I think the director’s intention is to build a labyrinth of time and memory, where there are nonlinear time, memory fragments, strong feelings, logical wandering, indescribable sorrow, and the endless pain of being born. . This film is not a box of puzzles. If the audience tries to put everything in place, and must spell out a clear and logical image, then they will probably be a little disappointed. However, I happen to be a puzzle-solver who grew up watching detective novels, and I have an extraordinary obsession with explaining everything through causality. So I still want to make some efforts in the puzzle, hoping to provide some clues to the neighbors who find it difficult to understand this film.
The protagonist of this film is actually the old man mopping the floor. He should be a cleaner in a high school. The image of Jake is the self in his mind-a composite of him when he was young and his imagination. This explains Jake's description of the high school: "130 classrooms, a gymnasium, two locker rooms, lecture halls, 10 restrooms, 6 offices, teacher lounge, counselor center". Almost only the school’s cleaning union describes the school this way, isn’t it? For him, the school is the number of rooms and rooms, the route to be patrolled and cleaned every day, not the people inside. This also shows that the protagonist is a lonely person. We can imagine that he rarely communicates with people in school, just cleaning all the rooms silently, day after day, for decades.
All plots and dialogues are the imagination of the protagonist. We noticed that a lot of literature, film, art, and science appeared in the dialogue. It can be seen that the protagonist is a very knowledgeable person. He may be well-educated but depressed and has been a cleaner all his life; or he has not received much education but loves reading, watching movies and appreciating art. In any case, I believe that he is an introverted, rich, emotionally sensitive person who is addicted to fantasy. He has no money, no status, and has never been seen. He passed his life silently and depressively in this way.
He grew up on a farm. His parents were a little weird and couldn't make it to the table. I think he is ashamed of his parents sometimes. Regardless of whether he succeeds or not, he is a smarter person after all. He won awards when he was a child; but his parents were not very intelligent, were always inappropriate, and said wrongly. He probably had the experience of bringing friends or girlfriends home. His parents behaved badly, which made him suffer. His parents didn't understand him either, he liked art, and his father's ignorant comments on art stifled him. He is not very close to his parents, at least they cannot communicate intellectually. But he loves his parents. The old and demented father and the weak and dying mother caused him pain, but he was powerless. These may be real scenes in his life. He also remembers the warmth his parents gave him: the table is full of food, and he always remembers to make him his favorite sweets, but at the same time those scenes are full of embarrassment and barriers. They may never express their love for each other smoothly. . In the "home for dinner" scene, the parents are young and old for a while, because those are non-linear combinations of memories. Judging from the age of the protagonist, his parents should have passed away long ago, and he does have a dead mother lying on the bed in his memory.
I think he is a sweet tooth, and he can guess it from his fat body. He always stays at home reading books, watching movies, and eating foods with high sugar content. He likes the ice cream advertisement: There are no worries here, please eat as much as you want; the first bite will take care of all sorrows and make you smile. He has been obsessed with sweets since he was a child, because the huge portion and unrestrained sugar filled his loneliness and emptiness. But that kind of futile stuffing sometimes made him sick: in the maze of memory, he bought two huge cups of ice cream, but finally felt so sweet that he couldn't eat it. He irritably wanted to throw away those substitutes of love. Lucy opened the trash can, and it was filled with the largest empty ice cream cups. It was countless lonely nights. I guess he suddenly became angry with himself countless times, wanted to quit his bad habits, and wanted to get out of the house and lead a more active life. He is sick of his wasted life. But of course he will not succeed. Lucy mentioned: "Your (Jake) mother is cold and sweet"; Jake said Lucy is also cold and sweet. Women are cold and sweet in his heart. They rejected him coldly, but they looked so sweet. If you get the love of a woman, you must heal all your sorrows, he thinks so. However, I guess he may never have been favored by women.
Lucia. I think it is more likely to be a girlfriend, or mainly from the memory of a girlfriend: firstly, the protagonist is not like someone who has had many girlfriends; secondly, these names are too similar, like vague recollections of the same person. Or maybe Lucy is exactly the person he imagined, based on movies (for example, the heroine is a waiter in a restaurant, and the hero suddenly shows love in a movie). He is very inferior to love. The girlfriend in this imagination or memory agreed to associate with him only because she was embarrassed to refuse, and she was always planning to break up with him. And he is always pleasing her, trying to keep her in a considerate response. That kind of anxiety is always there. In the scene when he went home for dinner, he mentioned the way he met his girlfriend: He wanted her number, but was too shy to speak. He should have had that kind of experience: looking at a woman in silence, but didn't dare to come forward to strike up a conversation. He will fantasize about compensatory plots: Lucy understands that he wants a phone number, and silently thinks he is cute, so he actively gives him the opportunity to speak. If you can find such a girlfriend to take home, the parents will applaud him and be happy for him, but this kind of thing has never happened; it may have happened once or twice, but the girlfriend hates his family or his parents. Always want to leave quickly, just like Lucy always wants to leave quickly. Yes, Lucy always wanted to leave, she repeatedly urged him to go quickly, she (or they) despised him and despised his family in that way-how much his self-esteem has been slaughtered like this. He couldn't help but be angry, he finally lost his temper, but in the end he still apologized to Lucy. He is a reasonable person. He knows that the anger based on sexual hunger is wrong, but this does not mean that he can eliminate that anger. Jake maintained his gentlemanly demeanor, so he was qualified to kiss Lucy's forehead in a humble manner; the cleaner gave Lucy a lot of understanding and tolerance, so he got an unloved hug. This is already the best. If you play a humble and good person who understands and respects women, you can always get a little bit of love leftovers, right? More passionate love, the fiery love based on sexual attraction in that surreal dance, he didn't deserve it. Notice that in that dance, from behind the ugly and fat Jake came out a more handsome and handsome ideal version of him. It is the ideal version of him who dances with women-the fat version of him is not even qualified to play, even in his own imagination-"I am not worthy". If you look better, maybe there will be love, right? He must have conceived and sighed like this. At the same time he certainly hates those handsome and attractive men: at the end of the dance, the old cleaner (himself) killed the man and tried to take the woman. Of course he has countless times That kind of desire, the desire to rape women who look down on him. When buying ice cream, he said: They all know me, if they know I will not come to serve, so you can buy it for me-he may have been a stalker and harassed a female shop assistant. But the women finally escaped unharmed. Buy a large cup of ice cream-buy ice cream will not be rejected, a large cup of ice cream is four yuan, you can eat as much as you want, and take care of all your troubles.
He is a contradictory person:
He is light and detached, like the woman who writes a thesis, talking about literature and art, and has long been indifferent to life. He is wretched and humble, like the fat and ugly guy, the toad wants to eat swan meat, to harass beautiful women, and is shameless.
He wanted to be seen so much, so he asked the elderly cleaner to say to Lucy, "I can see you", everyone should be seen. At the same time he was so afraid of being seen, so he did everything possible to prevent Lucy from entering the basement, because the washing machine had the cleaner's uniform, one after another, like his humble life repeated every day. He didn't want her to see that behind the knowledgeable and polite man (the fantasy him), the real he was an old and sad cleaner. He is too inferior, even the image he designed for himself in the fantasy of satisfying his wishes is not very good.
He wants to end all this. For example, if the strong and independent woman wants to leave her boyfriend, it is graceful and decisive. Suicide is a gesture; but he also knows what he looks like in the eyes of others: undressing. His obese and aging body is just a big pile of fat, just a pig covered with maggots. The pig matter is probably a shadowy fragment of his childhood. He has never forgotten that segment. In that segment there is the fear of death, the disgust of the disgusting state of human existence, and the disgust of himself-he is a sensitive and literary person, and he will not fail to experience it. This layer.
In the last imagination, he won the Nobel Prize. In his speech, he said that his life is full of accomplishments and meanings; after all, he is a smart man. He was awarded prizes when he was a child. If he made the right choice, he might live a life like that. It's like the little match girl got everything she wanted in the illusion before freezing to death. However, the damn pain always broke through the surface of the subconscious, and even a moment of sweet hallucinations did not let him enjoy. After the speech, he sang the bachelor's tragic song again: I want a woman, her beautiful long hair brushing my face, her warm arms around my body, her sweet love heals everything.
Everything in the ideal, everything that is impossible, may be in the light on that side of the tunnel-in the white snow, everything can finally end, so light and so good. But one day people will dig Baixue and see the true ending-a fat and ugly old guy who died naked in the car-it was disgusting and disgusting.
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