After the awards, Dai Jinhua commented: "I never expected Hollywood or the Oscars to deal with or deal with pressing issues in today's world." In comparison, MacDonald, the director of "Three Billboards", has the ambition to face the challenge head on. , he wanted to test the torn wound in American society today.
MacDonald first worked in the theater world. His writing style, originally from Ireland, is in the same vein as Beckett, the founder of the absurdist drama who is also Irish. The painful and violent stories are coupled with humorous interpretations, making him a West End and Broadway star. Drama star. Entering the film and television industry, "The Killer Has No Vacation" and "Seven Neuropathies" inherited his dark humor style, and MacDonald is also a well-known name in this genre.
Not a native American, but still dared to get involved in the sensitive issues of American politics, this confidence comes from MacDonald's understanding of American literature. Of all the American writers, he is the first to recommend O'Connor. At the beginning of "Three Billboards", when Mildred walked into the billboard rental office, the young man inside was reading a book. At this time, the camera gave a close-up. The name of the book is "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", a collection of short stories by O'Connor one. It is understandable that he admires this southern gothic female writer, the background of her stories is always set in her hometown, where people are vulgar, backward and racially prejudiced, they do what people hate and they are tortured, The cold sense of absurdity is vivid on the paper, no less than Ireland, which is known for its gloomy and coldness.
However, "Three Billboards," borrowed from O'Connor, is a movie-watching experience with a strong sense of tearing. MacDonald wants to borrow O'Connor's concept of violence, but it presupposes that extremely evil people experience the grace of God and come back to reality while experiencing violence (often before death), and the protagonists in the movie are evil But there's a touch of humanity, and this downplay takes away O'Connor's strength. Film critic April Wolfe noted that the final reconciliation between the two protagonists looked like a hint from the director about the legitimacy of sexual assault, domestic abuse and police violence.
Deconstructing the current political ecology of the United States with the old craft of black humor can only be danced in shackles. Dixon explains in the film that he is not a nigger abuser but a colorist abuser, and the director is joking about the ban on the N word, but that can't be compromised in America," McDonagh tried to put his previous writing in Ireland. The translation of working-class clichés into a history of tensions between white and black America is not only horribly misleading, but repulsive," said film critic Ira Madison.
On the other hand, MacDonald could not be too decisive to deviate from the mainstream narrative of equality and universality, so he added a new black sheriff and the role of a black friend of the wronged heroine, but the addition of the role was too deliberate and lost his personality. The fullness of human nature has become a concern for marginalized groups outside the discussion of the dark side of human nature.
On the other hand, the director of "The Shape of Water" is not without giving up. Using the powerful and incomprehensible Cthulhu monster to stimulate the instinctive sense of fear and powerlessness of human beings, this is the worldview that Top has always adhered to in the movie. "If there were no monsters in a movie, I would never make it." He even said in the early years that he would bet everything he had accumulated from filming for more than 20 years on Cthulhu's famous "Mountain of Madness", but because the expected cost was too high, Killed by Universal. However, this time, in order to cater to the small fresh emotional drama and the perspective of marginalized people, too much of Cthulhu's mark has been wiped away-except for the clip of running away and eating cats, it is almost impossible to find a trace.
In the end, the castrated Cthulhu monster stood on the highest podium of American movies with infinite beauty, while the human side of those Trump followers could only be quietly concealed by history. It's hard to say whether the two films would have been more intriguing than they are now without taking care of the mainstream narrative.
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