Text: Overnight flowers
Alfred Hitchcock is an influential author and director around the world, and is the most representative benchmark figure in the fields of suspense films and horror films, and his films have achieved high achievements in commercial and artistic, entertainment and ornamental. As one of his masterpieces, "Butterfly Dream" not only shows the expressive audiovisual language, but also has a profound insight into human nature, and has a unique interpretation of universal motifs such as women's growth and de-fake love.
"Butterfly Dream" is not Hitchcock's most mature work, and its personal style is not strong enough compared to the emotional mobilization of the audience's anxiety and horror psychology in the later "Rear Window" and the complete cinematic exposition of Freudian psychoanalysis in "Horror". However, as a preliminary exploration between Hollywood's business model and personal style, it has won unanimous praise from the audience and the industry, and also won the Best Picture Award at the 13th Academy Award, and is the only film in Hitchcock's film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
01. Dream to Reality: A Story of Blur
The film opens with a long, moving shot of winding paths, barren abandoned houses, overgrown vegetation, and a desolate and decaying manor house scene. With a hazy background of fog and a slow push of the backlit shot, complemented by a spooky soundtrack, the film begins with a flashback structure that sets the suspense on top of this mandala manor.
The film begins with a dream fragment narrated by the first-person "I" (i.e., Mrs. Wenders), and in the monologue it is explained that this is a dream-like reproduction of "me" in the past. From the manor that began to be ruined in the fire at the end, this story is both a real occurrence in "my" life and seems to be a dream, laying the tone of the film that is also true and dreamy, desolate and sad.
This dissolution of the authenticity of the story, the dream-like presentation, and the first-person perspective blur of the narrator's identity are all a blur of reality and dreams: it can be a nightmare experience that happens to everyone. The Chinese translation of the name "Butterfly Dream" is to profoundly grasp the essence of the film, not only from the perspective of Chinese culture, the use of "Zhuang Zhou Mengdi" allusion to lead to the essence of the story of the illusory dream, but also with a bit of romance, dream, mystery, mystery.
02. Rebecca's absence: who is the protagonist?
The suspense charm of Hitchcock's films is always inseparable from the transformation and migration of multiple narrative points of view, which is more vividly presented in the subsequent "Horror Story". This film is cut in the first person, which has a stronger sense of substitution at the same time inevitably with a kind of subjectivity, personal cognition is always limited, and when this kind of contrast between the one-sidedness of cognition and the omniscience of the objective perspective under the personal perspective of different roles, the character is in a state of "being seen" or "being spied on", which is also a means of creating horror and conveying anxiety.
The film's real name, Rebecca, is Wenders' ex-wife and former hostess of Mandalie Manor. The absence of the role of Rebecca is arguably the most ingenious design in the film's narrative, she does not even appear through visual means such as posthumous photos, but is always the core character throughout the film, arousing the curiosity of "me" and the audience.
On the one hand, it appears in a dominant way directly in the main characters' daily dialogue lines, above objects of a symbolic nature (R-word embroidery, pillowcases, address books, etc.); on the other hand, Rebecca is the crux of the three main characters' struggles, pains, torments, and worries, with Wenders unable to escape nightmares about her, "I" (i.e., Mrs. Wenders) shrouded in her shadow of doubt, and The housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, who has always regarded her as the eternal master of the spirit.
The first-person "I" (i.e., the current Mrs. Wenders played by Joan Fonden) in the film, which is one of the main perspectives of the narrative, has never appeared, and the film does not explain the family environment and identity background of "me" in any positive or negative way, which is in strong contrast with the nightmare Rebecca in everyone's heart, which is also the most important set of contradictions in the psychological portrayal and psychoanalysis of the film's characters.
03. Gothic style image modeling
From Daphne Dumourière's original novel to the film, Gothic-style imagery has always been an important ideographic element of Butterfly Dream. As an artistic style that has been widely used in various fields of art since the Renaissance, it is always inseparable from the iconic elements of fear, darkness, mystery, decadence, castles, and strange forces. For example, in the film, the roaring sea that symbolizes the force majeure of nature, the seaside hut that witnesses human sin, the mysterious and terrifying Rebecca, the ghost witch-like housekeeper, the strange old man with abnormal spirits, the manic barking puppy, and the curtains that blow with the wind.
In the enclosed space of Mandalie Manor, a ghost town, a cage-like Gothic castle, Hitchcock uses light, shadow, and composition to enhance this sense of horror. Doors, windows, and stairs will not only have a natural division of the visual picture in this vast space, but also the locked doors and zigzag staircases will transform the unknown space into a suspense that stimulates curiosity and a thrill full of oppression.
Hitchcock is widely known for his grasp of the essence of cinema: the use of lens audiovisual language to narrate rather than text, and Freudian psychoanalysis is also praised. The character portrayal of "Butterfly Dream" is high, which can be analyzed from a psychological point of view, and is also full of social and realistic reflection and criticism. If the creation of suspense and horror, the gothic visual style, gives the audience enough impact from the form, the potential spiritual interaction between the three plump main characters and the "absent" Rebecca has a more lingering tension.
The antagonisms and games between the two main female characters are directly related to Rebecca, the "absent" protagonist.
One is the mirror relationship between Danvers the butler and Rebecca: Danvers regards Rebecca as a spiritual idol, and is also a practitioner and implementer of his will, from the perspective of one manifestation and one hidden, reflecting each other and jointly oppressing "me". From the first appearance of the gaze is cold, sharp and forced, with a lofty, domineering posture to the new hostess disdain. She secretly obstructed and destroyed Mrs. Wenders's will, and behind it was a kind of viciousness and viciousness that went deep into the bone marrow. In the end, Rebecca followed the ship stone sinking into the sea, Danvers set fire to himself and died in the castle, in a sense, to achieve a special way to the same destination.
The other is the implicit conflict between "I" (the current Mrs. Wenders) and Rebecca (the former Mrs. Wenders). The blurring of "I's" name and background form a natural "confrontation" with the ubiquitous Rebecca, and the housekeeper always regards the dead Rebecca as the only Mrs. Wenders, so the repression suffered by "I" is a kind of all-round dwarfing of self-identity.
"I"'s lack of confidence has multiple factors. On the one hand, it is the innocence, kindness, and delicacy of the personality itself that determines that there is always a gentle and cordial attitude to show people; on the other hand, its own class determines the discomfort caused by the transition from the attendant of the noblewoman to the rich lady and the hostess of the mandala, and is questioned and judged by the relatives and friends of the circle of the rich, and knows nothing about the habits of aristocratic life and the etiquette of behavior.
Therefore, "I" lack an independent personality, a personal will, always content with a status of vassalage and dependence, and timid, inferior, cowardly, and lack of self-confidence in confrontation with housekeepers and former wives. And when this spiritual oppression reached the extreme, after getting the truth of Rebecca and her love "in vain" from Wenders, she completed her spiritual growth and re-strengthened her love and self-worth, so she was full of self-confidence and independent personality strength, and began to actively declare herself as the hostess of the mandala, no longer afraid of the shadow of the housekeeper and the former hostess.
Behind the spiritual growth of women is the reflection on love and human nature, and the contrast between the heroine and Rebecca is a call for an idealized love to be false and a praise for a pure, simple light of human nature.
Rebecca is a model wife of high society and a model of the hostess of the manor, a combination of beauty, wisdom and upbringing, which makes the housekeeper worship and countless lovers admire. And underneath this vanity, there is the impersonal coldness of the heart and the nothingness of losing love for everything. And the heroine "I", to some extent, is a kind of opposite. She was born poor, simple in speech, ordinary in intelligence, but gentle and gentle, willing to care for anyone around her, unswervingly committed to love, which captured the heart of the aristocratic male Wenders, her bright, beautiful, lively, cute, let him feel the warmth and brightness of human nature in the hypocritical and indifferent torture of Rebecca.
Of course, this contrast and irony of women from different classes is more from the perspective of personality psychology, if from a sociological point of view, compared with Shaw's "Flower Girl" and so on, it lacks a cultural perspective of pertinence and the thickness of the realistic level.
In the choice of actors, Hitchcock's vision is quite accurate. Judith Anderson, who plays the housekeeper, her own sharp and solemn temperament, does not need too much force under the camera, and naturally exudes a cold sense of oppression; Joan Fontaine's weak and pure girlish temperament coincides with the restrained and unconfident psychology of the heroine in the film; the performance of the male protagonist Lawrence Oliver is a wonderful embodiment of the suspense and horror temperament of the whole film, and the melancholy affection and the elusive strangeness and irritability he presents make the audience feel the love in the film. The quality of the characters all have a subtle feeling that cannot be seen to the end, and this untouchable ambiguity and obscurity enrich the emotional thickness of the film. All three were nominated for an Academy Award for Acting.
While using elements of suspense and horror to show the spiritual growth of women, "Butterfly Dream" makes people see the greatness of love and the brilliance of human nature, although the film inevitably carries the limitations of the Hollywood Golden Age studio system, it tries to explore an idealized aesthetic love that has nothing to do with external reputation and vanity, and the beauty of independent women after getting rid of inferiority, which is still highly ornamental.
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