The film writes that Grace (Nicole Kidman), the daughter of a triad boss, thinks that her father is unjust and does not want to be his daughter anymore, and escapes to a remote dog town in the mountains. The people in Dogtown are selfish, numb, and cruel, shattering Grace's romantic imagination of the poor. Her kindness was exchanged for deception, cruelty, slavery, indecency, and rape. The heaven she longed for turned out to be hell. In the end, when her father came to rescue her, she wore a shackle on her neck and dragged a millstone with a chain as she walked. Because she could not resist lying on the bed, all the men in the town had raped her. She changed her father's power from negation to affirmation. When her father suggested killing a dog to scare the people in the town as a break, Grace's suggestion was to burn the whole town and kill the hypocrite who cheated on her love in cold blood, without a minute's hesitation.
What is shocking is that the film's obvious "political incorrectness" and its relentless exposure to the weaknesses of the poor have obvious implications for Nietzsche's philosophy. It can be said that it is completely a film version of Nietzsche's philosophy. However, it is by no means like our political and ideological illustrations. It has only bones and no meat. All its characters, events, and thoughts are authentic, flesh and blood, reasonable and impeccable (although the whole play is not used for real scenes but is completely staged. , This is also amazing). Therefore, the viewing effect is stronger. To put it bluntly, it is just one sentence: You all deserve to die, you are not worthy to live in this world. It can do it, so that everyone who has watched the movie will have a strong sense of pleasure when the gang is washing Dogtown, cheering and feeling extremely relieved. At the end of the credits, I was afraid that its meaning was not clear enough. There were dozens of real photos of slums in the background, dirty, ugly, and bloody.
Some time ago, I saw an article by an intellectual who was born in the countryside, criticizing Lu Xun’s description of the lower class (such as Ah Q), saying that he wrote the lower class ignorantly and numb, and used his power of speech to bully the poor. justice. In his view, it is only justice to eulogize the poor. At the time, I felt a little paradoxical about this article. After watching "Dog Town", I suddenly understood why I felt this way.
Poverty is a sin. I have heard this statement a long time ago, but I didn’t understand it, because the Communist Party’s ideology has always praised poverty. In fact, what can be praised for being poor? In the history of thousands of years, hasn't poverty always been evil? Poverty means defeat in the cruel competition for survival. What can be praised for failure? Poverty is not beautiful, it is ugly; it is not something to be proud of, but it is to be ashamed. Either they are lazy, or they are dumb, or they are not lucky enough. If a person lives as a lower-class person, he is the person who has failed the most, and the person who has been eliminated. What can be praised?
Thirty years after the liberation of China is a bit special: artificially set up barriers to the upward mobility of the lower class, such as the scissors gap between industrial and agricultural products, such as the household registration system that does not allow mobility, such as the dual-track system of urban and rural areas. The people in the city have grievances. It makes the upper level seem not just enough, and makes speaking for the lower level a bit of justice. But after the man-made obstacles were removed, this point of justice slowly dissipated, and we returned to Nietzsche's proposition: Is poverty a sin?
In short, I feel that if Nietzsche and Lu Xun did not go to extremes and did not say that the poor should die, then they are generally tenable, and their theories have profound rationality, although they seem a bit "politically incorrect."
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