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I guess you will think you know the story, no, you don't know, the real story is bloodier, the one you know is too hypocritical , was made up many years ago, just to make people sound more comfortable and make children happy. — Roald Dahl
It was an embarrassment to go to the cinema alone to see Cinderella early on Saturday morning. Crowded in the line of the little girl in the princess dress and the mother in the lady's dress, when it was finally my turn, the conductor lady gave me a complicated look, a little pity in the humor.
A few years ago, the New York Times had an article saying that we live in an age of irony. "To live ironically is to hide in the public. It is a blatant indirectness, a form of disguise, and the word etymologically means 'sneak away'. Somehow, the direct way is unbearable for us ."
In an era of irony, encountering an overly sincere fairy tale movie, a sense of cognitive dissonance runs through the entire viewing process. As Cinderella's mother said at the beginning of the film, "I believe in everything". So, for the next 100 minutes or so, we were guided all the way by the very correct three views - the girl was gentle and kind, lost her parents, was bullied and humiliated by the evil stepmother and stupid sister, until the handsome and affectionate prince appeared. At the beginning of the palace ball, the girl transformed into a gorgeous, stunning entrance, and then we danced and danced until the clock struck midnight. The mysterious girl left in a panic, leaving behind a crystal slipper... There is no suspense and no spoilers, you I believe that good will eventually overcome evil, and the crystal slipper will finally find its owner. From then on, the prince and princess live happily together. So naive, so innocent, and walking out of the movie theater, Cinderella's mother's last words—"Be strong and brave, be kind and benevolent"— buzzed like a spell in my brain.
In the era of irony and deconstruction, we are actually more used to "the princess kissed the prince and turned into a frog together" ("The Frog and the Princess"), "a fairy guarding the forest was betrayed by her lover, and she embarked on the road of revenge in grief and anger" ("Sleeping Curse", "Frozen") "Alice returns to the underworld of her childhood dreams as a young woman to duel fire-breathing dragons" ("Alice in Wonderland")...with Compared with these increasingly powerful new school princesses, "Cinderella" is guarding an old soul, saying "strong and brave, benevolent and kind" seriously, how to please modern audiences with increasingly serious tastes?
For more than a decade, Hollywood's retrospect of the "dark" elements of fairy tales has made people gradually realize that before the 19th century, fairy tales were simply entertainment for adults, filled with a lot of violence, horror, and pornography. In Tolkien's words: "They are like old furniture being moved from the living room to the nursery. Because adults don't want it anymore, and don't care if it's misused." The collectors have already carried out the first round of "cleaning", but still retain a lot of content that was not suitable for children at that time - the queen who was jealous of Snow White's beauty was her biological mother, she ordered the hunters to kill her and bring her back. heart, liver and lungs for dinner; poor Hansel and Gretel were also driven into the woods by their biological parents and left to starve to death; Little Red Riding Hood was tricked into her grandmother’s bed by a wolf, and after she took off her clothes, she was eaten by the wolf No brave hunter to save her; the prince's romantic kiss in Sleeping Beauty is in the original version of a married king who raped Sleeping Beauty in her slumber, and she gave birth to twins .
Frenchman Charles Perrault first wrote about Cinderella's pumpkin, crystal slipper and fairy godmother in 1697's "Fairy Tales". But in that version, Cinderella's father was a shady incestuous who had evil thoughts on his daughter and forced her to marry him; one of her stepsister cut off her toes in order to put on the glass slipper. Another step sister chipped off her own heel. Finally, at the wedding, pigeons pecked out their eyes.
Also, if you know the sexual metaphor of "Cinderella's Glass Slippers", you'll be a little sick to see the glamorous glass slipper in the movie being tried on by women all over the country. In the original story, only unmarried girls were qualified to try shoes, but in the movie, it was aunts and even old ladies. Whether intentional or not, the setting of this plot reveals a secret that is somewhat embarrassing for modern women—some myths are hard to dispel, no matter how awake our female consciousness is.
The charm of fairy tales lies in the unpredictable suspension of human order and the dogmatic nature of the rules of fate. In these worlds, all luck and misfortune depend not on virtue, wisdom, or belief, but on magic. It is precisely because of this that when a person becomes an adult, reason makes it difficult for us to stay long in a world of magic, fairies and rainbows. Unlike children, they still retain mysteries and fantasies, "willing to set aside disbelief for a while to constitute a poetic belief". However, no matter how old a woman is, deep down she still wants to believe in the Cinderella story. So, with the fairy godmother's magic wand, when Cinderella was dressed in a splendid costume like the starry sky, not only the excited screams of the little girl, but also the deep sigh of the mother next to me, came from the theater. A young woman beside her even excitedly took out her camera.
According to scholarly research, there are more than 700 Cinderella folktales around the world. [Anna Birgitta Rooth's Cinderella Story Circle, 1951] This fairy tale has different variants in different countries and regions, and there are no less than 500 versions in Europe, among which the earliest In one version, an eagle stole a shoe from a prostitute named "Rodpis", and the eagle flew all the way across the Mediterranean, dropping the shoe into the lap of the Egyptian king. Thinking that it was the will of God, the king began to look for the owner of the shoes, and finally married Rhodepis. Since then, her story has continued to reincarnate in human history, in West Sudan, Madagascar and the island of Mauritius in Africa, in India, the Philippines and Indonesia in Asia, in Japan, in China, in Jane Austen's estate, and in youth in Korea In idol dramas, in "Meteor Garden" and "The Legend of Zhen Huan", in "Little Times" and "Fifty Shades of Grey" (The Ellen Show edited "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Cinderella" together, There is no sense of violation and).
The story of "Cinderella" will never be outdated, because this is the story of a girl looking for a husband, different names, different trials and twists and turns, and the counterattack of fate in different ways, but in the end it all boils down to the encounter with "Prince" .
"What do women want? This is a big question that has never been answered." Freud said that a woman's heart is like a dark continent. He has been studying women's souls for more than 30 years, but he has never been able to answer this question. Actually, this question is a bit silly, after all women are different and want different things at different times. But if Cinderella is a story about what a woman wants, the answer seems simple - a prince. Each era may have a different definition of "prince", but who wants to read the story of Cinderella and the dishwasher?
There is even a special term in psychology called "Cinderella Complex". American author Colette Dowling explained in her best-selling book "The Cinderella Complex" that this complex is caused by "women's fear of independence" - they are more inclined to define themselves by their relationship with men, and are afraid to pursue their hearts true self. Therefore, "Cinderella Complex" shows a kind of once-and-for-all redemption-meeting the "Prince", from now on hand in hand with life and living a happy life.
But why are women afraid to pursue their true self?
British psychologist Adam Phillips has a more interesting theory about the "Cinderella complex". He believes that Cinderella's problem is not with men, but with women. The real difficulty for her was not finding the prince - she easily met the prince in the woods, and the difficulty was how to get back to him through the obstacles of her stepmother and sister.
In fact, the war between women is very cruel in the story of Cinderella - the Indonesian folk version of Cinderella forced her stepsister to jump into a pot of boiling water, and marinated it into bacon to send back to her stepmother. In the Japanese folk version of Cinderella, her stepsister died in a pig cage. In the 1960s, sociologist Wolfram Eberhard (Wolfram Eberhard) published a collection of Chinese fairy tales, one of which is "Beauty and Pocky Face", which is also a very strange Cinderella story. A girl whose mother died, was reincarnated as a scalper after her death, and was killed by her stepmother. The girl kept her skeleton in a jar, and the jar transformed her into a horse, a dress, and a pair of beautiful shoes. She lost a pair of shoes at a fair and ended up marrying the man who found them for her. Her pockmarked step-sister tried to usurp her happiness, and in the end they had three competitions—walking eggs, climbing a mountain of knives, and jumping in a frying pan. The pockmarked step-sister lost the last one and her body was sent back to her mother.
In "Cinderella," Cate Blanchett's stepmother is the most dazzling character in the film. Her arrogance, hatred, high cheekbones, bright green skirt, bright yellow feathers are really bright as peach and plum, heart is like a snake, her aura completely overwhelms the heroine. In previous Cinderellas, the stepmother was evil, but here she is cruel. Her abuse of Cinderella was not due to a natural malice, but the cruelty of her own life and the direct consequence of being a woman. In my opinion, the climax of the whole film is not the transformation of Cinderella, nor the first dance between Cinderella and the prince, but after Cinderella was thrown off her crystal slipper, she finally became furious and asked her stepmother: "Why? You are so cruel to me?" The
stepmother replied: "Because you are so young, so beautiful, so innocent, and I..." Before she finished speaking, she closed the door in silence, leaving Cinderella alone in the attic superior.
Adam Phillips said: "If we think of Cinderella's story as a drama of inner conflict, in which each character is a psychological avatar of her, then her story is a story of self-repression, a story of self-repression. It's about how women become the enemy of their own desires. Cinderella complied with fate and never resisted, in order to avoid the same jealousy from women. Only when the fairy godmother appeared, she released her desires and dared to find her own happiness."
So, instead of asking what a woman really wants, ask how she wants it? How to unlock the boundaries set by yourself and pursue true happiness?
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