Ang Lee's Metaphorical Forest and Three Stories of Young Pi

Vinnie 2021-10-13 13:06:17

Before talking about the movie Boy Pi, there are a few prerequisites. These premises are like those axioms in mathematics. All deductions and all inferences come from this. If we cannot reach a consensus at the starting point, we will only part ways and go further and further.

First. The novel of Young Pi belongs to Jan Martel, and the film of Young Pi belongs to Ang Lee. Ang Lee's movies are based on the original work, but they are not all the same. He retained the frame of the story, made changes, additions, and deletions, so that it was mixed with Lee's gene and became something else. Therefore, in the following analysis, I will completely put aside the interference of the original work-it does not involve the plot of the original work, does not involve the original author’s intentions, and does not compare the differences between the two editions. In short, we never know this. The film also has the original work—only focusing on what the director showed us on the screen.

second. The adult Pi actor Irfan Khan said in an interview: “This movie looks like a teenager’s adventure story on the surface, but it actually hides a lot of metaphors. It has many parallel spaces and many levels.” In other words This is an allegorical story in which the metaphorical expression techniques are restrained and concise, and the mutual mapping relationship is very obvious. In this way, Ang Lee gave a "Ang Lee" soul to Jan Martel's story frame. Only by admitting that Ang Lee’s handling of these details is deliberate, every place has been carefully designed, and every line has its function and direction, can we piece together the meaning he is trying to express. Denying this, he becomes a Trisolaran who listens to Yun Tianming's fairy tales, and what he hears is only a pure and beautiful story.

third. I have always believed that film review is a subjective work. Everyone has different perspectives and perceptions. They are all right. The so-called benevolent sees the benevolent and the wise sees wisdom. There is no such thing as objective film review, so naturally there is no right or wrong. . For those who write film reviews, his only responsibility is to admit that his evaluation is only a personal experience, not an objective truth about others' right or wrong. Therefore, this article is just some of my personal thoughts. It does not involve micro-speech or the extension of the theme. It only does some analysis on the clues of the movie itself. Maybe right, maybe wrong, maybe over-interpreted, maybe far-fetched. If everyone agrees, I am deeply honored; if your opinion is very different from mine, it shows that this movie has multiple interpretations and shows its mysterious charm.

Without further ado, let's start with that dinner.

At the beginning of the film, Pi, who also believes in Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, had a conversation with his father and mother during dinner. This conversation is very important. It is the first preview of the whole movie theme.

Young Pi’s father said: “If you believe in three religions at the same time, it’s equivalent to not believing in anything. Instead of that, you should choose to believe in reason and science... I would rather deny me after careful consideration than blindly accept without discrimination. ." (Written out of memory, just repeating the main idea, the same below.)

And the mother said: "Scientific solves external problems, not internal." In fact, it implies that reason and faith play different roles. The former solves practical problems, while the latter solves spiritual problems. Note that the mother's words have actually become the psychological source of Pi's subsequent actions.

The background of the two is mentioned in the movie: his father was saved by modern medicine, so he believes in science, which represents reason; the mother is inclined to religion, which represents faith. The film also specifically emphasized that the mother abandoned her family to follow her father, and faith is her only connection with the past.

Father and mother say differently, and boy Pi faces a choice. Whether to be rational or to believe, this is a classic dilemma in the spiritual realm. The final choice made by the young Pi was: "I decided to be baptized." In other words, he chose the latter, which means that he agreed with his mother's words. ,

But what faith requires is piety, Pi is not a pious, he is a pantheist. The argument of an adult Pi shows that what he needs is a supernatural, supreme power as a basis for faith. As for whether it is God, Allah or Vishnu, it does not matter. It can be said that in his consciousness, he believes in faith itself, rather than a specific god.

For the devout, he chooses faith to solve problems. And for people like Pi, he chooses to believe only to avoid problems. For him, faith is not a specific object of worship, but a sustenance, a space where he can escape.

That's why, Pi wants to tell two stories.

There has been controversy over whether the two stories are true or false. But in my opinion, the first story is undoubtedly made up. Ang Lee is very cunning. He never talks publicly about the truth or falsehood of the story. He knows that maintaining the charm of a movie is to allow the audience to argue infinitely. But his arrangement in the movie showed his inner attitude.

A fantasy story can be unscrupulous; but a true story must conform to reality. In the first story, there is a cannibal island, which is a tropical jungle in the deep sea, in which there are countless meerkats that can only be found in the desert. The desert and the sea are two completely different images.

If this story is true, why doesn't Ang Lee set up a normal island full of palm trees and rats to make it look more reasonable? But instead of doing this, Ang Li painstakingly selected the desert meerkat farthest from reasonableness. This was deliberately amplifying the unreasonableness, in order to imply the illusion of the first story, telling all the audience that this is just an illusion. This is just imagination. We all hope that the first one is true, but there is no way to say that the first one is true.

This is a bit like we usually joke. For example, I teased a girl and said: "You are so beautiful and I like you very much." This sentence may be treated as a joke, or it may be taken seriously. In order to avoid the risk of being taken seriously, I will deliberately exaggerate the sentence "You are more beautiful than Lin Chiling. I think every day you don’t even want to eat meat." joke.

Therefore, the first story was imagined by Pi, and the second story was real and rational. But Pi can't solve the suffering caused by the second cruel story. He can only escape to the first story and turn the victims around into various animals in order to calm himself-just like his mother's dinner. Said, rationality solves the external, and faith solves the internal. His phrase "I decided to be baptized" was actually a prophecy of his own decision to escape.

In this movie, Ang Lee has two ways to guide the audience to cleverly perceive the existence of metaphors. One is a rehearsal. Before each big action, there will be a small action as a rehearsal; the second is to allow the ontology and the metaphor to appear repeatedly, strengthen the relationship between the two, and then reveal the destiny of the ontology by constructing the relationship between the metaphors.

The dinner conversation is undoubtedly a preview of Pi’s motivation to tell the two stories; and the sentence the Christian pastor said to Pi: "you must be thirsty." and his father said, "what is reflected in its eyes is your own projection", then It is Ang Lee who is constantly establishing the primordial relationship between Pi and Tiger in our minds.

Some people say that the tiger represents fear. I think we should go further, representing Pi's instinctive emotions. In the first story, Pi divides himself into two, representing humanity or rationality. The tiger is stripped of the primitive instincts of rationality—instinctively angry, instinctively fearful, and unabashedly expressing himself the roughest. desire.

In other words, the human and tiger in the first story are a projection of the battle between humanity and beast in the second story. Pi didn't want to face the reality of cannibalism, so he split into two and became a fantasy drift of humans and tigers. This is mentioned in many film reviews.

But, don’t forget, we deny the authenticity of the first story on the grounds that it is unreasonable, and Ang Lee retains the label of “unreasonable” to remind the audience of the illusion of the story.

But does the second story really make sense?

Recall the process of the second story: Pi, mother, sailor and chef boarded the lifeboat. The sailor was injured and soon died. The chef eats it. Then Pi accidentally released a turtle and was beaten by the chef. The mother quarreled with the chef and was killed by the chef. The cook threw the mother's body into the sea to feed the sharks. Pi killed the chef out of anger and ate him.

In this story, the various elements perfectly correspond to the first story. Mother = orangutan, chef = hyena, sailor = zebra, tiger = Pi's instinct, seemingly perfect, reasonable, and even the most rational insurance company is about to be. Agree, but there are two flaws in it.

The first flaw is bananas.

When Pi told the first story, he said that the orangutan came sitting on a floating banana. The insurance investigator immediately pointed out that the banana would not float. When Pi told the second story, he didn't modify this detail, but insisted that his mother came sitting on a floating banana.

Whether the banana can float in reality is not important. In the world of movies, insurance investigators pointed out that bananas cannot float, which represents a kind of common sense. Its function is to pull out the uncommon sense in the story that Pi tells. The internal logic is self-consistent.

The second flaw is the death of mother.

The chef is a person who is very obsessed with food. He can eat mice, kill sailors and use meat as bait. To him, every piece of meat is extremely precious. But after his mother died, the cook did not eat her, and threw it into the sea to feed the sharks-this is a waste, especially since the cook has eaten the sailor. For him, the biggest psychological barrier has been eliminated and there is no reason to do it. This wasteful behavior.

The second story itself is very complete, but there are two more eye-catching snake feet. In fact, they are also deliberately preserved labels to remind the audience-that the second story is not true-at least part of the truth is concealed.

Both of these flaws are related to the mother. There is no doubt that the truth concealed in the second story is the whereabouts of the mother.

As I said before, Ang Lee likes to use various metaphors to reinforce the relationship between the original metaphor and the metaphor. Juvenile Pi and Tiger are the most eye-catching pair, but there is also a pair of metaphors that can easily be overlooked.

Mother and lotus.

The relationship between Lotus and her mother is very close, and there have been two significant hints before this. Once at the beginning, the mother drew a lotus with chalk on the floor to show Pi and Ravi. Once in the middle of the movie, Pi overlooks the bottom of the sea, first the fish forms a lotus, then the mother's appearance (where Pi and Ravi's faces are not appearing, the pointing is particularly obvious), and finally superimposed on the sunken ship. So to be precise, the lotus flower represents Pi's longing and love for his mother.

At the same time, Ang Li specially arranged for Ananti to explain the dance to Pi, leading to an important metaphor about the lotus: the lotus in the forest.

When Pi asked Anantirin what lotus meant, she didn't answer. It wasn't until we entered the most critical plot of the whole movie: Cannibal Island, that it suddenly became clear.

Pi picked a lotus flower in the forest at night. After opening it, there was a human tooth inside. So the metaphor and orientation of "lotus in the forest" can be completed here.

We know that the first story is Pi's fantasy. Then his actions on the island must be projections of various realities. The lotus is Pi's longing for his mother; the human tooth in the lotus represents the remains of his mother, which is death. The mother's body is actually the entire cannibal island.

The island is the mother, and the acid tide rising under the island is the mother's fate.

The acid tide is a metaphor that is extremely clear and terrifying. If you want to express the image of the mother’s death, there are many ways. The simplest is that the tide slowly floods the island, which represents the mother’s drowning; or the shark gnaws on the rhizomes of the island, which represents the shark’s belly, etc... But Lee An I chose an extraordinary metaphor that has almost nothing to do with the ocean: acid.

This acid is naturally human stomach acid. The acid tide hits the island. This image shows that the mother was eaten and digested by stomach acid, so the representative of the remains is the teeth.

Pi ate the plant rhizomes on the island, and the tiger ate the meerkats, which is a metaphor for mother-eating. There is a saying that rhizomes and meerkats represent the muscle fibers of the corpse and maggots, and they represent cannibalism. These two metaphors cannot be referenced in the movie. If Ang Lee wants to set up a metaphor, he will definitely not set it only once, he will repeat it many times, or find another reference point. Therefore, whether this conjecture is true or not, whether it is insinuated to such a detailed level is open to question. But Mother Eater is certain.

The reason for saying this is that Mother Eater has already rehearsed once before.

Pi is a vegetarian. He caught a big fish for the first time, crying and smashing it to death with a hammer. After being smashed to death, Pi knelt down on the raft and cried to the fish’s body and said, "Vishnu, thank you for turning into a fish to save me." He did this because he was facing a crisis of starvation, and rationally told him To be able to eat fish and cross the sun, in order to achieve a spiritual compromise, Pi must find an excuse in his faith. The moral doctrines of Christianity and Islam are too clear to be used, so Pi can only choose Vishnu as his reason. This also reflects Pi's religious view from one side.

As a result, the fish became the incarnation of Vishnu, and Pi had an acceptable reason, and his heart returned to peace.

This fish-eating incident is very important, connecting the past and the future.

Looking ahead, it contrasts with the dinner conversation. My father said at dinner: "Today's lamb is delicious, but you can't enjoy it." It shows that my father is the only meat eater in the family. He represents reason, and reason wants to eat meat. Mother told Pi that reason can solve the outside, and faith can solve the inside. This is also reflected in the fish-eating incident. Pi rationally killed fish and eat meat, and then used faith to find a refuge in his heart, an excuse. This very flexible and even cunning move is in the same line with Pi's spirit of easily saying "I decided to be baptized" at the dinner table.

Looking back, the mother is a fish. The fish was transformed by Vishnu, so the mother must have come from Vishnu Pi. Pi eats fish because this is the incarnation of Vishnu, and Pi eats her mother because she is the incarnation of Vishnu. One turned into a fish, the other turned into a pirate. The fish-eating incident is a preview of the mother-eating incident.

Religion has become Pi's spiritual sanctuary, and he has built a solid shell for himself. For Pi, the doctrines of Christianity and Islam are too clear, and the moral judgments of good and evil are too clear. The only choice he can choose-which also happens to be what her mother believes-is Hinduism. Only the mythological characteristics of Vishnu can construct a reasonable excuse for Pi Eater.

For fear that the audience would not be confused about this metaphor, Ang Li deliberately gave a close-up of the outline of an island. Some people say that this is the profile of Vishnu, and some people say that this is a woman, and they are all right. This silhouette originally had both the characteristics of mother and Vishnu. The lotus is the symbol of Vishnu, and the mother believes in Hinduism, and the myth of Vishnu is what she told Pi. From this close-up, the connection of the three elements of mother-lotus-Vishnu has been unmistakably strengthened.

This is why the outline of the island resembles both Vishnu and mother. In order to find a religious reason for his mother-eater, Pi has long regarded them as one.

Before this, Pi should have done similar things. On the fantasy level, the hyena killed the orangutan, and the tiger killed the hyena, but soon the bodies of the hyena, zebra, and orangutan all disappeared and were all eaten by the tiger. Projected to the real level, the chef killed his mother, and Pi killed the chef. Then, faced with starvation, Pi ate the rest of the sailor and the cook, and finally turned his eyes to the body of his mother.

Cannibalism is one thing, eating one's own mother is another. Pi can keep normal when eating sailors and cooks. In the fish-eating incident, Pi killed the fish but did not eat it. Instead, he fed the tiger, indicating that he blamed the cannibalism on his animal nature and his human nature was still maintained. Sober-but facing his mother, he can imagine the panic and struggle in his heart.

Before landing on the island, there was a big storm with shocking power in Story One. The tiger was shaking and Pi was rushing for the earth. Pi called the gods at first, but quickly gave up. This shows that his humanity and animality have encountered a big setback in reality at the same time. This setback may be a real storm or other disasters. In short, the result is extreme lack of food and extreme hunger. The only food is the mother.

If you eat it, you can't accept it mentally; if you don't eat it, you will definitely starve to death.

But the crisis was too strong, so Pi’s humanity and animality had to temporarily reach a unity, or compromise, and treat his mother as the incarnation of Vishnu, repeat the story of eating fish, and construct a Vishnu cannibal island. Phantom. As mentioned at the beginning of the movie, at night, we are all living in Vishnu's dream.

Then, on the fantasy level, the human and the tiger landed on the island at the same time, Pi ate the plant rhizomes, and the tiger ate the meerkats. I don't know if you still remember, when Pi bid farewell to Ananti, Ananti tied a rope to his wrist, which represented the farewell to the one he loved most. Recalling that Pi tied a piece of rope to the island as soon as he landed on the island, he suddenly became clear. Pi is saying goodbye, saying goodbye to his mother, because he is about to eat her.

At night, the acid tide surged, and only one tooth remained in the lotus. When Pi opened the lotus at night and saw the human tooth, the metaphor of the lotus in the forest came into play. His fire of reason finally awakened and realized the terrible thing he had done.

Pi said that he was worried about being swallowed up by the cannibal island before he decided to leave. In fact, he was worried that the mother-eating incident would eat up his spirit, drive him crazy, and even die. So he chose to escape from this island, and he also chose to forget. This is also echoed in the plot of Ananti: "I remember everything that happened that day, but I forgot how to say goodbye."

As a result, Pi completely forgot about it. When he told the second story to the insurer, he only said that he had eaten the chef and stopped. He didn't deliberately conceal it, but he also forgot. The only remaining memory is the cannibal island that he made up and kept in the first story.

Ananti's plot has a unique position in the entire movie. If you take her play out and watch it alone, it doesn't make any sense at all. This episode has nothing to do with the following, and this woman has never appeared again. However, Ang Lee never did useless work. He joined Anandi's play precisely to establish a metaphorical comparison for the series of activities on Cannibal Island.

Tie the rope, forget to say goodbye, and the lotus flower in the forest, these are all important metaphors in the cannibal island, and at the same time all the elements of Ananti's story are photographed. Without Ananti's story, the behavior of Cannibal Island would make the audience feel incomprehensible. Without the cannibal island, Ananti becomes meaningless. The two are actually the two ends of a metaphor system that echoes each other.

This is the third and true story constructed by the various metaphors permeated in the details.

Ang Lee painted the first story extremely beautifully, but he was stingy with the second story to the point that he didn't have a single shot, and even only used metaphors to carry the third story. He wrapped reality in a beautiful icing, and put a cruel sandwich in reality, and handed it to everyone. The writer and the insurance company believed in the first story, and Pi himself believed in the second. In order to strengthen his belief, he even believed in one more Judaism. As for the audience's willingness to peel off the layers of sugar paper, it is up to them.

Ang Lee used this extremely unbalanced technique to give the audience the right to choose. He opened many roads, each without an end. In "Inception", whether the spinning top is spinning or falling, and whether the protagonist is in a dream or reality, the audience can guess and interpret, or they can play at any time, get up and leave. In the final analysis, this is the protagonist’s own problem, the audience It is an irrelevant objective person. But when the audience watched Pi, they had to face a question: which story should I believe in. This choice no longer depends on the interpretation of the story, but on the heart of the audience. Religious people see the power of faith, atheists see the denial and dilution of religion, pure-hearted people and people who are tired of the real city tend to believe the first story, while pessimists with a dark heart are against the back. The hidden truth shuddered.

When Ang Lee was asked about the second story in an interview, his answer was to avoid the importance and give it to the audience after the story was filmed. This is a smart way. He gave up the most authoritative director's interpretation right to keep the audience arguing. . Inconsistent is the only way to maintain the long-term charm of the film. So we don't have to expect a clear answer from him, just trust our own heart.


View more about Life of Pi reviews

Extended Reading

Life of Pi quotes

  • Adult Pi Patel: My uncle Francis was born with too much water in his lungs. They say the doctors swung Francis around by the ankles to clear the water out, and that's what gave him the huge chest and skinny legs that made him such a great swimmer.

  • Santosh Patel: You only need to convert to three more religions, Piscine, and you'll spend your life on holiday.