The theme of the whole movie is a metaphor for our world of life: the death of old creatures makes room for new lives.
The most basic setting of the movie: resources are limited. To survive in an environment with limited resources, the total population must be limited. When a baby falls to the ground, it must correspond to an old man going up the mountain. Otherwise, there will be a famine.
The limited resources are manifested in the fact that people use all the land as much as possible to grow food, use baby carcasses to fatten the fields, and eat worms in tree holes to supplement protein.
In this case, if people can be pure and mindless, take the initiative to cut off the matter of men and women, and no longer have offspring, the population will naturally not grow, and there will be no need to abandon the elderly.
However, people's sexual desire is surging like fire, gushing out, unstoppable. Mentally handicapped women, sister-in-law, widows, old women, and dogs, as long as they can vent their sexual desires, they can do everything.
Many film reviews regard the venting of sexual desire in the film as a lack of expressive resources, which is really a huge misunderstanding. In this film, both men and women have strong sexual desires. They are not resources, but exist as the opposite of resources (food).
Food and sex are also good, so everyone pays attention to the unified relationship between the two, but forgets the conflict between the two. On the surface, it is the contradiction between population and resources, but it is actually the contradiction between sexual desire and resources: sexual desire is the master of man, controls man’s destiny, dominates man’s life, and inevitably requires satisfaction → so the population will inevitably increase → the survival of the new population Need resources (food: potatoes, corn, fish) → the total number of resources is unchanged, so the old man must die. In order for the elderly to go up the mountain, in the village, the worship of mountain gods has been passed down from generation to generation. This belief is the morality of the village. So the old man's actions to go up the mountain were not only ethical, but also deified.
Therefore, it is not poverty, suffering, or shortage of resources that causes the abandonment of old customs, but human sexual desire.
The theme of the whole movie is a universal metaphor in our world of life: the death of old creatures makes room for new life, this is morality. And if this is the case, then morality doesn't matter what morality is, it's just the cold natural law between heaven and earth stipulated by the status quo of existence. That is to say: morality has nothing to do with gods and beauty, it is just a strategy for human reproduction.
(Of course, this is only the theme that the movie wants to express, not a scientific truth. In fact, from a biological point of view, the death of old creatures is because they are useless for the reproduction and mutation of genes.)
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