Author: Pan Siyi
This is an obscure and bizarre film, exploring the theme of human taboos: bestiality, necrophilia, incest, self-mutilation...
It can be said that the concept of sex beyond normal ethics is all in this film dabble. Just dabbling in it, so far, there is not too much intuitive presentation. The director is so calm and prudent, restraining his subjective emotions to the extreme. Despite this, we still find clues from the viewing process. Peter greenaway is full of magnanimity, but he is only one of ZOO's cautious animals. His restraint is not a moral constraint, which can bind him in the On the edge of the abyss, there is nothing more than this heavy and hopeless fear, an ignorant worship and obsession with death.
Sex is dead, and human beings are groping all their lives. Maybe not to the level of the spirit, so the proportion of love in it is basically negligible, and the more realistic two extremes are: sex & death. People have a great preference for sex, and normal love between men and women is not a problem. From ancient times to the present, there are countless ways of sexual intercourse that transcend ethics. Book boy = prostitution, face-to-face, wives and concubines in groups, eunuchs, close relatives incest, animal love... In the past, these wild and wild histories were just jokes after dinner, and normal is normal. Although they are defined as "feudal", from my point of view, even the ancient capital under the rule of the Qin emperor was too enlightened. At least they were not bound by the so-called civilization, and retained the core meaning of the word in human genetics: animal nature. .
Furthermore, Peter greenaway is positive about animal nature. What is the difference between humans and animals? The same limbs and flesh can also be decomposed by microorganisms. Maybe we deceive ourselves and define ourselves as "high-intelligence animals", but we also end up in the same way, and ultimately die. And people keep animals in zoos, plunder their freedom, enjoy their flesh, and desecrate their bodies, euphemistically called "animal research". What is there to study with animals? They are just victims of the law of the jungle, their demise is composed of millions of moments: a corpse without a soul, a certain organ of the internal organs rots first, maggots crawling out of the fur, hundreds of millions of maggots and microorganisms are dividing up Their spoils, and in the end, the microorganisms killed each other and died, leaving only a pile of bones. Do you think only the lower animals under study suffer from this misfortune? Do you think you can be luckier than them? Luck is a non-existent word, just a change in time and quantity. It's a frightening reality, and nothing is more meaningful than the existence of death. In the world we can perceive, death is the terminator of all existence, but death itself is eternal and inescapable. Death is the inevitable necessity of all accidents. It's a pity that human beings claim to be smart and wise, they can master most of the energy of this earth, and control the land and ocean, but in the end they can't escape Game over. The ultimate research topic of human beings is human beings themselves.
One night, I saw me in the mirror. Suddenly, an urgent feeling filled my mind: I will disappear, I will disappear in the future, I will not exist. In the future, I will no longer have anything to do with this world, I can't see or hear, like I have never had life, never existed. The world will still go on, but I have been inevitably abandoned. This is death! How terrifying. I screamed loudly in the bathroom! No matter how long it is in the future, I know this day will come. After that, I want to forget the terrifying feeling of being blessed by death, and every day is bound to a small life. I call it the process of enjoying life. This is my way of rejecting death, filling the inner void that can never be filled with the details of life. This is also the way most people resist death, race against time, use limited life to prove the traces of existence, let busy disrupt their imagination, and forget the forgotten. There is another kind of person who can face death head on, to them death is like a ferocious sea, swimming upstream full of exciting senses, or they want to copulate with death. They're crazy, that's all.
That's the case with the twin zoologist brothers in "A", who begin the story with their wives killed in a bizarre car accident when a swan in rut hits the car window. Why do swans cause car accidents? Was their wives accidental or intentional murder? Accidentally, we fell into the director's trap and intervened in this crazy animal farm with the curiosity of watching a suspense movie. We thought there would be all kinds of pleasures of being revealed, but we were taken by the director, and the brothers went to find the female driver to be held accountable. Instead, we were fascinated by her who lost a broken leg. They found the memory of the mother body on the old prostitute, what they felt at that time of deep loneliness, similar to the trauma of a woman's amputation. Brothers who may have grieved for the loss of their wives are eventually replaced by deep confusion. On the one hand, they are puzzled by the process of death and corruption, and perhaps they are fascinated by the instantaneous sense of indulgence, starting from an apple recorded with a fast camera, and they are getting deeper and deeper. On the other hand, the wife's sense of ethics and morality was gone, and the knife cuts of those conjoined babies made them become close, and they even began to think: the human beings created by God at the beginning may be conjoined babies, which That's the ideal state for a normal person. Because even is less lonely, even has more courage to face the final outcome.
The theme that the story revolves from beginning to end is actually death. Fun-seeking is a way to ease the ultimate thinking, putting yourself in the same position as an animal and getting closer to the truth of death. In order to liberate his bestiality, the zoo investor was thrown off during bestiality with a tall horse, resulting in a high-level paraplegia; a seamstress who had a decent job during the day, read aloud the animal stories collected from various books every night for obscenity. In the end, he achieved his wish, and secretly met his favorite zebra in the dark night. Why are there so many complex and dirty desires hidden in human consciousness? And none of this was allowed to be written into the annals of civilization? How many ugly deals have been made under the cover of night? Are these evils innate, or are they influenced by the environment? The wider the shackles of civilization, the deeper the evil thoughts of human nature can accumulate. Because human nature is three-dimensional, human civilization is also three-dimensional, and even the entire universe is presented in a three-dimensional manner. So far, I think the director's position is obvious. A nation that cannot accommodate diverse human nature will fall miserably and die ugly. I believe you understand.
The existence of each animal has its own unique symbolic meaning. Human beings fabricated by the hand of God are neither omnipotent nor omnipotent. Monogamous swan reproduction is a rare perfect state, but it is by no means the most perfect. In the director's mind, there is an idyllic environment that is very charming. The wetland was full of reeds, and there was an artificially created curved river for boating. The wet air filled the wilderness, and it was uninhabited, like a land without owners. The most important thing is that there are hordes of snails here. The snail is not only a symbol of hermaphroditism, but also the guardian of the two brothers at the last moment. It's hard to imagine how disgusting the snail's mucus is when covering the skin. Fortunately, the ritual sense at the end of the film reduces the visual discomfort and is acceptable. From this point of view, in the eyes of peter greenaway, the creatures that have evolved to the spiritual stage must be snails, but if this is the case, what a boring thing!
Some people speculate on the title of the film: a Z plus two zeros , ZOO. In the English alphabet, the director is used to explain the end of life and the consummation of the cycle. My understanding is that Z+OO is a combination of odd and even numbers, Z is an odd number is a separate individual and life, OO can also be an equally separate individual, because they are born in pairs and are connected. The evolution of all things has its own reasons and rules. Things that break through the understanding of ordinary people can happen freely. Forced demolition and hard hiding cannot avoid reality. Only by accommodating the number of variations can ZOO be complete and consistent. In another sense, the conjoined brothers witnessed the demise of the corpses of plants and other animals, and they alone could not see their corpses being eroded by time. Of course, the technical and moral factors at that time could not make them achieve their wishes. More metaphors promise It is the end of mankind rampant, unable to witness and control their own extinction. I can't speculate whether Peter greenaway is anti-human, but one thing is certain, he must be against the so-called civilization. Animal nature is the essence of human beings, civilization is a cage, if we cannot break through the shackles of civilization, we will live no different from pigs.
In addition, the music in the film definitely has a bonus effect. Michael Nyman makes such a serious and dull subject full of eerie and joyous passion. And those surreal scenes can only be dispatched by a talented person like Director P. A rich and colorful painting of the human world, where there is a lifelike atmosphere like death, people can't hide or run away. You will be completely released, the moment you give up your resistance.
It is rare to find so many words, but it can be summed up in one sentence: people who still have animal nature, recommend it. If you are bound by stereotypes and normal social ethics, and have been reduced to a mechanical high-level animal, then you should stay away, don't dirty our P-directed films.
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