The Fall.
Falling from a horse while filming - this was the beginning of Roy's slump in his life.
Falling from a rickety chair while taking medicine - this is the beginning of Alexandria's love for saving souls.
(1) Interpretation of Dreams—Imaginary Satisfaction with Real Trauma
"Falling" is a fantastically conceived fantasy film, and its subtlety lies in this virtual story, which is more like a dream of Roy, a dream with a complete plot and strict logic. In Freudian theory, dreams symbolically satisfy repressed desires. People's instinctive impulses and suppressed vitality constitute the main content of the subconscious mind. The desires in the subconscious mind avoid repression and sneak into the consciousness through disguise and become a dream. Thus, dreams are special expressions of desires that are repressed into the subconscious while awake.
In real life, he suffered a double blow both physically and psychologically. He collapsed on the bed but could only watch his girlfriend leave with others. The biggest setback was this. When Roy borrowed Alexandria to tell this wonderful story and obtained morphine, he was weaving a beautiful fairy tale for himself. Roy, who incarnates the masked man, leads the other four to seek hope and rebirth, fighting a bloody path in the adult society. The five people in the fairy tale seem to me nothing more than the embodiment of Roy's five different real-life traumas. The black man who had been a slave all his life but watched his brother die on the farm in a rage, let go of all the slaves on the farm and vowed revenge, is actually the embodiment of Roy's unfulfilled career. The Indian who had his wife occupied but was loyal and could not escape from the labyrinth of despair and died by jumping off the building, doesn't it symbolize the unrequited love and pleading of Roy for his girlfriend in his heart. The bomb expert was isolated from the crowd because of his contact with the Governor, just as Roy was slumped in bed and ignored the resentment and resentment of being abandoned by the world. Darwin, who loves animals and chases American butterflies but was presented with a butterfly specimen by the Governor himself, is precisely the persistence of dreams and the gleam of hope that is still buried deep in Roy's depths. The last mysterious man leads everyone to the Governor's Palace and uses mysterious spells to help them out of the predicament. He is an indispensable safe haven in the dark. As for the masked man conceived by Roy himself, he was shy and cowardly, and for revenge, he walked to the palace step by step, completing the transformation from being strong and firm to revealing his inner weakness and despair, and finally taking revenge with the encouragement of Alexandria.
This 120-minute psychological healing drama alternates between virtual fairy tales and the real world. With a "picture-in-picture" design, it uses a symbol and metaphor to reveal contradictions and conflicts, and uses a dream to fully reveal Roy's subconscious. and through the symbolic transition from "I can't get up..." to "Get up! Show me your hand!" at the climax, life is shrouded in a sense of powerlessness and helplessness. Find meaning and be healed from the sad Gu Ying's self-pity.
(2) Instinct theory - the instinct of life and death
Freud's "instincts" refer to the basic requirements, primordial impulses and internal drives in human life and life. Specifically, it refers to the instinct of life and the instinct of death. The fatal pain in the film made Roy despair, not only the lack of awareness of his legs and the abandonment of his girlfriend, but also the fact that he had lost his desire and fighting spirit for life deep in his heart. The saddest thing is that he doesn't even have the ability to choose to die. In reality, it was his death instinct that Roy used the little girl Alexandria to steal morphine.
Similarly, in that wonderful fairy tale, the revenge robbers group led by Roy went through all kinds of hardships to come to the Governor's Palace. Their strong desire for revenge, their strong sense of destruction and the urge to kill can all be understood as a kind of death. instinct. But after adding the factor of Alexandria, the little girl, Roy completed an instinctive change from death to life.
Roy fell, he fell from the bridge, he fell after losing his girlfriend, he felt that his life had no meaning, and his will fell with the ordeal he endured. Alexandria also fell. She climbed the orange tree and fell, and fell again after stealing medicine. She was psychologically used by adults, but she did not give up. The glass heart of an adult is not as strong as that of a five-year-old child.
- Are you here to save my soul?
- What is the soul?
- That's something like power.
So Roy stretched out his hand, stood up, and knocked the Governor down - only by confronting him could he be reborn, and he could save himself.
Thank you for saving my festering soul.
Thank you for giving me the strength to live.
(3) Theoretical Analysis of Personality Structure - Confrontation and Rebirth
In Freud's theory of personality structure, the personality structure consists of three parts: id, ego, and superego. The id reflects people's biological instincts and acts according to the principle of pleasure; the ego seeks to satisfy the instinctive impulse under the conditions permitted by environmental conditions, and acts according to the principle of reality; the superego pursues perfection and represents the sociality of human beings. The id, ego and superego are always in a special state of interaction, contradiction and intermingling in the whole process of spiritual activity. Here I focus on the film's characterization and analysis of the id and the ego.
1. The repressed id
At the beginning of the film, Roy suffers from severe psychological problems due to loss of feeling in his legs. The first story he told Alexandria about Alexander the Great, the soldiers offered the only water but Alexander drank it all. Alexandria asked why, Roy replied that there was not enough water for everyone, and then Alexandria said, why not give everyone a sip? Optimists and pessimists are logically different, and my despair is your hope. Roy's first story hints at his deep-seated determination that a person with a depressive mental disorder finds it difficult to be happy.
And in the second day's story to free the imprisoned brothers, it turns out that the brothers of the Masked Man have been tortured to death and brutally hanged from the ceiling. This even highlights Roy's faintly revealing masochistic tendencies. He tortures and suppresses himself with death and abuse.
2. The cowardly ego
And then Roy used unfinished stories to instigate Alexandria to steal morphine again and again, trying his best to end his life as soon as possible, which is a reflection of his own cowardice. When the visitor persuaded him that his legs would get better, there was a sentence in the film, "Problem is not his back. It's a broken heart." Best testimony in your own turtle shell. "There is no happy ending with me." Nothing can represent a depressed state of mind and a cowardly character more than this sentence. No future, unwilling to think about the future, even the sun is black.
The next part of the story is the death that Roy envisioned. Alexandria asks why they can't be together? Roy said he couldn't. Death is very painful, but he has no way out in his heart, and he cannot live bravely, because she has never been able to step out of that painful circle. Such a lack of nostalgia for survival and a strong sense of self-destruction stems from self-cowardice.
3. superego against
At the end of the film, patients in the hospital enjoy a black-and-white silent film: a cornered cowboy jumps off a towering bridge and happens to be on horseback. This is also a metaphor for Roy's state of mind from the side, no longer blindly falling and sinking, but reborn in confrontation. In Roy's story, Alexandria rescued the fragile soul from the abyss of despair and gave Roy hope of living.
summary
A moving movie. It was just the right time and space to meet, the right persistence, the right interference and intervention, and only then did Alexandria cry and plead, and only then did Roy turn to tears.
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