It's not a revenge story, it's not a suspense story, and it's not a relationship story.
This is an open-ended story in which the hostess knows herself and excavates herself.
I would like to interpret this film as a closed-loop structure, starting with the close-up of the eyes of Susan at the exhibition and ending with the close-up of the eyes of Edward waiting in the restaurant. The film explores the events and conflicts that may be experienced as a person (not a person with various labels such as male, female, gay, etc.), but a full and rich person, the emotions and behaviors expressed in the event, and finally Open endings on how to accept or resolve these dilemmas.
If analyzed from the perspective of dreams, the film repeatedly emphasizes that Susan has always had sleep problems, and even never sleeps, and the time at night is the exploration, mapping and reflection of nocturnal animals' self-psychology. The ex-husband will definitely not appear. The ex-husband's novel is a narrative of a personal soul conflict projected by Susan's guilt, cowardice, struggle between utilitarianism and idealism. I would like to understand it as a less scary version of Lethal ID.
In this narrative, first look at the male characters: there is a strong and fair Texas Inspector (but this kind of spirit will suffer from cancer soon after death), a cowardly sensitive and melancholy temperament Tony (a lack of courage in life and easy to be manipulated), a Heinous murderer (the logic of this murderer is that if someone labels me, I will complete the label, a bit self-defeating confrontational personality). Note that these three men represent three distinct forces, and Tom Ford has arranged for two men to be completely naked, one crying by the bathtub and one shitting on the toilet, from a certain To some extent, it reflects the level of these two forces.
Let's look at the female characters in the narrative: the insulted and damaged wife and daughter, also a full nudity shot. (The two corpses have to be said to be very beautiful.) The death of his wife and daughter was Susan's guilt for the abortion, and it was also a revenge for her weakness, her own revenge against herself. Note the cross necklace on the wife's body, the same necklace Susan and Tony had at the end. Susan's wife ID died once in the narrative, and then died a second time with the death of Tony's ID.
Apart from the characters in the novel, there are also two interesting characters in the real world, which can also be internalized as Susan's ID, one is her mother, her mother is a complete utilitarian, and ultimately bold language, every girl Will live to be her own mother, Susan has been avoiding this thing, but living as a prophecy comes true, she knows her so-called "art world" is a pile of garbage, but her friend said "our world, It's a lot easier than other people's worlds", so in the real world, Susan's behavior is closer to her mother's. The second worth mentioning is her gay brother, who has not shown his face in an image that is not recognized by the family. This real brother is the other side of Susan, this side is sensitive, vulnerable, and melancholy, (Tom Ford himself in the I brushed the presence here). Btw, and Susan's daughter who is naked in real life (TF really loves nudity), I think it's also Susan's fiction, because she never mentioned the sex of the abortion child, and she also said go back to sleep to her daughter .
At the end of the movie, reality and fiction finally meet, and the ending is wonderful. In the novel, Tony's death and Susan's death (or weakening) of a weak spirit occur simultaneously, they both hold their necklaces and are dying, and the interesting arrangement is that Tony is blind at the time of death, and the dream of the nocturnal animals ends. In reality, Susan did not wait for her ex-husband in the end. It is also possible that all this is her fiction, a war in the inner world, a deconstruction, a reconstruction.
After the disintegration of the inner world of women, as Susan said, it is very devastating, but the weak soul is gone, and the threat of violence has been eliminated. I wonder if it is possible for Susan to re-choose the life she yearns for.
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