There is an old saying in China: it is better to die than to live.
There seems to be a strange and powerful force in our ancestors that supported them through those difficult and difficult years.
Being able to endure hardship has become a label for Chinese people.
However, the recent spate of suicides of young people seems to have changed the above old saying today: it is better to die than to live.
There is an Internet phrase, which I just learned in the past two days, and that is "I emo". It means "I'm depressed" "I'm depressed".
Why is there such a big change?
A large part of the reason why young people are depressed now is that they have understood too much and seen too much when they were very young, but they often have no ability or ability to change the status quo.
I think, maybe this is also a drawback in the Internet age.
If we think about history in this way, we may see something different. For example, the classic movie we are going to talk about today deconstructs the grand history with a contemporary thinking——
"The Devil is Coming"
Most people must have seen this film, after all, it is already famous.
So far, "The Devil Is Coming" has maintained a high score of 9.3 points despite being watched by nearly 500,000 people.
"The Devil is Coming" is adapted from the novella "Survival" by writer You Fengwei.
It was not only an adaptation, but also a major adaptation, and even caused You Fengwei's great dissatisfaction, believing that the film violated the right of adaptation.
However, Comrade Jiang Wen is naturally not caring. He bluntly said that this film is not only a reproduction of the atrocities of the Japanese army in those days. More out of a cautionary duty:
"I want to tell the Japanese audience through this film: You have to truly face this history. Don't try to deny it. I also want to warn the Chinese audience: In the face of the wicked, we cannot repay kindness for no reason. The fact that happened, both the Chinese and the Japanese should have a correct understanding in order to prevent this from happening again.”
So an interesting thing happened. The film, which was called "Devil", received rave reviews after it was released in Japan, and also won the Japan Daily Film Award.
Tsk tsk tsk, the recent divorce incident of Fukuhara Ai has united the people of China and Japan, and Jiang Wen's "The Devil Has Come" made the two peoples reach a consensus.
To be honest, Pi Ge didn't understand this movie when he was a child, and only when he became an adult did he realize that it had so many metaphors and innuendos hidden in it.
The main content of the film is actually very simple. It tells the story of "the devil is coming".
It was an evening in the twelfth lunar month of the last year of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. The "Jiaojiatun" at the end of the Great Wall near the sea was quiet. The bachelor villager Ma Dasanzheng and the beautiful widow fish "Hu Tianhu Di" in the same village.
When the interest was in full swing, someone knocked on the door.
Ma Dasan raised his trousers and asked angrily because his good deeds were disturbed, "Who is it?!"
The visitor was silent at first, and then replied, "Me."
I am me, who am I?
Ma Dasan only got out of bed to open the door, but he didn't see "I", but a gun was placed on his forehead first.
The person who came was very domineering. There was no inducement, only coercion. He left the two sacks behind and walked away.
Before leaving, he left a sentence: Come and pick it up on the evening of New Year's Eve.
It took a while for the gun to come down from his head, before Ma Dasan regained his strength, dragged his two trembling legs to open the sack, and found that there were actually two big living people inside.
A Japanese devil, a traitor translator.
Good guy, next to this is the small Japanese artillery turret. The Japanese guard of honor passes by here every day, trying to hide these two people, isn't it terrible?
No way, Ma Dasan had no choice but to push back his physical desires, and went to the village's most learned fifth uncle and grandpa to discuss it overnight.
All in all, a small meeting.
This Ma Dasan looks timid and fearful, but in fact has a lot of heart.
Obviously "I" said that if he was not good, it would kill him, but when he conveyed it to the villagers, he said, "If he is not good, the whole village will be killed."
Look, it was originally the life and death of Ma Dasan alone, but now it has become the life and death of the whole village.
Presumably, this is one of our little smarts.
Sure enough, the old and young men in the village panicked.
In the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War, the fighting was fierce outside, but the villagers in Jiaojiatun still lived in the way of their ancestors.
When it's time to calculate, when it's time to cheat, they didn't understand justice and be more patriotic because the devil came.
At first, their relationship with the devils can even be said to be harmonious.
Every morning, a small team of the Japanese army would pass by Jiajiatun, and the children in the village would line up and stretch out their hands to wait for a few candies given by the Japanese commander.
When I'm in a good mood, I'll touch a little devil's head a few times.
Naturally, the villagers in Jiaojiatun also realized that the devil is not a good thing, and it is disgusting to be a traitor.
But compared to the national sense of righteousness and patriotism, their goals are more practical and more self-conscious, that is—
alive.
To live, to live at all costs, even to lose dignity.
Compared with being alive, what can a devil not bear to slap a few times?
If there was no "I" intrusion, perhaps they would have survived this cruel and long war with as little risk as the previous eight years.
It's just that this is not the Peach Blossom Land.
Compared with a large number of mature anti-Japanese war movie series, "The Devil Is Coming" is a new outlier.
On the one hand, it takes those classic anti-Japanese war movies - "Food", "Mine Warfare", "Tunnel Warfare", "Evening Bell", etc. as the host, from which to obtain the nutrition and motivation for growth.
But on the other hand, it is more about deconstructing these classic works, even deconstructing its own meaning, and finally arrives at the dissipation of postmodernism.
Here, there is no grand ideology, only villagers full of cleverness.
The next day, the fifth uncle and grandpa solemnly tried the two prisoners.
According to the confession of the prisoner, the Japanese devil is called Hanaya Kosaburo, and the traitor's translator is Dong Hanchen.
After thinking about it, the fifth uncle and grandfather made the decision: "The junior is raising it. Fortunately, it is only five days away from the root of the year, and it will be over once it is boiled."
Ma Dasan is raising him, he is clearly making offerings.
The thick quilts and delicious food at home were all given to the two prisoners.
They wanted to eat white noodles, but they didn't have them at home. Ma Dasan went out to borrow noodles and steamed steamed buns at the price of loan sharks.
Among the two prisoners, Xiao Saburo was very tough at the beginning, giving him a pleasure if he wanted to kill him, etc., and even cut himself to death. He was the embodiment of Japanese noble sentiments, and he kept cursing and cursing in Japanese.
But none of the villagers, including Ma Dasan, knew what he was scolding, it was the translator for the translator.
It is precisely because of this translation that the Chinese and Japanese people get along pretty well in a strange atmosphere of chickens and ducks.
The fifth uncle and grandfather asked whether the devils killed Chinese men and abused Chinese women?
The devil replied, "I came to China for this."
After the translator's mouth twitched like this, the words became: "No, I just came to China, I'm a cook."
We all know the following classic. The devil asked the translator to teach him a curse, and the translator taught him: "Happy New Year, brother and sister-in-law, you are my father and I am your son."
As soon as they heard this, the villagers were naturally happy.
However, until the first day of the new year, no one came to take the two prisoners away.
The villagers in Hangjiatun waited for another two months, but nothing came.
Seeing that the three families of Ma and Da were going to be impoverished, and the two prisoners were dishonest, they made trouble again and again.
There is no way, I can't keep it up, let's solve it on the spot.
That said, but no one dares to commit murder, so they can only cast lots, and the unlucky junior, the third year, was caught again.
As a result, he didn't dare, so he kept even a prisoner secretly.
Later, the matter came to light, and the villagers forced the junior to do it again after discovering the truth. Facing the pressure of the crowd, the cowardly junior burst into tears, admitting that he was timid and could not do anything.
After another round of deliberation, the village decided to "borrow a knife to kill" and sent a junior to the county seat to invite an executioner from the Qing Dynasty to "kill" the two prisoners again.
A group of people were fully expecting the big guy to show off his skills, but the big guy was as fierce as a tiger and finally missed.
Under the tossing of the "tough guy" Hanaya Kosaburo, the mental defense line was broken, and the desire to survive occupied the basin of IQ.
I saw him crawling on the ground, begging the junior and the villagers not to kill him, and promised to exchange two truckloads of food in exchange for his own life.
Now that we think about all the good things that are impossible, the villagers actually believed it and really took the two prisoners to the Japanese artillery turret to exchange food.
Incredible.
In fact, it is understandable if you think about it carefully.
China's Confucian ethics has always emphasized "practical application", so the Chinese people maintain a practical and pragmatic mentality. Coupled with the scarcity of religious complexes, a traditional concept of "it is better to die than to live" naturally arises.
This realistic principle of doing things ultimately has an ultimate goal -
food.
Think about the peasant uprisings in Chinese history. Most of them were "forced to the Liangshan Mountains" before they rose up. They went around and went around because they were hungry. If they succeeded, they were "equalizing the land."
The deafening "freedom!" in "Braveheart" was almost impossible to shout in the Chinese environment at the time.
Because no one cares about being free or not, and those who don't eat or drink can be assholes.
But there is one thing that is most used in China, and that is human feelings.
The reason why the villagers in Jiaojiatun dared to seek skin with the tiger is actually very simple. The way Xiao Saburo committed suicide on the pillar, he had to be polite.
In the traditional Chinese concept, human affection is above everything else, and the villagers even felt that this could be used to subvert the relationship between the aggressor and the invaded.
Naturally, this wishful thinking eventually resulted in the brutal massacre of the Japanese army.
The national responsibility and ideology of the Anti-Japanese War is like a joint law, trying to kidnap all the masses. But the people in Jiaojiatunli have no conscious nationalist stance, they just want to live.
Hanaya Kozaburo also quickly abandoned the so-called solar terms of Japanese Bushido in the face of death, and desperately tried to survive.
In "The Devil is Coming", all grand meanings have been dispelled.
There is no moral anxiety of nationalism, replaced by the simple life principle of farmers, and this concept of emphasizing practicality is the most fundamental and bottom-level traditional national concept.
Both Xiao Saburo and the "Ma Da Sans" were passively and almost coercively given the responsibility for the so-called national war, and both sides were passive.
And Ma Dasan's final revenge is not patriotism at all, but a revenge on a purely mundane level, an individual revenge.
In the end, "The Devil Is Coming" completes the deconstruction of the nationalist collective myth of the Anti-Japanese War movies.
At the end of the film, Ma Dasan let out a long howl before his execution, facing the compatriots who were watching the beheading in high spirits.
Under the sun, the junior who was headed in a different place tried his best to open his blood-blurred eyes, watching the little Saburo, who he had cared for so carefully, wiping the blood-stained saber.
Here, the black-and-white image ends up being a vivid, dazzling blood red.
Different from "Schindler's List", the red color in "The Devil Has Come" is a metaphor for a chaotic and upside-down world, a nightmarish world.
Regarding the black and white tone setting of the film, Jiang Wen believes that the entire black and white film is the foreshadowing of the last few color shots: "Just for this last picture, it is worth shooting the entire film in black and white."
In other words, compared to black and white, the red is actually the most important.
During the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War, the Chinese nation shed countless blood, but does this blood really wake up the world?
In the movie, Hanaya Kosaburo once said fiercely: "I finally understand the reason why you can't win this war for so long."
This sentence spit out from the mouth of the Japanese devil completely uncovered the fig leaf of a nation.
The "I" in the film has never been revealed, but it doesn't matter who "I" is.
"I'' am everyone and nobody.
The nihilism and anonymity of "I" make the entity "I" also meaningless and directionless. Ma Dasan's death lost its social and historical significance due to the lack of "I".
In a chaotic society, no one can be alone. In the face of the enemies of the state and the nation, in the face of absolute evil, kindness and cowardice are foolishness.
If you want to survive, you have to defeat them first!
Text/Pippi Film Editorial Department: Tong Yunxi
©Original丨Article Copyright: Pippi Movie (ppdianying)
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