’s expertise. The film provides a platform for thinking in terms of narrative content and character creation. Both Joe and Seligman represent different faces of human nature. Many people are arguing whether this film represents a feminist position. I think it is better to say that this film discusses the fundamental source and motivation of feminism.
One of the most vigorous and fundamental sources of a certain political aspiration of man is his instinctive desire. Different political demands may conflict with each other in the cultural context, but they may share the same desire background. Joe’s sexual desire has a transcendental or even transcendental meaning in the movie (self-contact in childhood and "floating" sexual experience). The various taboos surrounding sexual desire have been provoked by Joe, suppressed by him, and finally surpassed. The reason for being able to transcend is because of Joe's clear and natural sexual desire in his childhood, as pure as a tree. Joe may understand that the pure gesture of desire should be agitation such as "I want", "I want", "I love", "I hate", rather than something desired. It expresses the individual's intention and originality. The good (not bound by universal moral standards), when you replace desire itself with the object of desire, desire is imprisoned. The loyal love and the moral laws and social system tied to this chain are a pity for Joe, because the love of him/her, the contract of love, and the crystallization of love cannot replace her lust in the end. And when the outside world tries to discipline Joe’s eros mentally and physically, or when Joe compromises on the weaker side of human nature (for example, at the end of the credits conversation, Joe hopes to correct his desires), Joe is destined to stretch her will to power and dominate herself. The desire to regain control of the body.
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