About four years ago, I felt like I had discovered the most worthwhile meaning in my life. The trigger for this discovery was my understanding of the magic of cinema, and of all the "illusions" that it represents in a broader and abstract way. This magic can hold my sensory portals hostage, imbuing my spirit with pleasure and satisfaction, thrill and excitement, and just about every human emotion. This magic leads me to believe that the last final hallucination and reality can have no boundaries, and that those illusions that are believed to be beautiful will ultimately be the antidote to all the suffering of reality, because they can be as real as reality. I feel like my mission in life is to blur the border between illusion and reality a little bit, and then a little bit more until I can see giant whales flying over the valley, and then I pinch myself and find out it's not a dream or a movie, it's reality .
If there is one film that represents this obsessive pursuit, it is Jin Min's "Red Pepper." I will always remember a scene - when I was discussing the film with Collin Williamson, my professor of film theory at the time, I told him that at the end of the film the giant baby devoured the dream world, and the professor said that this represented a new The epoch—the fusion of reality and dream—has been no different since then. The excitement at the moment when I heard this sentence has never subsided, even now every time I think of this scene, I have the same strong and fresh impact. Jin Min's ending, the professor's words, gave me the feeling that a god descended on me at that time. They connected all my confusion and thinking, as if the scattered fragments in my value system were pieced together into a complete picture at that moment. All of a sudden I became self-consistent, and all my ideas flowed freely. The fusion of reality and illusion became my answer and meaning.
These thoughts have been evolving in my mind for four years, and Jin Min's "Red Pepper", "Mima's House" and "Millennium Actress" are the three nodes that cannot be avoided in every turnover. They are my language and vocabulary, and it seems that many of my ideas no longer need to be expressed by myself, because these three films have already helped me express them in the most appropriate scale and form. In a way, they define my thoughts and form part of my three views, and Jin Min is the creator of this definition. So Kim Min seems to be my delusional agent.
Now, I met Kim Toshi again through "Delusional Agent". He is still talking about the relationship between illusion and reality. There are also many shadows of "red peppers" in "Delusional Agent". Fusion is difficult to distinguish between you and me. This time, his protagonist smashed his paper-thin peach blossom garden with his own hands and returned to reality; the maker of all illusions chose to go back to the past to resolve his inner conflict and reconcile himself. The bat boy who appears every time someone is cornered, its power grows with the anxiety and pressure of the whole society, and is also amplified by public opinion and rumors, and finally, with this reconciliation, he put down the bat and started hallucinations Finally hallucinating. Illusion is no longer an antidote, no longer a harbor for the soul, but a mask for high pressure and inner conflict, a place where sin and evil grow.
I can imagine that I might be dissatisfied with this setting before, because the hallucination itself is just a picture of an experience, which is neutral, just like real life. It would be unfair to associate hallucinations with reality-based paranoia pressure conflict rumors, and thus portray hallucinations as "lower" than reality. They should be like two sides of a mirror—seemingly symmetrical, perceptually indistinguishable. But now I've gradually gotten rid of my obsession with hallucinations, so I don't actually seem to dislike this setting. On the contrary, I just feel that I met the right Jin Min with the right mentality again, which made me feel closer to Jin Min in my heart.
How I got rid of my obsession with hallucinations is a very important topic for me, because this process is probably all my life and thinking for more than a year. But I don't want to create that "perfect illusion" anymore. Now the experience I most want to create is not a brave new world that satisfies all the desires of all people, but a self-reflection in a narrative experience as well as a sensory experience. I no longer want to grab people's nerves to fill people's desires by instilling those nerves, I want to create experiences that make people more self-aware, let them bring their nerves from the background to the foreground and then take it seriously The feeling of every nerve. If I use the mirror analogy above, I used to want people to forget whether they are in the mirror or out because they don't seem to make any difference, and now I want people to be neither in the mirror nor out of the mirror man, but a third person, inside and out, who can watch this mirror from a distance—so that he can play with his own experience, whether it comes from reality or illusion.
I feel like I used to be the bat boy who was stubbornly obsessed with the more pain he sucked, and now I want to put down the bat too.
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