- On the Cautionary Significance of the Movie "Suspicious Clouds" The
more absurd the conclusion is, the more logic and evidence are needed to support it. According to some authorities, defending an established lie is easier and less costly than rediscovering the truth. American director Clint Eastwood's 2008 film "Suspicious" tells such a Kafka-esque absurd story, which is based on a true story that happened in the United States in the 20th century of the last century adapted.
Actress Angelina Jolie plays Christina Collins, a single mother who lives in Los Angeles with her five-year-old son Walter (Gatlin Griffiths), who have a large and small house. House of. Christina is the business executive of a telephone company with countless female operators. When Christina came home late due to a shift, she found that her son was not at home. After experiencing the indifference and prevarication of the police station, Christina attracted the attention of the public with her uncompromising attitude. Amid the outcry from the media and the church's accusations of incompetence and corruption in the police, the police finally had a chance to restore their reputation. Five months after her disappearance, Christina was told by police that her son had been found in Illinois. She saw the child on the occasion when the police took the opportunity to express their merits to the public, but from the first glance, she knew that this was not her son.
And the police, led by Officer JJ Jones (played by Geoffrey Donovan), are immersed in the complacency of success, and at first simply ignore it, when Christina repeatedly insists on her point of view, it is inevitable that Out of anger, she forced Christina Sizi to temporarily recognize the boy on the grounds that she was eager to influence her judgment. The child present also insisted that he was Walter, which also touched Christina and couldn't help being distracted. The police took the opportunity to take a photo of the two and published it in the newspapers. Christina, who barely brought the boy home, immediately found the confirmation that the boy was not Walter, and found conclusive evidence from Walter's classmates, teachers, and dentists (in fact, it is very absurd for a mother to find evidence that it is not a son). ).
Christina's repeated "petitions" and "unreasonable visits" and even "unauthorized" exposure to the media have made the police constantly face embarrassing situations. Arbitrary police announce that Christina has delusions, and Jier thinks she is an irresponsible mother, until she is secretly locked in a mental hospital with a mental disorder. On the other hand, Gustave Brigaber (played by John Malkovich), a pastor who has been preaching on the radio, believes that this is the result of the corruption of the Los Angeles Police Department, so he firmly stands with Kerry On Stina's side, trying to use Christina's example to attack the corruption of the authorities. Things got worse and worse, and soon turned into a public event that triggered demonstrations, and the whereabouts of the protagonist Christina at this time also aroused public suspicion.
The turn of events came from an accident. Officer Rice of the police department was ordered to a farm to take an illegal Canadian boy, and it was this boy with a tormented conscience who revealed a terrible crime: He told the police that a terrible and psychopathic man had repeatedly Forcing him to kidnap and kill many boys together, Walter is one of them. The film repeatedly uses intersecting shots in the following sections, stitching together the two important events of the homicide trial and the municipal hearing, and gradually leads the story to the end.
In the long river of history, people from different periods always seem to be able to step into the same river.
Considering the many public events that are taking place in our society today, this film has a very contextual and cautionary significance. Not only can it find many common "accidental" or "coincidence" plots and materials from the matter itself, but what is even more amazing is that there are many similarities in the way the authorities deal with the incident, as if going back in time.
The moment Christina Collins saw the boy at the train station, she knew that the boy was not her son, but the police who blew their bullshit in front of many media reporters warned Christina in a calm tone that this was because In the torment of family affection, the child in the eyes of the mother who lost a child is often quite different from the son in the actual eyes. This is nothing to be ashamed of. It only takes time to adjust your emotions. In this way, the police's "reason" hit the mother's "emotional" waist. Of course, the police have sufficient evidence to prove that the boy is Christina's missing son for 5 months, because with the help of "experts" on missing children's psychological counseling, the boy claimed to be Walter, and he could also say his home address, and After seeing Christina, she took the initiative to call "Mom"! Under the police's prompt, Christina also had to accept the point of view that she might have some mental problems because of her thoughts, and reluctantly hugged her son who was obviously not her own. The boy cooperated with the police to let the media take pictures and took the boy home.
Mothers will not admit their children wrong, which does not require evidence. But in a "rational" society, everything must have evidence, because it is the emotions that are susceptible to various motives that the law suspects. So Christina as a mother needs to look for counter "evidence" that the boy is not her son. The evidence is obvious. First, she found that the boy had been circumcised while her son had not. Second, she had personally marked her height on the wall of her home the day before her son disappeared, and five months The boy who was later brought back from the police station was several inches shorter! Now it is the police's turn to answer the question. However, in the face of almost exclusionary evidence, the police, who resolutely defended the conclusion, remained calm. They brought in an authoritative expert, the same guy who initially believed that the boy was Christina's son. He went to Christina in person. Home to help, he explained, first, anything can happen during the 5 months out of the mother’s custody, including the abductor circumcising her son for unknown reasons because of his personal hygiene after all. Advantages; second, 5 months of miserable life encounters may shrink people's spine and lead to foreseeable trauma such as height loss. In the face of the unquestionable opinion of "experts", Christina needs to look for additional evidence to challenge, and these evidences abound (why does it take so much trouble to overturn an apparently absurd conclusion of an authority?), first , Walter's dentist told her that the width between the incisors of the child retrieved by the police obviously did not match Walter's, and it was impossible to have such a big difference without surgery; secondly, the boy could not name his teacher, and he could not find it. to your original seat. The teacher even said, "If he's your son, I'll eat the pointer." Now it's the police's turn to disprove it. This time, the police did not send authoritative experts, but condescendingly offered a stick of morality and ethics. Officer Jake Jones angrily scolded Christina: "You are just used to living a free and comfortable life alone, and finally dumped your child, but now that the police have found your son, they want to pass the burden on the country, you Either an irresponsible mother or a lunatic with a paranoid that can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy!"
Christina has no problem, I will discuss it later. But it's not the child who lied to become a virgin. He was also a kidnapped child. The premature wandering society gave him the shrewdness and sophistication of Wei Xiaobao, as well as the desire for the comfort of family love. He observed the words and expressions of the police who were eager for quick success and great success, and mastered the personal information of the boy Walter, the boy the police were looking for with great fanfare. Under the guidance of the police, he chose to play the role of Walter. When the boy finally found his real mother, he turned back to the media and said that they made me say I was Walter's. The embarrassed experienced police officer hurriedly covered up and said, "Look, naughty little boys always like to blame the police to avoid being punished by their parents."
The media's fueling of the flames had the opposite effect at first, preventing the police from thinking calmly, forcing the police to cover up their mistakes by persecuting Christina. But it can’t be blamed on the media either. Emotional and intolerant media can make the criticized lose their normal judgment and do ridiculous or hateful things. In a large number of mass and public crises, it is not difficult for us to find the media's incitement and fear that the world will not be in chaos, but as an institution with power, it is the pressure that it should bear to bear criticism. When an authoritative institution justifies a false proposition with scientific rationality, it is often farther and farther away from common sense and conscience. When we look at the police's pretentious lie in the video, we can't help but wonder if this is really happening in the world. But if we try to review the "South China Tiger" incident, it is not difficult to find the similarities between the two. When a powerful institution needs to maintain its authority, it will disregard all common sense and conscience to cover up its mistakes, and even cover up its mistakes with heinous crimes. In the film, the police go further and further along this road of no return. It is the community religious groups and the media that constitute strong monitoring of the police, and it is this external monitoring force that is strong enough to help Christina from further framed by the authorities. In Xu Jingxiang's case, too, if it wasn't for the intervention of a strong procuratorial organ, the suspect's personal efforts might not have achieved such an ideal result. Because wrongful authorities do not hesitate to sacrifice personal interests in order to maintain their own authority, this is a kind of extreme collectivist inertia. In my opinion, the Nie Shubin murder case in Hebei encountered such a powerful Iron Curtain after a long delay in the investigation. In the famous case of She Xianglin's wife murder, assuming that there is no restriction and supervision by other forces, will the erring agency use the powerful resources at its disposal to use "scientific" methods to prove that the returned mad woman is not his wife?
Authorities also have a terrible way to deal with indomitable doubters. When the outcome of the polemic between the two sides puts the authority in an obvious disadvantage, the monstrous and terrifying authority of the authority that lacks checks and balances will break out, and it will declare its opponents mentally ill with unquestionable determination, in order to prove that it has unquestionable rational and correct. That's what the police department does in the movie. While humans "discovered" the alien phenomenon of psychosis, they exploited this discovery to the extreme. The French philosopher Michel Foucault quoted two writers in Madness and Civilization, in which the French thinker Pascal said: "Man must be mad to such an extent that not being mad is just another form of madness. The madness." And the Russian writer Dostoevsky wrote in "The Writer's Diary": "People cannot confirm their sanity by confinement of their neighbors." Accordingly, Foucault believes: "Because people Out of this madness, to confine one's neighbors by the action of a supreme reason, and to communicate and recognize each other in a cold language that is not madness. It is necessary to determine the beginning of this conspiracy, namely The moment of establishment before it is permanently established in the realm of truth, before it is revived by the passion of protest." After examining the history of human madness, Foucault concluded that "madness is not a natural phenomenon, but a A product of civilization. There would be no history of madness without the history of cultures that describe this phenomenon as madness and persecute it.” The scary thing is that the police department in the film disgracefully invented the human race The phenomenon of madness is abused to the persecution of dissidents. In order to maintain order and stability, the authority has a strong urge to attribute all those who oppose it and affect its authority as abnormal and mentally ill, so as to obtain moral strength and legal harm. In the current society, there are many government officials who frequently declare repeated and leapfrog petitioners to be mentally ill, and there are even so-called experts and scholars like Sun Dongdong in the academic field for them.
What is even more terrible is that the authoritarian authorities desperately defend the mistakes of the system not only to protect its sanctity, but also to fear the awakening and independent thinking of the people. Such an independent spirit is the power to break through all the authoritarianism of external power and internal power. What appears to be a film about a child kidnapping case is actually a depiction of the fact that a woman who yearned for independence at the time was considered a threat by male society. Eastwood summed up the role by quoting an official who decided to send Christina Collins to the reformatory at the time: "There must be something wrong with you. You are an independent woman." And this," Eastwood said, "was unacceptable at that time!" The
authoritarian government most taboos people with independent ideas. It is this kind of unethical thinking that slowly breaks through the shackles of the system and arouses the people's enthusiasm. Awakening, thereby leading the people to the path of freedom.
View more about Changeling reviews
