In general cognition, philosophy explains art, art shows literature, and literature sums up science. If the other way around, it will be very weak. Science cannot sum up literature, nor can literature show art, nor can art explain philosophy.
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1
Art is the ultimate in many things, whether making wine, painting, playing the piano, or killing people. But I don’t think anyone wants to admit that the killers are artists.
"This House Is Made By Me" does not come to such a simple conclusion, because it is a film by Lars von Trier. "Lass Crazy" is the industry nickname of the Danish director. Even when his name is mentioned, there will be waves.
His films are often full of bloody scenes and naked scenes. "Antichrist" and "Female Addicts" are all like this, and this film is naturally no exception. It premiered in Cannes this year, and even more than 100 people were forced to leave early.
The beginning of the movie is exactly the end. While traveling through hell, Jack, a psychopath, talked with Vigie about murder and art, and told about five murder cases, expressing various opinions to people. He killed 61 people in 12 years. Like other serial killers, he commits crimes every once in a while in order to get pleasure from it. He himself also told the analogy of street lights and shadows. Whenever he is directly under a street lamp, the shadow is the thickest and darkest, that is, he has just killed someone. On the way to the next street lamp, the shadow in front of him disappears and the shadow becomes longer behind him. Satisfaction disappears and pain comes on the scene.
Every drug addict will use this as an excuse, just like a drunkard gets drunk every time he gets directly under a street lamp. Vigie, his guide, like a justice messenger, can always say something to refute Jack's point of view and pull the audience back to normal thinking.
Simply speaking, the format of the film is not novel. The Korean movie "Walk with God" starring Ha Jung Woo is the most similar. In addition, there are literary works. For example, in "The Seventh Day", Yu Hua also used the soul as the protagonist to tell the story.
Maybe you and I have found out that the book is falling out of the book bag at the beginning of the article, but for a film that is falling out of the book bag from beginning to end, even if Dan Brown walks by with a copy of "The Da Vinci Code", he has to pay his respects. Fan.
2
Jack is an engineer, but he wants to be an architect, build a perfect house for himself, and work hard for it again and again. In the past 12 years, he has repeatedly killed people, and the building of the house seems to have gone nowhere. During the journey to hell, he told five stories to Vigie. It is necessary to state in advance that the simple narrative plot is part of the article, but the content of the film narrated in words may also cause discomfort.
Story 1, a woman stopped a car halfway and asked to help her fix the jack (Jack), but she was extremely arrogant, took the lead in provoking the topic of serial killers, and laughed at Jack for being a counselor, he could not be a killer, so Jack took Jack and gave it to the woman One Jack. He hid the body in an abandoned freezer. After that, all the "trophies" were piled into this unnamed place.
In the second story, Jack followed a woman living alone, pretending to be a policeman and an insurance salesman, gaining trust, walked into the house and strangled her. In a panic, he drove to escape, while his body was held behind the car with a rope. Back to the freezer, only half of the corpse remained, and the other half became blood stains all the way. Just then the rain poured down, helping him to wash away the evidence of the crime. It can be seen that the director's point of view is very sharp, as if he said a few words with a smile, "You don't think bad people will be retributed."
Story three, Jack went to a picnic with his mother and two children, and taught the children to hunt by the way. He explained the hunting principle to Vige, hunting down the young cubs one by one, and then the big cubs kill the female deer last. Because the female deer is killed first, the two cubs will not survive. It sounds a bit human at first, but in the end Jack shot and killed two children and their mothers according to this theory. Back in the freezer, he also made a specimen of a child, similar to the head of an animal hanging on the wall of a mansion.
In the fourth story, Jack seems to be in love with a young and beautiful girl. He "praised" her for her big breasts, and not surprisingly, she was dismissed as vulgar. Then she discussed the difference between an architect and an engineer. She said that when an engineer draws a house, an architect also draws a house. Unexpectedly, this angered Jack. The film is so depressing during this period that I have to open the window to listen to the noise and escape for a while. More than 100 people in Cannes may have left at this point. He cut off a pair of her breasts and made one of them into a purse, claiming that it was some kind of worship.
In the fifth story, Jack held five men and tied them to a steel pipe frame with iron wires. They knelt on their knees with their hands behind them, crossing each other to keep their heads in a straight line. It turned out that Jack had to do an experiment to see how many heads a bullet could penetrate. One of the soldiers reminded him that it was a hunting bullet. Jack jumped over the wall in a hurry, and even shot and killed an old friend in order to find metal bullets.
The soldier’s question, successfully delayed the time, and waited for the police to arrive. Amid the clamor of police sirens, a kind-looking old man appeared, and it was Vigie, the guide. After a brief conversation, Jack built a house with those frozen corpses.
His architectural philosophy requires that materials must be breathable. So he built a perfect house for himself with materials devoted to energy and thought. This house is the entrance to hell. This is where the film begins. Jack tells the story while wandering in hell.
3
Lars von Trier has always advocated that attention should be paid to the story of the film and the performance itself. In the film Jack loses his humanity, but he happens to be the protagonist. When we denounced the cruelty, we were worried that he would be discovered by the police. The performances of other "victims" also moved people, sometimes pitying and regretting. All kinds of pictures are presented before us, just like thinking about human society from a unique perspective.
The first female victim was extremely arrogant, seemingly unable to extricate herself from the moral high ground, always using the weak to speak the words of the strong. Even if Jack is not a murderer, her words and deeds will make people uncomfortable, even helpless disgust. When the second woman living alone heard that her pension had doubled, she happily let Jack into the house, and felt sorry for her vigilance, so that she exposed her life to danger.
In the third story, the ladies and children seem to have no flaws, but they still lost their lives because of their credulity. In Story Four, women are in trouble because of their simplicity. When she was exaggerated and said Jack was vulgar, I suddenly thought of the rules of Western society, which cannot be described or praised at will, because then men will be mistaken for a certain motive for committing crimes.
The sultans of the Ottoman Turk Empire castrated black slaves in order to serve their concubines in the Topkapi Palace; under Chinese feudal rule, eunuchs continued to usurp power. Castration is indeed a good way to cut off the motives of committing crimes. It refuses "vulgar" language to form rules. In the eyes of some extremists, it is not a kind of castration.
When Jack allowed to scream, she screamed for help. The moment she climbed up the window, she might have been completely desperate, because the society in front of her was far more "civilized" than she imagined, so civilized that she ignored everything. In the blink of an eye, the elderly in the unit building enjoy the clean and tidy living environment, but always miss the past because they cannot bear the indifference.
All the loopholes in civilized society let Jack drill right, so he killed arrogance, greed, gullibility, as well as innocence and indifference. But in the opposite way, these shortcomings only transcended moral boundaries and did not constitute a death crime in the least. It can be seen that his punishment does not have any legitimacy.
4
The victim has troubles, and of course the murderer Jack has. He suffers from severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and hygiene. After killing the lone woman, his mind kept flashing, with blood stains everywhere under the floor lamp, behind the picture frame, and on the edge of the carpet. As a result, I went back and forth several times and wiped it again and again, and still couldn't feel at ease until the police arrived.
Unlike the hygienic patients portrayed by Nicholas Cage in "Stickman", Jack actually cured the obsessive-compulsive disorder and hygienic obsessive-compulsive disorder through continuous torture. It's not so much a cure, it's a change of form. During the many assaults, he did not care about bloodstains and other evidence, even ignoring potential witnesses. As mentioned above, he took advantage of the indifference.
After a certain kiss, he strangled a congenial woman, went back to the freezer to look at the photos, and found that there was no aesthetic feeling, so he returned to the scene of the crime to take another shot. On the way, she ran into a woman on foot and drove to her death. After the incident, he said that he could feel a strong sense of humor by fiddling with the two corpses to take pictures.
Like hunting the mother and son, he transformed obsessive-compulsive disorder and cleanliness into a sense of ritual. Great rebellion and hasty walking have become the basis of this sense of ritual. He also sent the photo to the newspaper, signed it as "Mr. Sophistry," in order to get a big name and get pleasure from it. But what he is most proud of is not the photo itself, but the negative. The original strong light source in the negative film will turn into endless darkness, similar to the inversion of black and white as people often say.
The next step in the sense of ritual is artistic, and many things to the extreme are art, whether it is wine making, painting, playing the piano, or killing. But I don’t think anyone wants to admit that the killers are artists.
Jack is like the clown in "Batman", born to challenge human nature. He wanted to exclude moral judgment from art, so he said to Wei Ji, “You use your own moral ruler to measure life to kill art, but I want to liberate art because the vastness of art is far beyond our understanding.” After that, he exemplified that the three methods of wine making, frost, dehydration and noble rot, correspond to the chemical changes that occur in the body after death.
When Vigie asked about the house, Jack said that "destroy and destruction can also create art", and finally derived another set of theory "the value of worship", he equated himself with a person who made worship, such as a fighter alarm. The inventor, Hitler, who created the Nazis, and Pol Pot, who organized the Khmer Rouge. Those massacres in the history of various countries are an extravagant art for him.
The role of Jack, perhaps as Lars Von said, "understands and sympathizes with the Nazis", but the "art" he created, compared to the appalling destruction, is still in the infant stage. Digging a small ditch will pretend that the water is flowing, it is really arrogant.
5
"This House Is Made By Me", like the director's predecessor "Female Addict", still uses a dialogue style. If the film stops when the frozen corpse house is built, it will be a disaster for the audience. Fortunately, there is the last part, Jack in a red robe follows Vigie to hell, which is the concretization of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Virgil is Virgil. They talked about Virgil's "Aeneas" when they were debating. There is a scene played by a real person, just like the oil painting "Dante's Boat", which also illustrates this point. Goethe was also mentioned by Vigie. The mode of chapter-based thematic exploration is to imitate his "Faust".
It is not difficult to sort out the thinking. The story told by the director is just the process of the two traveling through hell, and most of the film's images are from Jack's memories and episodes of the debate with Vigie. In the end Jack wanted to jump over the broken bridge to heaven, but fell into the deepest layer of magma in hell. The picture suddenly turned into a negative film, the originally bright magma turned into endless darkness, and Jack was in the darkness.
Lars von Trier is indeed worthy of admiration. The pictures in the Divine Comedy are like flowing oil paintings, bright and beautiful, with a bit of mystery in their solemnity. He himself escaped another accusation and stood firmly on the edge of mainstream values.
As we all know, in 2011, he took the film "Melancholia" to Cannes, and was expelled from the film festival for making "understanding the Nazis" remarks. Some people say that this film is a proud confession of the incident, and some people say that if House (house) is replaced by Cathedral (church), it will show his cynical side like Jack.
6
In general cognition, philosophy explains art, art shows literature, and literature sums up science. If the other way around, it will be very weak. Science cannot sum up literature, nor can literature show art, nor can art explain philosophy.
Movies are often artistic. The film quotes classics and regards it as a work of art for the time being, but it raises many philosophical questions, such as whether the ultimate goal of mankind should be possessed before death or possessed after death. Everyone knows that there is no standard answer to philosophical questions. It happens to allow some psychopaths to apply what they have learned, just like Jack, in a special situation, draw extreme conclusions and work hard to practice them. Maybe Lars von Trier is only responsible for presenting, not for drawing conclusions.
Rather than speculating about the creator's ideas, I would like to discuss the film itself. After all, there are not many films with the same thesis. In addition to stories, the film inserts a large number of paintings, architecture, documentaries, animations, and other artistic, religious and historical information, as if to find an answer, willing to devote all energy to finding arguments. While broadening their cognition, the audience must also learn to think independently; they must also make self-judgments for some theories that are to be covered.
This article was first published on ONE
Text | Yelulu
Novel author and freelance writer.
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