THE POVERTY THAT THE FILM TREATS FIRST. In an era of general abundance, poverty is endowed with a kind of beautiful imagination, as a kind of "other", combined with primitive, pure, primary social relations. In a dystopian way, the movie reminds us of the relationship between poverty and greed, selfishness, desire, and jealousy. At the end of the film is a series of photos about poverty that flashed one after another. These almost naked and unprocessed photos of realism pull us back from the distant observation of the stage play to real life, and bring Brecht back to life. The combination of the audience's reflective awareness and real feelings reminds us that the issues that the film focuses on are all around us.
This element of evil human nature exists not only in this closed mountain village, but also in the underworld where Grace fled. This society uses the car as a metaphor and symbol, and always shrouds the mountain village as the foreground of the movie like a shadow. Logically, the whole society is like this. It's just that the degree of human evil being revealed is different, related to the degree of abundance and the satisfaction brought about by comparison.
2.
I still can't accept some kind of innate human evil, even though I think the film suggests so. Of all the malevolent or inspired human frailties that Dogtown has displayed, I think the worst is hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is a character trait or coping style closely related to civilization. Only those who are ashamed of meanness and cannot give up will choose to cover it up with some kind of aura. They can't give up the pleasure and self-interested consequences of despicable actions, but at the same time, under the rules of civilization, they believe that tolerance and nobility are the proper attitude and character, so they choose the latter as the coat and the former as the body. Whether the emperor wears imperial robes or not is the emperor with an ugly body, but he doesn't have to feel ashamed when he dresses up. Dressing up is a kind of intermediary existence that connects and separates the individual and the society, the ego and the superego.
In the film, everyone in Dogtown is in a place like the church to show mercy and tolerance, in the civilized way of democratic voting and citizen assembly, saying all the high-sounding words, and satisfying self-interested wishes -
I don't need help, it's you Offer to help me (so I don't have to give back to you).
There's nothing to do, just something that doesn't matter, you do it when you're idle, I didn't ask you (it's not important to me, so I don't need extra gratitude).
I gave you a two-week deadline, which is a testament to how tolerant and kind I am.
In the later period, the same upright and civilized way is used to intensify the fact that some kind of persecution is practiced, such as intensified labor, malicious treatment and finally betrayal.
What they hate most about Grace is that she, as an "other", reflects all the filth and sin in their hearts like a mirror with her frankness, tolerance and kindness. Especially when she told all this publicly under Tom's arrangement, they couldn't bear the tearing of this moral veil, so they started a series of revenge actions. In an age of civilization, only under the protection of this veil can they do all evil things with peace of mind. Tearing off the veil, they are naked with their sins, too ashamed. As a solution, they vented their grievances in the form of persecution to reduce the mental oppression caused by this emotion. But her own despicable behavior and Grace's tolerance only triggered a new round of guilt and brought a further vicious circle. Do you remember why Tom finally
said hypocrisy is to cover up his inner selfishness with a good-natured appearance and a harmonious interpretation, and the most hypocritical is Tom. So it was him that Grace killed herself in the end. He saved Grace out of a good sense of being a hero saving beauty, he protected her in order to possess her, and he said that he passed on the crime of theft to help her for a longer time. More generally, his whole plan from start to finish is to use her as an experiment to test some of his possibilities for reconstructing society, but at the same time keep himself in a safe position.
Finally, when he used literary creation to cover up his selfishness and fear, she couldn't bear to shoot him. But the demise of Tom, and the whole of Dogtown, doesn't mean that literature, and all good things, are no longer desecrated. Dogtown is just a symptom of modern society, it implies some kind of trauma and rupture inherent in modern society itself, and its disappearance only gives people some hope and illusion of solving the problem. The underworld, isomorphic to Dogtown, hints at its continued existence, spreading across society like an unspeakable chronic disease.
3.
Grace is a symbol of Christ, and it doesn't take long for you to see that in the film. Her way of life is to be strict with herself and be lenient towards others, to love and forgive her own asceticism and no bottom line for others. The yoke she wears is a symbol of the cross. And her father is a rational citizen of modern society, with equivalence and interchangeability as the basic principles of interpersonal communication: you should treat yourself and others with the same standard. You should not forgive others with a gesture of looking down and pity. This is the highest expression of arrogance, because you presume your identity as a redeemer.
The outcome of the dialogue between Christianity and modern reason ends in the failure of the former. Even so, Grace remains religious. Grace, who walked off the cross, turned from Christ to God and wiped out this sinful village in the same way that God destroyed the world with a flood, in order to look forward to the birth of a new world.
4.
The film's political thinking takes a middle-class perspective. They are moderate, rational, socially responsible, and consider themselves capable of changing politics. But at the same time, they are the maintainers of social order, and they hope to make adjustments and improvements while maintaining the current status quo -
so throughout the dull and hopeless film, there will be an image of an angel like Grace, and hope continue to the end.
So the movie adopts some kind of karma logic, where the good guys get rescued and the bad guys go to hell.
So Dogtown ends up in ruin, as if it ends as a sin node, meaning the world is going to stretch for the better.
So the film leads us to think about how to deal with the relationship between people, how to deal with the sins of ourselves and others through the final dialogue, as if there are solutions to these.
Let me tell you how an anarchist would make this movie -
Grace would be tortured to death. The whole Dogtown will say at the grave how they love her. As in Wilde's "The Faithful Friend," the miller did at the funeral of little Hans.
Dogtown lives on, unpunished, and returns to its mediocre daily life. Good was swallowed up by evil and then so completely forgotten.
The film will use Dogtown as a metaphor for the entire society, a society that has rotted to its roots and has no solution but to overthrow it.
Of course, anarchists would also imply that all problems are caused by capitalism and class inequality. That's it for later.
5.
So I say that this film should be set in the England and France of the Enlightenment era advocated by Habermas, the rational age when the middle class was still able to intervene in the public space.
The film proposes a certain ideal of constructing a society, but what it just ignores is that society has long been not constructed by the middle class in a direct democratic way, but by a very small number of social elites in conjunction with large-scale media to manipulate and manage. In a way, we are all living in a certain age of the spectacle. Everything we see and live in is a constructed appearance, but it has no possibility of being changed by us.
This is really a humanistic utopian film.
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