Bergman is reflecting and exploring the roots of depression and anxiety. Like a philosopher proficient in psychoanalysis, a person who is thinking about depression is not depressed. Just like a psychiatrist who is writing a textbook on depression, if he himself is deeply depressed, he can't mention a book about illness.
However, Stephen Chow was immersed in the ocean of depression. Each film is full of anger, despair, helplessness and tears of small people. Then these emotions erupted like a tsunami, and turned into manic fantasies that followed one after another, and time and space were reversed. The string of laughter is actually the roar of the desperate soul when it fights against the demon of depression. This dialectic of depression and mania is vividly reflected in "Kung Fu".
The protagonist Ah Xing is a traumatized person. His body and soul seem to be born to be abused, despised, and deceived by others. The first half of the film is full of scenes of A Xing suffering from bizarre physical and psychological abuse.
Everyone in the theater laughed, and I burst into tears. At this time, I thought of a patient with a personality disorder. When she told me how her mother tried to abuse her verbally and physically, I almost laughed. Because I have to treat everything that happened to her as a funny movie, or I have to admit-all this is true.
There are really mothers in this world who abuse their children so viciously. When maternal love becomes abuse, when family becomes hell, you will not continue to cry. People who are truly desperate don't shed tears, they bleed, the blood gurgling out when they commit suicide.
The world is far less beautiful than the wishful thinking of pseudo-humanists full of adolescent fantasies. When a group of psychiatrists are doing clinical seminars, they often have terrible silence, followed by piles of jerky laughter. Unexplained beginners came and often sighed, "You are so happy! It's great to be a psychologist." How did he know that these psychologists denied the despair and grief they experienced through manic laughter. . If they don't laugh desperately, they must cry bitterly.
I was in the dark theater that day, with a lot of people denying Ah Xing's despair and helplessness. The places with the most laughter often suggest that there is no real joy here. It's like a TV series that tells earth-shattering love stories. In fact, everyone knows that that kind of thing is not called love, it's called illusion. Finally, Ah Xing's despair turned into anger and violence, which will appear in all Zhou Xingchi's films.
The play begins, let's bleed together.
The little man, little beggar, and little gangster who had been humiliated, somehow lost good fortune, and suddenly possessed peerless martial arts. He was originally the target of the attack, but now he has become an attacker. He began to revenge frantically, using no less cruel methods to fight back against those who abused him, and to take back the girl who belonged to him. This is the same as those with personality disorders who have been abused. They often become love killers, looking for an individual to abuse, and severely extinguish the spark of love in the other's heart, making the other person completely desperate for love, just as the fire of their love was ruthlessly destroyed.
What makes people feel a little gratifying and warm is that there is still a trace of compassionate warmth in "Kung Fu". In the end, the wicked did not die, but were saved. Perhaps all this was because Ah Xing identified with a great compassionate figure-Buddha. Like the Buddha, Ah Xing killed hatred, but didn't kill anyone.
This kind of transcendence of depression actually had some signs at the end of "A Westward Journey". That is a sad ending that is rare in the film, and Zhi Zun Bao (Monkey King) must go to other places, far away from love. Because he is really not ready to accept love, he cannot restrain his violence and anger, he cannot accept the impermanence and change of life, he is still unwilling to forgive the hatred and jealousy in the dust, so he cannot really love For himself and others, he needs to first go to Xitian Leiyin Temple to learn the lessons of love and comprehension.
In Stephen Chow's previous films, all conflicts were resolved through murder. In fact, there is no essential difference between this and suicide. It is also the extinction of life.
The life of a good person is life, and the life of a bad person is also life. As Zhou Xingchi's most humanistic line said: "Chickens are born to chickens."
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