"Until the End of the World": The Future is a "Post-Fiction Era"

Aryanna 2022-04-08 08:01:02

Original address: http://www.qh505.com/blog/post/6257.html

From "Until the End of the World" to "Until the End of the World", from "Until the End of the World" to "To The Ends of The Earth", from a 287-minute movie to a three-episode TV series of 90 minutes each, the story are distinguished in a kind of ambiguity, which is first the "I know nothing about the end of the world" oolong, and after the oolong is the correction, after the correction is the return, when no longer in the "TO" way tending to a At the end of this, when one feels the feelings of a negative state in the "Until" way, can the world really return safely and embark on the road home like Odysseus?

This is a real dilemma. The images obtained after downloading through the Internet, search engines, and resources do not really point to the end of the world. The TV plot and movie viewing records are finally abandoned in the 90-minute opening. This dilemma That seems to be exactly what happened to Wenders when he made this film: spanning 20 cities, nine countries, four continents, with a budget of over $20 million, as Wenders' largest-ever production, he put his faith in the film. It has high hopes and claims to be an "epic" movie, but the movie was cut to more than two hours when it was released - this is the length of the movie when it faces theater audiences, and this version is even more popular in the market and contract. Frustrated by constraints, Wenders couldn't stand the abbreviated version of the film, calling it a "Reader's Digest-style digest", so he remade a "Director's Cut" and called the 287-minute film the "The Ultimate Road Movie".

"The smartest thing Wenders ever did in his life" was to predict the possible fate of the movie when it was marketed, so he saved the developed director's cut in advance and paid for the "feature film". ”, to compete with the market-oriented “digest version”. This seems to be a prophecy of Wenders, and this film pointing to the end of the world in 1999 is also the language of human destiny, and this implication was revealed when Eugene, a writer, started to write a novel: "The Gospel "In the beginning, it said: 'In the beginning there was the Tao', but now the Book of Revelation may be changed to: In the end, only images remain." In the beginning, there was the Tao, and the last image was the end. When the so-called Tao annihilates, the words disappear. , the imaging of the world is a kind of apocalyptic existence - this is the reaction people make in the fear of doomsday, but the existence of images and images is not the self-salvation of human beings, but another kind of depravity: whether it is Father Henry, who is keen on image experiments, and mother whose eyes have been cured, whether it is Sam or Claire, everyone has seen images and dreams in the image equipment, so dreams become everyone's lonely black hole, and they wear Equipment, indulged in endless dreams, without dialogue and speech, without concern for reality, they are addicted but lonely, they are sleepy but afraid, they are happy but fall, or hide in the cave of the rock, or hide in the The roots of the big tree, "they fell into the abyss of narcissism." In this world of images and images, Eugene is writing, he said: "It gave me the desire to write novels again. , the future is like a novel."

Writing is a breakthrough from the pictorial dream, and it is also a kind of salvation. When Eugene's novel with Claire as the protagonist is completed, when he shows the manuscript to Claire who has lost himself, the world returns from the end: Claire's weaving in the barbed wire. In the cage, finally attracted by the novel, she walked out of the abyss of dreams and the apocalypse of images with a smile on her face. The text of the novel becomes her guide to return, but is the future really the world of fiction? Can the salvation of images really drive out the delirium of the end times? From images to novels, from being lost to waking up, this is a simple rescue. It is by no means the presupposition of Wenders in the film, nor the ultimate goal of his construction. "What should I do now?" Claire asked You King, it is this question that turns Wenders' end-of-the-century question into another possibility. When a novel that makes full use of the imagination is born, it just rewrites the dream of the image. In the sense of imagination, it It is actually the same existence as dreams and images, so the final revelation should be: "You go to find the future yourself."

To search for oneself is to redeem oneself, to learn to return from the end of the world by oneself, and this is the purpose of Wenders' creation of this film, "This is not a science fiction film. This is a contemporary film, where the background of the story is set In ten years, we will be more free to create.” The freedom Wenders is talking about is in a sense a break from a fixed form. When he went to Australia in 1977-78, he was Attracted by the aboriginal culture, especially the way of dreams and the belief in the territory of songs changed Wenders' view of creation. When the ancestors of each totem of the Australian Aborigines roamed, they would scatter words and musical notes along the way, weaving them into dreams. Path, also known as the map of song, but Wenders's deeper thinking is that this dream path and map of song are not for people to stay, stay and finally be fixed there, it is a road, a direction, so Combining the story of the Odyssey, Wenders reconstructed this motif and turned it into a journey of human return. The answer to "what to do now" is "you find the future yourself".

The return of Odysseus is to re-search for "the way in the beginning" from the end, so this will be a journey of re-starting along the path of dreams and the territory of song, this will be a journey from image to novel and then into "post-mortem". Novel's Road Home - From Lost to Dreamland, Dreamland to Novel, Novel to Homecoming, this is the trilogy "Until the End of the World". And Wenders set the starting point of this trilogy at the end of the century in 1999, which is not the end of the concept of time, but the beginning of a spiritual loss. "1999 was the year that India's nuclear satellite went out of control, the whole world panicked about it, only Claire didn't care, she was going through her own nightmare, sliding in a strange land, and finally the sliding turned into a fall." Claire is the only one The person who doesn't care about the changes in the world, but is actually a runaway nuclear satellite herself: she smashes the glass, the TV is on late at night, and in the corner of the reception she finds her shoe...the broken glass , the lost shoes, the control of the TV show, all constitute Claire's existence in reality, so her nightmare is the projection of reality to her, this woman who has lost her lover is actually living in a self-abuse life, "love The fire burns in the distance, but there is no flame." In such an empty world, the wig-wearing Claire becomes a lost specimen. But she woke up from a nightmare in order to find the meaning of existence like her own shoes.

Leaving from the blocked road was the beginning of Claire's escape and search. At first she drove a car with a computer instrument system and an electronic map navigation system, which was undoubtedly a kind of modern cage-like existence, so Claire searched for herself On that road, she changed direction and entered the unknown territory. From then on, the intelligent system on the car lost control. "You have left the control area and can only rely on yourself." This is the last sentence left by the intelligent system. Silence begins, and silence is farewell to modernity, farewell to technology, and farewell to control. Because of the unknown, the weak Claire suffered a car accident. Raymond and Chico's car collided with Claire's car. The collision did not turn them into opposites. In fact, they are both lost people, Raymond Claiming to be a Buddhist but a pragmatist, Chico is a drummer and loves crazy things, and the two of them just robbed a bank in Nice, and that bag was full of robbed money. Claire drank their wine, got into their car, and divided the dirty money into three at the hotel. After the split was over, Claire returned to Paris to buy an apartment she longed for.

From escaping to returning, from being lost to being rich, Claire, like Raymond and Chico, just returns to this materialistic reality in a frantic self-naming. But Claire's search has begun. She found that someone was following a man. After informing him of the situation, Claire took the initiative to drive to help him out of the siege. In the car, they listened to the songs sung by Cameroonian dwarf children and saw the wife he took out. The picture of the child, which seemed like an ordinary help, became a fateful communication for Claire, "I dreamed that I was pregnant." Claire fell asleep in the car and woke up with his feelings for The man he was driving said that dreaming of being pregnant was the beginning of a kind of love. How did the man in front of him start Claire's dream? It seems to be an intrusion for no reason, it seems to be an expression of irrationality, and even the man stole the money in her bag, Claire's reason is only one: "He is a good man, I believe in him." It becomes an intuition, but in fact, the man who calls himself Trever is Sam, his pseudonym is the same as Claire's wig, he is the self hidden in the real world, so Claire's belief in his own intuition is the opening of another dream— - I was pregnant in my dream.

Sam was followed because he had an expensive opal in his hand. Sam was rescued by Claire, but he took a lot of money. The core word in Sam's story is to seek, but he seeks and is sought, it is with money Related, related to material; Claire's search was blind, then she got money, she met Sam, she began to search for love; Claire hired private detective Winter, and Winter began to look for Claire and Sam again , and then Claire's writer boyfriend Eugene also joined in, looking for people and things, and the search itself became a game, and in this game, the world of images was opened: Sam had a special machine in his hand. The instrument, which continuously collects images of people, finally allows the mother to "see", because he is the son of Dr. Faber, and an experiment carried out by his father Henry Faber's laboratory in South Australia will be collected. The image is injected into the human brain to form brain waves, and finally the blind eye can see again; Winter also has an instrument for tracking clues, and the human will send the target's positioning system back to find the target.

Seeking by means of images, images for seeing, in a game-like chase game, Claire goes from Paris to Berlin, from Berlin to Lisbon, from Lisbon to Moscow, from Moscow to Beijing, from Beijing to Tokyo, and from Tokyo to San Francisco , and finally went from San Francisco to the residential area of ​​Mbantua people in South Australia. The search on this journey is of spatial significance. In the continuous transformation of space, the imaged world gradually unfolds. Because of the collection of instruments, Sam led to his own His eyes were also lost. In the hot spring town of Japan, Claire used local herbs to treat Sam's eye disease, and then his eyes were restored; he went to San Francisco to find his sister, and with Claire's help, he photographed his sister and niece and this video became an important image to heal Sam's mother's eye disease later; when Claire arrived in Beijing, she almost recorded the local customs, whether it was the man who taught her to hold chopsticks, or the uncle riding a bicycle in the countryside, In fact, they all appeared as a kind of video existence; Winter, Eugene and others used equipment to keep track of them, and finally they came to the primitive tribe of South Australia together.

This is the way of looking for images, but in the journey of imagery, there are also real human emotions in their search. Claire is in the story named love, she tracks and takes care of Sam, no longer for money, It was no longer to help him escape from the pursuit, especially after their plane broke down, in order to reach their destination, the two supported each other in the desert, using an airplane wing door and a branch, and reached Mbantu with difficulty. In the demi-human's residential area, he saw his blind mother who had been waiting for Sam for two years; Eugene joined the tracking team because of a kind of jealousy of love. He wanted to know why Claire liked Sam; Sam collected images for his mother, but to In San Francisco, getting together with his sister and niece is also an expression of affection... Even though there is a estrangement between Sam and his father in the laboratory in South Australia, in order to make the mother's eyes see again, they give up old suspicions, eliminate misunderstandings, and work together for The experiment was successful and hard work. With the help of the video collected by Claire, the mother's eyes finally regained her sight.

But the imagery also opens up a fascinating dream. Sam's mother once said: "It's better to not see, the world has become so ugly." It is precisely because of this that when she sees the world, life changes. Going to the end, "Life will always end, I finally see it, this is our story." She finally said to Henry, success is seeing, this is the image of salvation, seeing is death, this is the image of the dream Open - in the intertwined fate of life and death, seen and unseen, 1999 finally came to the end - the Indian nuclear satellite was destroyed by the United States, so the World Cup nuclear radiation shrouded, only this place was not exposed to radiation Influence, when the dream unfolds, when the world is seen, is it real or unreal? Is this an isolated death or an imaginary life? In fact, the opening of the visual world is a kind of apocalyptic existence. Henry is keen on experiments, in addition to allowing his wife to see the sun again, and also has the desire to win the Nobel Prize; the contradiction between Sam and his father is a bit different in front of his mother. Reconciliation, but the death of his mother, he sank into his dream again; Claire found her dream when she was four years old, she saw herself in the restored story, and she never walked out of another story of herself.

They are in the isolated black hole, she fell into the abyss of narcissism, this is the new apocalypse after the beginning of 2000 after 1999, the dream is the import of this apocalypse, they are again in the world of estrangement, life and reality become Visual images, like the barbed wire that manipulated them into a lost world. So even if Sam comes home after all the hardships, even if Claire finds love over time and space, even if Sam's mother sees the world again after years of being blind, they still haven't reached the end they were looking for. So after finally becoming an image, the novel took on the task of savior, but the novel freed people who were addicted to the image world, but it was not the way to return in the future. Eugene is a narrator in the film, as the existence of "I", he witnessed the process of Claire's "until the end of the world", and he is a "he" related to Claire's story, he wrote the novel about Claire at the beginning , is to use a kind of imagination, and he accused Claire of falling in love with Sam, also because she projected her imagination on Sam - Claire is a "she" in Eugene's pen, but the person she loves in real life , the interlacing that makes his novel an inevitable imaginary, how is it different from Claire's wig, Sam's fake identity, and the initial dream of being pregnant in the car? When Eugene arrived in Australia, he said that this land is a story, "I have the desire to write novels." "Like a novel" is actually a kind of loss, a kind of manipulation.

Just as the world of images can cure Sam's mother's eye disease, the world of fiction can bring Claire out of that lost world, and that's what fiction and images do together, but neither can really bring people home, so when Claire asks " What to do now", the real answer is "you find the future yourself": Eugene says that Claire is no longer a romantic relationship, they have become more real friends; Sam and Claire want to meet again in the bar, But as an ending to the novel, it's more of a reality, because they don't have a good relationship with each other. They don't start their lives, and of course they don't reach the end of the world; Sam returns to San Francisco, and Henry later dies, of course without winning the Nobel Prize; Eugene's The novel is published, but it is only a novel - in this post-fiction era, the future Claire becomes a member of green aviation, she is closer to the universe in the space capsule, and it seems that she has become the satellite of 1999, which It is the transcendence of human fear, and in this world that is neither an image nor a novel, Claire finally received birthday wishes from Winter, Chico, and Raymond. This is the truest voice about life, and it is the meaning of rebirth. This is the beginning of returning from the end of the world, because, "The world is still alive."

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Extended Reading
  • Aaliyah 2022-04-20 09:02:56

    My Wenders! Narrative and acting are really poor (there is indeed a traditional story to read, and people are not abstract), the now-daily imagination of the future seems interesting and lovely now, the visual spectacle and his creations Dissolved the embarrassment and opened up to editing. I, who also lived through the millennium, realized from the movies that it seemed like a big moment and the emotions people felt about it at the time. My impression is really just the millennium bug...

  • Jacklyn 2022-04-08 09:01:13

    1. Wenders is a masterpiece, comparable to [Under the Sky in Berlin] [Away from the World] [Paris, Texas] [American Friends]. 2. The 4.5-hour post-apocalyptic sci-fi road film is like an endless journey, from Nice to Berlin, from Moscow to Beijing (with the help of Chen Kaige), from Tokyo to San Francisco, and to the primitive tribes in the empty wilderness of Australia ( Primitive vs futuristic technology), crime road movies have also become eerie and blurred dream apocalypse. 3. The use of color is charming, and the original soundtrack is moving. 4. Photography, images and dreams as motifs: videophone + rough and distorted DV + psychedelic and ambiguous dreamscapes, a cautionary tale for sinking, lost in night dreams and image sequences - "In the beginning there was a way (words) ), there are only images in the end times.” 5. With the narration of Sam Neill throughout the beginning and the end, and his figure always typing or playing the piano, with words/text and music against pictures/images. 6. For the first time, the duality of metropolis and nature is so clearly visible in Wenders' films, and his favorite "Dawn/Sunset on the Horizon" image is constantly reappearing. 7. "There is always tomorrow in science." (9.5/10)

Until the End of the World quotes

  • Sam Farber, alias Trevor McPhee: I am neither a Spy or a Jewel Thief!

    Eugene Fitzpatrick: What are you, then?

  • Singer: In beginning is dream... Halls of Disorder...