"I've never been deceived, why did I go astray?"
Bill is undoubtedly the representative of the New York middle class, and his story also represents the moral dilemma of modern society that the Bills cannot get rid of - a struggle to find a way out, and sometimes even pervert. They even resorted to an arrogant (even if potentially fatal) way to try to break through, only to discover that what lured them into doing so was nothing but an illusion, and the whole process was a hoax against themselves.
It all started with jealousy. Bill has never been jealous of Alice for nine years of marriage. Such trust is first based on his dimensionality reduction/ignorance of Alice's "person" - both of them are rational people who have signed a marriage contract, and marriage is "a lot of money" So that both parties will no longer have unreasonable thoughts about people other than each other. However, the spirit of the contract is only based on a relationship of interests. The married two may be summarized as an "economic mutual aid group", but the signing of this contract must not make the two emotionally loyal forever at the same time - so , marriage implies a self-interested contradiction from the very beginning, that is, I need to restrain my lust for other people (and this is usually inevitable) in exchange for a stable guarantee to better manage own family, accumulate their own capital, knowledge, and so on. This logic presupposes that, for humans, the stable structures of the worldly world take precedence over personal passions. So one of the preconditions for a well-run marriage is to refrain from this passion in order to fulfill the promise of fidelity to your partner. For Bill, this premise is more thorough, that is, once in marriage, as a "rational" person, he will no longer have any lust for anyone other than his partner. This is also the source of Alice's anger: Alice is not angry that Bill has never been jealous of himself after 9 years of marriage, but that Bill doesn't even think he has the function of being attractive to others, or that Bill has not Be yourself a "human".
Alice then spoke out about the Navy, and for the first time Bill felt the wickedness of jealousy surging inside - despite the fact that nothing happened. The evil was so persistent and unstoppable that it lured Bill into arrogance step by step—it had to, or he wouldn't be able to fix his jealousy-induced imbalance. The first time, he was able to directly refuse the temptation; the second time, his wife's phone call stopped him from stepping over the taboo; but his wife's pleasure-seeking scene was clearly interpreted in his mind again and again, and finally led Bill to the carnival. The feast is also the essence of the whole movie——
In this erotic orgy about arrogance, there is an extremely important pleasure device that cannot be ignored, and that is the mask. Masks, on the one hand, conceal our social identities, whereby we can cast aside our worldly world and make it possible to move towards a "sacred state." It is the installation of the mask that separates a space for the whole banquet and creates a transcendent dimension; the meaning of the mask as a symbol is no longer important at this moment, it erases the daily life and allows people to blend together and enjoy pornography together orgy - this is inseparable from the mask, precisely because pornography is not the same as sexual intercourse; intercourse is a part of pornography, but pornography goes beyond intercourse and, in extreme cases, even eliminates intercourse: it does not happen in the flesh, it happens in consciousness. But on the other hand, the "sacred" space created by the device of the mask is a false space, a lewd space. Is everyone present who is not a high-ranking official and aristocrat who is famous all over the world? It is too far from life itself, so that a sublime pornographic activity that is different from biological impulses has only been enjoyed by a small number of people since ancient times; so that the doctor Bill from the lower class can only temporarily enter it by "stealing" his password. (Just as someone can temporarily experience what it's like to be rich by "stolen" clothes, and pay for the act). After Bill returns home, the dream described by his wife is so similar to what Bill saw; the temporal juxtaposition of the two may also hint at the illusory dimension of the banquet itself.
At this point, the symbolic meaning of the mask may emerge. It's a surplus, what you get after porn minus sex. That's why when Bill finally realized that it was all just an illusion, he came home and saw the lost mask next to his sleeping wife, and he burst into tears - the image of his wife and the Navy having sex in his mind eventually also It's just an illusion created by jealousy. Bill's jealousy stems from a misrecognition of the phantasm that gave him a perverted desire and led him to the brink of dangerous overreach. But fortunately nothing happened; no AIDS, no one was killed by his arrogance, and his middle-class life went on.
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