If you're talking about horror films in the late 20th century, The Shining and Alien are definitely two peaks that can't be bypassed. The controversy over the film itself caused by the former has never stopped, while the latter won back hundreds of millions of movie box office at the cost of tens of millions of films that year. But from today's point of view, the horror of "The Shining" and "Alien" is definitely attenuated by a considerable amount. On the one hand, the improvement of technology has made contemporary movies more realistic than in the 20th century. On the other hand, the method of creating a sense of horror in the above two films has been used for reference by too many films over the years, and the audience has become tired of aesthetics (of course, it may also be because I am bold) . But apart from the "scaring" purpose that horror films should have, "The Shining" and "Alien" are indeed a good reflection of the various problems faced in the late 20th century: the weakness after the end of political movements in various countries, and the severe situation of the Cold War. high pressure and the increasingly intense social conflicts related to race and gender. Compared with the thrill of being frightened, the above questions are the real reasons why these two films can be famous in the history of the film, and they are also the parts that I am really interested in and want to talk to you more here. More precisely, it is about part of equality.
1. Racism? Feminism?
"The Shining" and "Alien" are indeed two films with a strong sense of equality. The former is more about racism, patriarchy and patriarchy, while the latter is about feminism. Stephen King, the original author of "The Shining", doesn't like Kubrick's version of "The Shining". It is said that after watching "The Shining", Stephen King commented that Kubrick "thinks too much" and "makes simple the problem is complicated.” And the part that Stephen King said that Kubrick "complicates" and "overthinks" "The Shining" is actually the part that involves racism. Whether or not Kubrick's version of The Shining involved racism is still a big debate to this day. But as far as I'm concerned, because I watched the shortest 119-minute version for the first time, maybe that's the reason why many scenes were cut, I feel more illogical and illogical in this version. Evil and horror; but the second time I watched the longest 146-minute version, what I could experience in this version was more blood and violence from racism. It seems to me that if Kubrick was just trying to show the horror of illogical and unprovoked evil, he would not need to insert so much "white supremacy" dialogue and various aspects into the film. This kind of racist symbols and metaphors, and once the racist elements are included in the evaluation of the film, the fluency and logic of the entire film have indeed improved, which will be discussed in detail later.
For "Alien", there is no such confusion, because Ridley Scotty clearly stated in an interview that he and Giger (the art director of "Alien", the designer of the Alien image) deliberately designed the Alien's head. The reason for making it look like male genitalia, and then letting it burst out of the human body, is to "make a man experience what it feels like to be raped". In addition, it is not only the 1.8-meter-tall Sigourney Weaver who plays the only surviving female human in the film, but also the cat who constantly provokes aliens but is always safe (this is between humans. Conflict, not about cats), or the different ways in which aliens kill men and women are shown, all of which are clearly sexually suggestive and feminist.
2. Creating an atmosphere of terror of power: abstract and figurative
Both "The Shining" and "Alien" are related to the theme of equality, but since it is a horror film that discusses equality, in any case, the shaping of horror is inseparable. If you want to discuss its deep-seated theme , you really have to deconstruct the horror on the surface before you can see the thematic expression it deserves. Both "The Shining" and "Alien" take place in isolated locations, the former being in a mountaintop hotel and the latter being on a spaceship. At the beginning of the film, "The Shining" shows the winding mountain road leading to the hotel, "Alien" shows the interior of a quiet spaceship, the former turns the camera into a bird, as if showing a beautiful landscape, but in fact However, the narrowness and contradiction are everywhere: whether it is to strengthen the narrowness of the mountain road or turn the edge of the mountain into the diagonal line of the picture to achieve a sense of opposition and instability, or finally to show that the hotel is completely wrapped by the mountain, and it is impossible to escape. ; paired with a spooky soundtrack, and you'll soon be sucked into this weird atmosphere.
And "Alien" is also shaped by the environment as a prelude to the occurrence of terror. In the several empty mirrors describing the cockpit, corridor and passage of the spacecraft, there will always be a contrast of light and darkness. The unknown horror that exists is magnified by the presence of light, human beings slowly wake up, and the tension of loneliness and helplessness comes out.
"The Shining" and "Alien" show a completely different tone of terror in the first shot. "The Shining" shows anxiety and unease, while "Alien" shows tension and innocence. help. These are just the creation of the atmosphere, but the difference between the two in the creation of the atmosphere comes from the development of the subsequent plot. "Alien" will appear as a monster "Alien" as a symbol of power in the subsequent development of the plot. It is a concrete product of the concept of male power as a power. It is a very clear source of danger. Humans in space ships can have a lot of Clearly avoiding and excluding its consciousness, human beings can clearly perceive specific things. In the isolated space, the feeling of tension and helplessness is bound to arise. And because "The Shining" takes place in the "Yin House" hotel, it is a concrete object in real life, but after it takes place as the film's place, this figurativeness is consumed, and instead, it feels that the hotel is the main body, and the hotel The people in the film are objects, so neither the audience nor the characters in the film are unaware of the danger they face. In short, you don’t know what you are afraid of, but you are afraid. "The Shining" can't reach the level of tension, anxiety is enough, a glass ball suddenly pops up for you, twin sisters or something, even if there is no shadow in the picture without exception, you still feel very horrible. You have no idea and no control over what you are facing. It follows from this that the abstract dangers in Alien (where you may encounter aliens) are brought about by concrete aliens, while the concrete dangers in The Shining (Jack, the white man) are caused by abstract dangers (the white man Jack). Hotel) brought by. The focus of the two is completely different. How did those two films put the idea of power into a well-made horror environment? That's the director's handling of the character's interaction with the environment.
3. Planting power into terror: the strong and the weak
1. Hotel ghosts, white men and space monsters
The first thing to know is that in The Shining, the real protagonist is Jack Nicholson. The way the ghost in the Hilltop Hotel drives Jack mad is not by frightening it but by baiting. What Jack saw in his eyes was a crowded hotel ballroom, a hotel waiter in a suit, not the terrifying space monster in "Alien". Jack's career is a failure, as he said in the interview, being a teacher is no way to fully support the family, the only way to make his life better is to become a writer, which is also his motivation for coming to the Hilltop Hotel. At the same time, Jack is proud, he can't accept himself like this, and his behavior is the separation of the family, wife and children (and even domestic violence tendency). Jack is a fairly standard middle-class white man with ambition, but not enough ability to overcome the pressure of the times and life to realize his ambition. He can only immerse himself in the fantasy of capital - at this time, the Peak Hotel is his fantasy. Brings hope, and here Kubrick begins to connect characters to themes, trying to evoke the horrors of racism with a spooky setting (i.e., the Hilltop Hotel), since your personal achievements cannot support your pride, then Just use your nation to support your pride, the ghosts in the hotel began to tell Jack his superiority, telling him that he should have more fame and fortune, the pride of those ancestors turned into Jack's pride at this time, he wants to maintain this. Pride that he wants to defend his bourgeois fantasies, Jack's madness has a legitimate reason. In the interaction between the characters and the environment, there is finally a place for racism. Jack took the baton from the Hilltop Hotel and became a racist "superior" to "black people, women" who want to threaten their status. With children" to punish and clean up, "white supremacy" has completely turned into pure violence and oppression of the strong against the weak and unbridled greed for power. Black people were killed, and women and children fled everywhere. So far, there is a sense of high-rise buildings rising from the ground, and the sense of power and terror are perfectly combined.
Unlike "Alien", because the alien was directly given the symbol of male power in the early stage of creation, there is no need to directly hook it out through the environment like "The Shining" step by step, it is better to let it directly Start the massacre, and directly raise the contradiction to the highest peak. The embodiment of this in the film is to send an unknown signal through the alien civilization, and use this signal to make the kindness of the earth people who symbolize women approach the alien step by step, and then let the alien "rape" all the earth people. At the same time, in order to make the sense of horror fit the theme, more settings have been added to the slaughter of aliens in the space station: for example, the danger that women feel outdoors at night and dark streets is simulated as aliens crawling around in space ships. The danger felt by the crew; the mouth of the alien larvae face-hugging bug was designed to look like a female genitals, and the male genitals were protruded from it to "mouth blast" the earthlings; when the male crew was killed, the alien's mouth was extended to simulate insertion The process of killing men, and the footage left when killing female crew members is that the alien's tail slowly wraps around the woman's thigh and moves to her pussy, etc. As a result, the tension created by the original film has its place. Due to these bizarre designs, the sense of horror slightly overshadows the theme expression at this time, but it also tightly attracts the attention of the audience, so that the audience can have If you are interested in watching it, the rhythm of the film is many times faster than that of "The Shining", and it is for this reason that the box office sells well.
2. Lone Heroine and Blacks, Women, Children
In the above analysis, we found that "Alien" is actually not like "The Shining", it seems that this kind of horror creation and theme have been combined from the beginning, and there is no sense of gradual horror. The reason is that the creative focus of "Alien" is not like "The Shining" to express the generation of power and strengthen the horror, but to try to weaken the horror after showing the horror of power: Ridley Scott created the anti-male power. The symbol of the heroine Ripley. Ripley is played by Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver is not a beautiful woman in the traditional sense. She has large bones, not plump breasts and buttocks, but she plays Ripley in the film, brave Decisive and rational, he has a fairly accurate judgment for every danger coming (but he has no decision-making power in the film at all, the power is monopolized by men, and the judgment of men in the film is always wrong. It is also the source of tragedy), can tear apart the disguise of the android, can line up with the alien in the middle, and finally drive the alien directly into space. The process of Ripley's dealings with the aliens is very metaphorical. He realized early that the aliens could not take the spaceship (discovering male power), then tried to kill the aliens and failed to choose to escape (escape from male power), and finally couldn't escape to kill the aliens. (Victory over patriarchy).
On the other hand, The Shining is also on the weaker side of the power relationship. Black people and children can see the ghosts in the hotel, and they are quite clear about their situation, but they can't do anything about it, and women don't see the hotel until the end. The ghost inside (metaphor awakening), there is no resistance in the whole process, only escape and hiding. Although Jack was frozen to death in the ice and snow in the end, it was not destroyed because of a strong enough symbol like "Alien". The last scene turns, in a photo from 1921, Jack is standing in the most prominent position in the crowd, he is back in the golden age of capital, nothing has changed, and the next person who comes to the hilltop hotel will repeat the same tragedy.
4. Conclusion
Of course, what "The Shining" and "Alien" want to express is not only about equality. You can see the separation of families and the shattering of love in "The Shining", and you can also see the Cold War in "Alien" The shadow of the arms race of the period, but in any case, the two films clearly point out the essence of all the contradictions involved: the selfishness and greed of human beings. The hotel on the top of the mountain will be different now, and the monster with strong acid in the body will appear in "Alien". After the massive black civil rights movement in the 1960s, from Martin Luther King's non-violent movement to the Black Panther Party's pure violent movement and then to the end, although the problem of black people has not been solved, the concept of "white supremacy" is indeed due to this. It has suffered a considerable impact, and the issue of equal rights for blacks has therefore gained space for public opinion. Similarly, the intensified feminist movement from the 1960s to the 1980s also made society begin to re-examine women, and women also took back some rights to describe the world from men. But just like "The Shining", the white people who have been doomed to lose still fantasize that they can one day return to the golden age of "white supremacy" in their eyes, but, after so many years of development, Ripley is in space. The lonely cry for help has long been heard by more people. However, from the initial awakening, to the general "political correctness" in art works, to the almost critical censorship of all aspects of the film-related form and content, the violence has been reduced, but the language has become more and more The more radical, the metaphors in the 20th century movies have evolved into the straightforward slogan at the end of the film today. It seems that nothing has changed. What people are worried about is still what they were worried about decades ago, and what people are fighting for is still decades ago. what people want to fight for. "The Shining" and "Alien" may be some of the best horror movies of their time, but that doesn't mean they did much for the world at that time, and they may not even have as big an impact on the world as it is today. V Weibo. But in any case, as long as your voice is not hoarse, you can continue to express, express slogans in a straightforward manner, and express your wits and courage with metaphors. You can speak as much as you can. It may be useless to speak up, but at least it will keep you from forgetting. Finally, let me make a silent statement: Of course, I personally don’t have such a profound opinion on this. I only think that respecting others and maintaining a basic sense of justice is something that can be easily done as a person in the world, and should always be done. thing. mutual encouragement.
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