"Desperate Mandarin Duck" is not a new theme in American film noir. "Gun Madness" in the classic period directly inspired the new Hollywood's first work "The Male and Female Thief", and Terrence Malik thanked Arthur Payne with the ending subtitles in his debut novel "Bad Land".
At the beginning of the film, Holly, played by Sissy Spike, murmured to herself, “I never thought that the story of the town would end in the bad soil of Montana.” It is true that the literal meaning of the title of the film is the geography of Montana. The environment, but that piece of land, is not a projection of Holly's inner world.
Her destiny changed from the encounter with Kit. She was deeply infatuated with this boy who resembled James Dean, ignoring his dangerous qualities like a time bomb. Holly's father clearly opposed the relationship between the two. After a dispute, Jitt shot him and the couple embarked on the road to escape.
Facing the death of her father, Holly was shockingly numb. From beginning to end, she seemed to be completely outside the event. Kit set off a fire to disguise the illusion that he and Holly had both committed suicide. At this time the soundtrack sounded, and the female chorus in Carl Orff's works was solemn and paradoxical. If Earl Scolagues’ banjo in "The Male and Female Thief" played a weird madness, then the music of "Evil Earth" is even more creepy—that's a pure evil ritual that Jitt is obsessed with. Feeling is the footsteps of the god of death approaching the victim. Kitt's extreme cruelty stems from his disregard for life, but what about Holly? She may not even know the meaning of "indifference"; she is naive, but this naivety that does not distinguish between good and evil is a kind of ignorant evil. Because of this, she won't even hate Jitt because of her father's death, she can watch Jitt continue to kill people while fleeing and stand by. When her hands were covered with blood, she couldn't even feel the temperature of the blood.
Holly's heart is a wasteland. She lost her mother in childhood, and her depressed father has not given her the education of love. Seeing Jitt, she felt that someone finally cared about her and cared about her, as if she had grasped the life-saving straw, but could not taste the poison in the grass. She acted on the instinct of a child, and what caused a tragedy was that she broke into the adult world a long time ago: there are no children’s play games there, all love and hate, all need to bear the price; all right and wrong, all need to be enough To discern the conscience and wisdom of one's own.
It is difficult for us to map Holly to the typical "femme woman" in film noir-she does not seem to take the initiative to do evil, but as a silent accomplice, she carries out indifferent and silent revenge against the society. It is also difficult to say that she represents the depravity of male alter ego; on the contrary, when she said that Kit was going crazy for pulling the trigger, did she realize that Kit was also her own trigger? From this perspective, Holly has almost become a symbol of evil like a cold-blooded killer in "Old Nowhere"—they have no guilt and no sympathy from normal people. But unlike Javier Baden's character, Holly is not completely emotional: she said she loves Gite.
However, such "feelings" are as primitive as her evil behavior. At the end of the film, we seem to see Holly's humanity and compassion gradually awakening. Having been trapped in the quagmire of evil for a long time, in a chase, she finally stopped fleeing, and both of them were arrested. But one of her important motives for doing this was the disappearance of Jitt's love: the passion in the original state eventually faded slowly with time. She has lost her emotional support and no longer feels nostalgic for life in the desperate world.
After the trial, Kit was sent to the electric chair, and Holly got a chance for redemption. I can't help wondering whether she, married to the son of a defense lawyer, will really get a new life in reflection. In any case, countless innocent people have been killed during this period. When the unconscious evil grows savagely on the wasteland of the inner world, wherever it goes, it also becomes the evil land of others.
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