This film is not just a story about love and murder. The intention of the director Karax is to force the audience to speculate on the intention of the director, that is, the awakening of the audience's subjective consciousness and the liberation of the creator that it brings.
This film discusses the relationship between the audience and the performer/creator. "Don't stare into the abyss" is a line repeated throughout the film. As long as the concept of "seeing" is mentioned, Foucault's theory of rights cannot be avoided. There is always a power relationship between "seeing" and "being seen." In the film, Ann and Henry and their audience demonstrate the complex power relationship between audience and performer, who manipulate and restrain each other. The power relationship between audience and performer is not one-way, but dynamic.
Ann is a classical opera singer, her audience is passive, alienated, hidden in the dark; Henry is a talk show performer, his audience is active, engaged in the performance, exposed to the light. The stage art engaged in by Ann and Henry shows two different modes of interaction between the audience and the performers, which is also similar to the change of the audience's role in the theater in the process of the theater's development to the later stage. However, regardless of whether the audience is passively appreciating or actively participating, the audience is not just "watching" the actors' performances. When Ann and Henry first met, Henry said "I killed them" and Ann said "I saved them" . Whether killed or rescued, the audience is manipulated by the performer. Annette is the audience, and the marionette analogy couldn't be more obvious. From this perspective, the audience is the party with a lower level of power.
On the other hand, the performers who are "watched" are conditioned by the audience. In stage art, especially in traditional operas, realistic dramas, etc., actors only serve as a medium for conveying works of art, and are roles in the works, not themselves. Even for a talk show actor who seems to be standing on the stage as himself, his rhythm and his baggage are designed and choreographed. The only time Henry was himself on stage was when he acted to kill Ann. He was expressing his true feelings at that moment, but he was thrown off the stage by the audience for not being funny. This paragraph is quite ironic. The audience turns their faces faster than the book. In the last scene, they called Henry a god, and the next scene directly coaxed the performer off the stage. The audience's strong resistance is not against being manipulated by Henry, but against not being manipulated. It's also like the dilemma faced by all creators to express themselves and please their audience.
I think Karax decided to express himself this time and challenge the audience. To be honest, the viewing process is really not smooth, because the film is an anti-traditional narrative, and the director uses a lot of Brecht-style alienation techniques, which makes the audience often unable to "enter the play", and even causes discomfort. Such as the frequent postmodern collage-style entertainment news broadcasts; such as the puppet Annette who caused the uncanny valley effect; including the often criticized musical movies (but I'm not sure if this is really not well integrated or the director deliberately did it) )... The use of these techniques makes the audience continue to play. In stage art, the fourth wall is easily broken (especially in post-dramatic theatre) due to the "presence" of the performer and the audience at the same time. But this is difficult to achieve in the movie. However, the director used such a radical way to try to force the audience in front of the screen to participate in the art form of film, forcing the audience to realize their subjective identity as the audience, rather than being blindly manipulated by the creator and passively Immerse yourself in theatrical hallucinations. At the end of the film, when Annette stopped obeying Henry's instructions and gained self-awareness, she was finally transformed from a marionette into a human figure.
When the audience's subjective consciousness is awakened, it is not completely controlled by the performer, and the space for thinking is properly reserved, so that the creator can have less scruples about whether he can please the audience, so as to obtain more space for self-expression. I think that keeping space for each other is exactly what the movie "don't stare into the abyss" means.
——2021/12/1
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