It was another day of rent arrears.
The shop windows were filled with weird big-print slogans, and the sound of the film record player circled the empty street.
Behind the sunny four seasons in the City of Angels, there is a cool-toned Los Angeles, California . Guilt, paralysis, illusion...
"You ask me if I will get tired of you one day, and if my heart will lose its desire for you-impossible, my love."
In the headlines of the newspaper, the lead singer of the band with a Steve Taylor haircut , holding a smoky hot girl in one arm;
Behind the counter of the greasy fast food restaurant, the unreally beautiful blonde girl didn't even look at our protagonist .
At first glance, everything is chaotic :
The crowded houses scattered in one place, the skunk corpses flying everywhere; the small swimming pool behind the rental house pretends to have an atmosphere that has never existed.
The director seems to be testing the audience : did you hear the question I raised?
Everyone’s vitality seems about to be taken away, indifferent, peeping, hiding , and occasionally encounter a little kindness——
The black curtain has been hung, and Sam is walking in the twilight in late July with the only warm light.
No, we can't see where the problem is , because the painting is covered with mud spots and deviations everywhere .
Following his procrastinating pace and lazy perspective, we walked into a community where splendor and rundown existed intertwined, and walked into this city where heaven and hell interspersed.
Sam was looking for the girl from last night, but in the role-playing detective , he unearthed the most terrifying secret in the depths of this valley .
It was too late for him to break free; when Los Angeles lifted the veil of mystery in front of him, he couldn't reverse what he had looked directly at.
But can he really save the girl who disappeared suddenly ? During this period, the inexhaustible threads involved, how could he let him go.
The huge machine in this world scooped every pedestrian into the mixing bearing, pressing out a frightening template, bewildering countless eyes.
Here, you can't find the answer; because the truth is hidden at the bottom of the silver lake .
01
Crime and erotica
The battlefield in the dark
What is the core of film noir ?
A down-and-out protagonist (they tend to hide their lost souls very well, but not this time), a mysterious girl, a difficult case, and countless difficult decisions .
Constitute a film noir of the main elements, often above points, plus a very suffocating despair environment .
But it’s hard to define the true core of it——
Unlike other types of movies, which usually have a clear ideographic standard, the values and themes in film noir are as chaotic as the inner world of the protagonist .
Because the fact is, this world, never not entirely of.
[Rear window] The actor played by James Stewart spy on neighbors to pass the hard time to recuperate;
In [The Bottom of the Silver Lake] , Sam's peeping behavior is just an externalization of desire , the stubborn taste of a dead house.
"Peeping", an element that transcends moral boundaries, is it boring to put it in these films? Not really.
Because the moment they walked into this kind of movie, the audience had wiped out the edges of the concept of good and evil , and gave the full power of the code of conduct to the protagonist of the story——
We no longer judge whether a certain behavior of the protagonist is good or bad, we are more trying to understand all his or her behavior and rationalize it ; the reality of the character has entered the hearts of the audience.
The audience also wanted to get behind Sam's binoculars to see what he saw. The voyeuristic desire to sit in front of the screen is hard to resist. Human primitive instincts can't even bother to admit it at this moment.
In our daily life, although we gritted our teeth against bear children , it is unlikely that we will implement punishment methods like Sam's——
But Sam did. Was he the cause of it? no. Did he hit a minor, right, right. So what should I think of this behavior?
Audiences, whether there is sympathy or not , you know in your heart.
[Cry] and [Rear Window] posters, Hitchcock ’s tombstone, the director defined the black tone of the film while paying tribute to the master ;
[Black Lake Monster Tan], [Wolfman], [Vampire] and other sci-fi horror movie posters have also appeared one after another, as well as clips from [天外魔花] on TV. This series of easter eggs has strengthened the misty atmosphere.
And the fable that runs through the film comes from a comic book that Sam was obsessed with in the bookstore at the beginning——
"Only I know the secret of the bottom of the Silver Lake. When the time is right, I will make it public."
On the basis of film noir elements, the atmosphere of mysticism and conspiracy theory makes the background of the originally gloomy story even more elusive.
It's just that, poor Sam, the fable only says that the secret will be revealed, and doesn't tell you what the next step is .
Compared with the mode of crazy egg smashing , I think the two movies are more like another aspect:
The male protagonists are all in the eyes of others , and there is almost no heroic atmosphere in the adventure and detective films (please ignore the fact that one of them has played Spider-Man and the other has played Laser Eye );
But they pop culture mastery of the Earth is likely to exceed 99% of the population, but in this chaotic world that they have the strong heart of the -
For Wade , played by Taylor Sheridan, it is to clear the customs and discover the past of mysterious characters in the "Oasis"; for Sam in this film, it is to find the missing girl and overthrow the criminal network in power.
These are the only rays of light in their unbearable lives, and the only certainty among their wavering value choices.
Once you touch that light spot, it is the victory of the dead house .
When Sam was on this nostalgic journey, he was not overcoming all obstacles, but found that the things he encountered were getting more and more absurd, unexplainable and unsolvable .
Apart from him, no one realizes that they are at the center of the crime, no one wants to break free from this "bliss space", no one wants to explore the source of darkness .
He Chandler as described by Philip Marlowe , as the golden age of each section actor of film noir , like -
In this retro detective story , he knows everything but can't do anything .
The public do not want to see the collapse of gorgeous buildings, they only need a scapegoat ;
Then, they can continue to sing and dance, maintaining their shaky illusion .
Sam in the eyes of female body , erotic element under the male perspective , but also with the above-mentioned "peeping" echoes.
The women's tennis finals on TV are being broadcast live, and the screams of Basel and Larsson when they hit the ball match the groans of the friends on the bed to score.
Then when the heroine appeared on stage, the face seemed to be surrounded by holy light , like the fairyland-like lighting effect in the golden age of nostalgia.
Kurt Cobain ’s suicide ended the heyday of oily rock in the early 1990s and left countless young people with the imprint of an unruly age;
Cobain's music is still in Nirvana , and in the plot, when Sam is told that even the most famous song "Youth Heart" is a huge scam, his resistance and despair are the last struggle of pop culture toppling .
——Don't insult my IQ and beliefs , that is the hope that supports my whole life, no, not Cobain.
[Rebel Without a Cause] make Griffith Observatory ever since the supreme symbolic meaning, in this quiet city landmark overlooking this noisy, then his head and looked at the clear sky -
The disappearance of mystery girls, the disappearance of billionaires, the rampant dog killers, the startling remarks of weird composers, and the weird organizations hidden in the world are not things that people pay attention to.
Los Angeles is really a place suitable for dream-making, but there is only a lack of dream-interpreters; and Sam, who is about to hit the deadly acupuncture points in the city, does not know that he has no blueprint for what to do after the secret is revealed .
02
The downfall of the dead house
Subculture
This chaos of sub-culture may make some viewers confused during the whole process——
Do not worry, cards Division who looks is confused.
Garfield : I'm on the set, and I have too much time to figure out what is happening today ...
"It's crazy, I don't think about time, just do it." He bluntly said, "This is really the strangest, most free and strange thing I have ever been involved in ."
However, the stunned guy, still put himself at ease to the director :
David quite visionary , he learned that he knows want to see what effect, mentioning also requires specific and clear , I am grateful.
——I completely gave up my control and completely gave the dominance to David. "Just tell me what you want to do."
Garfield also compared the director's techniques and techniques with David Lynch .
That's right, the style of [Silver Lake Bottom] has obvious Lynch-like traces to a large extent :
There is not only [Muholland Dao] that kind of intersection of reality and reality, the use of dreams, memory and mysticism ;
More directly, there are actors from [Muholland Road] in the cast of this film . ( Patrick Fiskler , who plays the manga author , once played Dan in [ Muholland Road])
Of course, there are also endings in Lynch movies that are confusing and unforgettable .
[Silver Lake's Bottom] The muffled carnival trend has been set from the beginning of its birth——
Director David Robert Mitchell sat at home with his wife, looking at the house on the Hollywood Hills , wondering: What happened there?
This paradoxical idea, coupled with excessive caffeine , resulted in the first draft of this film, a black thriller positioned in Los Angeles .
"It was originally shot in Roman Polanski's [Chinatown] style, and the tribute to Hitchcock and Lynch naturally came out."
Mitchell is fascinated and loves Los Angeles and people's perspective on the city depicted in film history .
As a result, those easter eggs, stalks, and classic movie clips all actively ran into his mind when he was writing.
The symbolic meaning of water in the film is very important-
It not only shapes the beauty, but also reflects the complex and moving emotions of the characters .
In the words of the director, "At a certain moment, it becomes a dark and distorted illusion ."
The story in the film is as mysterious as the film itself :
The huge mystery, the flickering hint, the possibility of hiding...
A large amount of popular culture inspiration , the connection of horror legends and modern humanistic society, the collapse of the American dream and mythology , and the dramatic turn of evil;
Colorful people, the chaotic community on the banks of Silver Lake——
Mitchell draws countless elements from his side, and then portrays the male protagonist into an extremely contradictory image , with a peculiar charm, cute and terrible; both private and universal.
This is the director's torture of the confusing and misty Los Angeles , in fact, it is a love letter to the city of angels .
Like Sam prying through the blinds of the spring , the audience must also embark on a spiritual journey to find the answer .
Under the silver lake, there are countless desires and countless nightmares .
The tragic state of the male protagonist, and the life he wants, are transformed into cultural symbols in the movie, and the source of his impulse to pursue the truth .
In this nostalgic, romanticized noir film , the darkness and depression, sweetness and ugliness, although arranged by a large number of fictions, are horribly real and passionately challenging the nerves of the audience.
Didn't understand? It's ok.
Listen to the director’s advice and read it a few more times , and you will naturally understand the heaven and hell in [The Bottom of Silver Lake] .
Reference materials:
[1] Spider Man in the Hollywood Hills | Eye For Film
[2] Andrew Garfield left confused while filming under the silver lake | Youtube
[3] David Robert Mitchell On Cannes-Premiering'Under The Silver Lake' | Deadline
Text: Yorkshire Viking
The article comes from WeChat public account: movie detoxification
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