The novel serializes "Box Cinema" 5

Chapter 3 Da

Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what to taste next.

This is a line from Forrest Gump. Speaking of which, I watched this movie alone. My cousin, Da, was also an English-language movie fan, but when he came to my box cinema, he never seriously discussed Forrest Gump.

Another friend of mine, or a relative, and I enjoyed the film again. Of course, it was seen as a comedy that killed time. This man later soared, and I was not in the same world.

Whether it is full of philosophy or full of laughter, this film has important implications for my life. Isn't Balzac's huge work, a collection of novels that understand the world and dissect human nature, called "The Comedy of Man"?

What moved me the most about this film was the shot of Forrest Gump running. From adolescence to adulthood, from sunrise to sunset, from the past to the future. Run in the wind, run like the wind, do not rejoice in things, do not grieve with yourself, the wind has its own answer, the answer is in the wind.

Running non-stop freed him from illness, fear, loneliness, growth, helping, and self-improvement. Perhaps even unbeknownst to himself, the running made him a philosopher, a person who was pure and incredible, an individual who insisted on himself and influenced the world, a symbol of that era and a microcosm of history. His drifting stupidity sharpened his fortitude and wisdom in the pursuit of freedom, igniting himself and illuminating the audience he grew up with, as well as the whole world. And this is the meaning of life.

My cousin, a boy named Da, now lives somewhere in Australia. Twenty years ago, in 1999, he was just an ordinary high school student. When I needed to work hard to meet the challenges of the college entrance examination, he came to my bedroom again and again, sitting in this warm and comfortable box movie theater, enjoying the movies one after another. We spent a wonderful and fulfilling sleepless night together, and I was originally alone in the days of searching for films in various video stores in the ancient city, and I also had friends to accompany me.

In the box movie theater, my old monk sat cross-legged on the bed, and Da always sat on the sofa on the right side of the bed, an old sofa moved from my grandmother's house, and the dark green corduroy cloth covered its huge body, occupying a third of the space on the west side of the bedroom. The small TV and VCD are placed on the small table in front of the sofa and bed by the south window. The cool midnight breeze came through the door of the hidden balcony, constantly cooling the hot air in the room. Except for some films involving eroticism, Da and I, at this moment of coming of age, without exception, are extremely fond of watching science fiction movies and horror movies.

Among them, it is necessary to talk about the "Alien" series.

The first part of the Alien series was released in 1979, when we were not yet born, and the 4th finale of the series was released in 1997. By the time we got the pirated version of Alien 4, it was 1999.

There's also a name for the film called Reborn from the Fire, which I love.

The heroine Ripley is finally about to return to Earth after a long space adventure. At the end of the film, the earth of the future appears, and she radiates a scorching light, so beautiful and vast, full of sweet temptations. For Ripley, who has been wandering and fighting in space almost all his life, the long-lost mother-like earth is so kind and warm, like an oasis in a dream, like a paradise in a vision. Like Odysseus in Homer's Epic, she went through all the hardships and finally came home! From the first book of Aliens, where humans land on aliens by strange signals, discovering and being attacked by aliens, to the second part, Ripley follows mercenaries in a desperate battle on alien planets, to the third part accidentally falling to the prison planet on the way home, the alien entering her body and committing suicide, and the fourth part being re-cloned, she leads the space pirates to escape from the spaceship that spawned the alien. Ripley's life has always been accompanied by aliens, violence and death. The alien is not only a symbol of the unknown and fear, but also the embodiment of evil and madness in the depths of human nature. In the process, her relationship with the Alien has also undergone a subversive change, the Alien is no longer her enemy, and Ripley, who has fought with the Alien all her life, finally even became the mother who brought the Alien new life and evolution. In the end, she finally left this unpredictable space and completely ended her nightmarish journey and returned to Earth!

This is a brief plot of the Alien series.

To this day, I seem to understand why Da and I are so obsessed with Alien: curiosity and fear of the unknown, expectation and rejection. This paradoxical emotion makes us eager to explore and discover the unknown, but at the same time it is difficult to leave the immaculate world of childhood, which has matured like a mother. Standing on the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, we seem overwhelmed and in a dilemma. Just as when human beings first discovered the strange and strange alien existence, they were so curious, surprised, and frightened that they trembled! When the alien larvae tore through the human chest cavity and smeared the blood of the host's death on the ferocious appearance of the parasite's new birth, new worlds and new discoveries were revealed to us. Aliens as new species have brutally completed the replacement and deprivation of obsolete species, killing and abandoning, completing the transmutation and maturity, alienation and depravity in evolutionary history! The icy universe, the isolated people, the dangerous spaceships, and the shadows of the alien killers at any time all tell the horrors and despair of the unknown world. And the never-ending battle, and the premonition that it will die at any time in battle, makes human beings feel the shortness and nothingness of life at all times! However, far from home, human beings eventually survived in a cruel and strange world! This may be the essence of growth. After great sacrifice and a long wandering, they seem to have established some delicate and special relationship with the evolving aliens, reaching some kind of symbiosis and reconciliation, forming some inevitable new equilibrium. On the evolutionary stage of survival of the fittest, the coldness of the alien is mixed with a trace of human warmth, and the essence of the human is also mixed with the cold blood of the alien. Aliens are actually the most terrible things in the external world that exist in the human imagination, and such imaginations are not made up out of thin air, because it is not so much external existence as it comes from the depths of human nature, from the subconscious at the bottom. It symbolizes the darkness in the depths of the human soul, it reminds us, the cruel and crazy evil behind human nature, the abyss that swallows up all good. Nietzsche said: When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks at you.

And that's why this film touched us so much. Of course, at that time, we were almost completely captured by the visual effects and weird imagination of the film, and did not think so deeply. Tired of going to school, and Da, who had escaped from study, exchanged warmly and unsympathetically, discussing what would happen after Ripley returned to Earth, what year would it happen? What era and what kind of world was that? Were there still hostile nations and people on the planet who were suffering from hunger and cold? Are human beings still estranged and killed each other? Are robots already as indistinguishable as humans? Do even robots believe in the existence of a God or a Buddha or a heavenly path? Robots have appeared in every part of the Alien series, and they have evolved with humans, playing roles of evil or justice, even to the point of surpassing humans. In the end, we unanimously concluded that by the time Ripley returned to Earth, humanity had evolved to unimaginable levels. But even so, exploring the light and darkness of human nature, the relationship between the external world and human nature remains an eternal theme. Sleepless nights and boiling blood, we almost have to write a script for the story that will happen next.

Time passes and we don't care. The college entrance examination will come a year later, like a big exclamation point and a rest, shaking and ending this beautiful and brilliant world of light and shadow that we regard as heaven. The summer vacation finally ended, and at the beginning of the new school year of the year, Da suddenly disappeared. It is said that he has been controlled by his parents and teachers, and can only travel between home and school every day. The high school was located on a hillock in the city, and every time Da went to school, it was an effort to climb up against the current, and every time school was an indulgence of galloping down the river. He lost film, television, music and basketball, and all his freedoms, and became a high school student who disappeared into the sea of people and had less than a year to prepare for the exam. Losing the companionship and empathy of this good friend, I looked at nearly a hundred discs placed in several empty shoe boxes and felt a deep sense of loneliness and loss. I don't need the college entrance examination, but where is my future path?

At that time, I didn't notice that just above this small old, somewhat blurry 18-inch TV, the VCD player called the "box", there was my dream and the way out, and even my future path. But at that time, I did not find the germ of dreams hidden in the box, but in discouragement endured the torment of loneliness and confusion. Without my cousin's visit, without lively interaction, without tireless all-night chatter and endless imagination, I hardly wanted to watch a movie anymore. One's films became long and boring, and the energetic me began to collect erotic films and books to seek release.

Perhaps, this is an unspeakable experience that every boy has. At that time, living in a small apartment near the Yangtze River, I had not yet been exposed to computer networks and had no resources at my fingertips. I need to quietly find peach-colored resources hidden in every crevice of the world, including discs, albums, books and magazines. After many days of "hard work", I actually searched for as many "bad things" as there were about one corrugated box. In the dead of night, the door is locked and felt out from under the bed, and a person silently admires and fantasizes. When I wanted to reach the point where I was working hard to prepare for the college entrance examination, I became more and more eager to find a kind of deconstructive reality, self-abandonment, and paralyzing consciousness. The VCD was covered in a layer of gray. I sat on the dark green couch, combining all kinds of heartwarming pictures and words in front of me, creating some strange and seductive illusions in my mind, venting my energy that had no way out, and sinking into a lost and eerie dream.

Lonely and empty, I seemed to be like Ripley, sleeping deep in a spaceship that had lost its course, wandering on the edge of the deep, cold, dangerous universe. Maybe I'll be spotted and saved by a human rescue ship, and maybe I'll fall to some remote, extremely dangerous planet for the rest of my life—

The tentacles of unknown creatures are gradually approaching...

Capture me...

Creeping inside me...

I didn't know...

The consciousness and body are gradually undergoing terrible changes...

A world that has lost its friends, a lonely and confused world. Even walking in the sun, walking on the crowded street, I still feel an indescribable cold and fear. The sun shone on me, imprinting my faint shadow on the ground, and I could not feel the slightest warmth or the weight of existence. The night dragged me to sleep, punished me with a long period of sobriety, and stuffed the terrible hallucinations that grew in my waking into my thin and bleak dreams, which were always filled with the harsh silence of the vacuum and the unbearable extreme cold. As if I had malaria, I continued to weaken, trembling involuntarily, and talking uncontrollably.

I lost my dream, I couldn't see the future and lost my past. My parents took me to the hospital just as winter was approaching.

The world of winter, my world, is a white void. The ruins of life are slowly covered with falling snowflakes and buried quietly. In the vast storm, countless snowflakes were crystal clear, as large as the palm of my hand, floating like falling leaves, symmetrical and perfect and cold and bone-chilling, like many fragments of memory that had no way to go, withering and swirling in my desperate vision. I kept crying, on the threshold of about to step into adulthood, like a child who refused to grow up, lost his beloved toy, lost his strong shelter, wandered in the depths of the strange labyrinth, unable to return to the warm home and the bright sunshine. Just when I was overwhelmed and helpless, someone, from a distant place, wrote me a letter.