Stills from "The Beginning"
There is a famous myth in ancient Greece that the mythical Sisyphus kidnapped the god of death and made there no more death in the world. To this end, Sisyphus offended the gods, and the gods, in order to punish him, asked him to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, but because the boulder was too heavy, every time Sisyphus did not have time to move the boulder to the top of the mountain, the boulder rolled down again.
But Sisyphus did not give up. He lived out the meaning of life with the courage to recognize the absurdity of life and continue to resist it, and with the open-mindedness to know that it could not be done. This is also the famous French existentialist writer Camus pen, this Greek myth gives human thought.
The recent hit infinite stream TV series "Beginning", why not? The choice between the male and female protagonists in "The Beginning" about getting off early or trying to stop the bus before the bus explodes is like Sisyphus rolling stones up the mountain. (The following contains serious spoilers):
"Beginning" tells the story of game architect Xiao Heyun and college student Li Shiqing who "came back from the dead" after encountering a bus explosion, and constantly experienced the time cycle during the time period of the bus accident, from getting off the bus to self-help, to breaking the barrier and fighting side by side, each cycle one by one to verify whether each passenger on the bus carried explosives, and finally find the murderer, and successfully worked with the police to stop the bus explosion in the last cycle.
When many viewers discuss this drama, they will talk about the biggest gripping point of "Beginning" is not the story setting stuck in the time loop, and the suspense of whether it can get out of the loop - after all, many classic films such as "Horror Cruise", "Happy Death Day", "Source Code" and so on, so that film and television fans have already experienced the blood and tension brought by the cyclical plot.
But "The Beginning" still has its own charm: because the memories of Xiao Heyun and Li Shiqing have been preserved in more than twenty cycles of time, the coping, pressure resistance, and responsibility and responsibility shown by the two in this emergency have increased one after another in the experience. The point that the TV series touches the audience is that the protagonist still does not retreat in this kind of forced time and space in the endless darkness and does not know when he can glimpse the dawn, and even the more frustrated and courageous the behavior.
For people who respect their duties and responsibilities, like Officer Zhang Cheng in the play, it is already heroic to be the first to go to the police after receiving the alarm call, and to boldly get on the car to unload the bomb; after all, this may cause the "sacrifice" of Officer Zhang Cheng in the penultimate explosion.
However, the hero and heroine's difficulty comes from the belief in salvation that has not been extinguished after countless physical tortures and more severe mental torture- even if they are treated coldly by other people in the car, even if they are suspected by police officers, when they are aggressively interrogated, and even after a life-and-death escape due to manslaughter, they still try to take away the deadly bomb in the next cycle.
When Xiao Heyun was hesitant to save people in the next cycle, he once said to Li Shiqing: "I will wake up, but my memory, the memory of the explosion, the memory of the small black room in the police station, will always be engraved in my mind." "In such a situation, which is very likely to cause traumatic sequelae and has no idea how long it has been stuck in time and space, it is convincing to be able to commit purely altruistic acts."
Back in the real world, most of us are luckier than Xiao Heyun and Li Shiqing. We don't cycle through horrors, and we don't carry the burden of whether we need to save the world. But we still often fall into a "Sisyphus"-style "tragic sense of fatalism":
We often feel like 996 social animals, doing day-to-day mechanical work and unable to break out of the cycle; full-time wives are caught in the cycle of losing themselves around chores; boys/girls meet scumbags/scumbags and break up and then choose to get back together again and again, stuck in the emotional cycle...
So we may soon acquiesce to the vicious circle of life that we cannot get out of.
But in fact, at the beginning of each "cycle", life opens up new possibilities. Just like in "Beginning", every time Xiao and Li get on the bus, they encounter seven or eight passengers in the loop, but the two can still collect clues, empathize with others, accumulate contacts, learn experience, and completely change the ending of the story through the tempering of fire in each cycle, just as we who live in the non-fantasy world can also.
Although we cannot escape the fate of life and death, most of the "eternal" sense of meaninglessness, frustration and despair in life can actually try to jump out of it - through the way of trying to improve and change ourselves in repeated life, out of the comfort zone, in order not to walk through a short life in vain.
This kind of "promotion" does not refer to the unnecessary effort of the inner volume - such as making your "996" life into "007", but to discover the direction of the heart, to see if you can find a job you want and get yourself out of the bottleneck; not to change the identity of the full-time wife, but to calmly think about whether this identity is what the heart wants, whether you want to change, where to start; not to ask for the next time you look for the object, you must find the "right person", Rather, it is to learn the lessons of a relationship once and turn the cycle into a "meaningful cycle"...
After all, as Camus said, life is absurd, like Sisyphus pushing stones: day after day, we get up, eat, work, sleep, and repeat most of our lives at two o'clock. When we try many times and fail to achieve what we want, whether we can't find our sweetheart, the job we want, or it is difficult to get a decent salary, it is easy to fall into the "nihilism of life".
But if we stop eating, sleeping, and working, then it is as if we have never been to the world and cannot prove our existence; or if we are passively neglectful, tired of our families, or even do not treat ourselves well, then life will continue to slide along the existing track, and it will only be delusional to get out of the vicious circle.
Although life will one day be the end, the meaning of life is to live in a limited time.
And this brilliance is absolutely inseparable from falling down, climbing up again and again, and pushing the stone up again to meet the challenge, so as to infinitely move closer to the mountain. Even if Sisyphus could not push the boulder to the top of the mountain, at least when he pushed the boulder halfway up the mountainside, he would certainly see a more beautiful scenery than he could see it down the mountain.
The famous philosopher Isaiah Berlin had a view that the freedom of life is divided into positive freedom and negative freedom. The desire to govern oneself, or to participate in controlling the course of one's own life, is positive freedom; this is as profound as the desire to seek the scope of free action, that is, the freedom of negativity.
For example, as a high school senior, you stay up late every day to play games, which is to achieve your current "negative freedom"; and to actively prepare for the college entrance examination every day is to repeat the stone pushing process of Sisyphus on the 365th, but after the college entrance examination, you can get freedom because of your own positive actions - that is, to achieve the "positive freedom" in the future.
Today, living in the inner volume era, we have heard too much about the philosophy of "lying flat", that is, the philosophy of negative freedom. In fact, the post-90s and Generation Z young people stuck in the bottleneck are indeed facing the dilemma of "trying to stop the bomb explosion may not be successful" and "positive is not necessarily free". But at least, if we try, it is still possible to make a little change in the current situation; and this "cycle" of ascension may bring about qualitative changes over the years.
Just like Li Shiqing desperately tried to stop the bomb from exploding for the N+1st time in the "Beginning" drama, and really succeeded, how do we know that the next time, will it be the day we encounter the butterfly effect, and our dreams will be realized like that? (This article was first published on the Titanium Media App, and the author |.) Tao Tao)