It is very interesting, whether it is the birth of a star or the death of a star, in the film, they are all powerless fates like drowning.
Whether it's success or failure, Ellie and Jack are stepping into an abyss far from the shallows. Once you step in, you can only sink to the bottom alone. Even if you sacrifice your own strength to push the other party, you are destined to be unable to stop the other party and yourself from indulging.
This is what makes the film so unique and moving. It tells the same old story about the redemption of a lover. But this time, the "redemption" that Hollywood had given countless halos finally lost its magic power. This time, not only did redemption not come as promised, but its own meaning was also questioned.
Ellie's failure to save Jack from self-destruction, the latter's death speaks loudly. At the same time, even though Jack made Ellie's "birth" as a star somewhat, his redemption of Ellie was a failure. Because what he wants to see is that with mainstream attention, Ellie's musical talent can be better released. But she does. Accepted the packaging the industry gave her. In Jack's eyes, these over-packaging obliterated Ellie's talent, and her "birth" in it was another self-destruction.
So he will feel inexplicable anxiety and pain about Ellie's success. The pain is not some kind of gender or power envy, but the sadness of seeing a loved one being bit by bit obliterated by the popular industry.
But is this the case? When the two confronted each other, Ellie's anger seemed to give a negative answer. In this denial, redemption is further disenchanted: redemption is no longer an act of natural justice, but more of a leather-malion-like construction.
Jack's attitude is subjective after all. As the film critic Owen Gleiberman put it, Jack is dominated by a Dionysian spirit: he enjoys "suffering like a Dionysian, and is worshipped as such". All his life, he pursued an irrational state of pleasure and pain, his drinking and drug addiction, his deafening deafness in order to hear the cheers of the audience. Under the leadership of this Dionysian temperament, rock and roll, a form of music that advocates abandoning rationality, naturally became the best way for him to release himself, and the roars and tears on the rock stage are what he believes to be "truth".
But he forgot that Ellie and he were not the same kind of people after all. This is evident from the first time he invited Ellie to perform at his own concert. Ellie is not someone who can leave everything behind and enjoy the moment. Even if a rock star sent a limousine to pick her up at her door, she could turn down the invitation for her poor job because it was "crazy." It might be said that Ellie believes in the very rationality that Jack can't wait to get rid of. This allows her to regain a balance without having to sacrifice too much when she has to face the industrial packaging that serves the aesthetics of others, and release her musical talent again in it.
So Jack's anxiety and pain are actually meaningless. Ellie's "birth" was not based on a betrayal of self, as he thought. It's heartbreaking that Jack doesn't realize it.
In fact, Ellie is not like that. She thought that Jack's self-destruction was a wrong "deviation", but she didn't know that self-destruction was actually part of his personality. This self-destructive tendency to write genes makes Jack's death doomed. For him, self-destruction is an established personality. In the end, Ellie still grieves the failure of her redemption.
The two actually ended up falling into some kind of Pygmalion trap. They think that their salvation is helping the other party to get back on the right track and return to the real self, but they don't know that this "reality" is only their own imagination, and the real other party is the "sad" appearance at the moment. And the sad part is that they will still suffer from its failure.
View more about A Star Is Born reviews
