The Spring Festival is a ceremonial day, people get together, change into neat and beautiful new clothes, put on a rich and delicious food, chat about the past harvest, think about future expectations, in the restrained carnival and alcohol intoxication, survive a period of worry-free time.
After decades of Spring Festival, few really think about why the New Year is in addition to the inheritance of traditional customs, and what does this year embody?
Inadvertently, I turned out Ang Lee's "Wedding Banquet" nearly 30 years ago, in addition to lamenting that today's lack of this in-depth exploration and record of traditional culture and the relationship between people in culture, I also found the extremely similar temperament between the New Year and the wedding banquet.
"The Wedding Banquet" uses a seemingly embarrassing story, that is, the "farce" of the lover comrade in the United States who holds a formal marriage with a Shanghai girl because of the forced marriage of his Taiwanese parents, telling the interest of life produced under the collision of traditional Chinese culture and modern new concepts.
The title also comes from the climax of the whole story - a wedding feast. Just like the New Year, the wedding feast is one of the most representative of the traditional culture of the ritual performance, whether it is the feast that brings related and unrelated people together, or the ensuing wedding ceremony and the behavior of the cave house, the wedding feast continues the same structural pattern as the Spring Festival, from the gathering under the common goal, to the abundant biological satisfaction, and finally there is a bias and noisy behavior, of course, compared to the cave house, the Spring Festival keeping the year is more restrained.
What is more interesting is that the wedding feast often carries not love, but the expectations of the family, parents, and a realization of social relations. In the Spring Festival, an eternal theme must be the discussion and torture of family members at the level of their marital relationships.
In this way, the purpose of the Spring Festival seems to be to urge members to achieve one wedding feast after another as soon as possible, and the purpose of the wedding feast is to let people form a family and live a "perfect" Spring Festival together.
If we say that the endless questioning of meaning makes the intelligent life eventually confused, and finally concocts an illusion like God to end the search for the chain of cause and effect that is linked one by one. Then this "Spring Festival - Wedding Feast" model can make people almost effortlessly jump out of the exploration of life, and directly fall into a cyclical state.
In this state, the purpose of life is to combine reproduction, the purpose of reproduction is to get together, for more reproduction, and at the same time, this seemingly rough goal is packaged in one ritual after another, so that most people lose the ability to reflect and resist, in the huge cultural inertia, in the Spring Festival marriage, in the Spring Festival, in the promotion, without hesitation, jumped into the cycle of ending the meaning of life.
And this end is to use the maximization of some basic desires in life to paralyze people in the appearance of survival. The premise of the Spring Festival and the wedding feast is that the food supply is so abundant that it is even somewhat wasted, which may stem from the craving under the lack of food in the traditional era.
On this basis, the Spring Festival is an appropriate time to put the topic of sex on the family table, of course, people will still package it, with marriage or children, to pass the sexual behavior, just to pursue the results of the process. The wedding feast is a more daring act of making a cave house, and the sexual taboo of thousands of years of discourse is presented in a parody way in the game, in the cave room of a couple of newcomers, it satisfies the release of the collective repression of all participants.
In fact, most festivals and wedding banquets are just a concentrated expression of people's desires, and the Spring Festival is the minimum or the highest pursuit of life that has been inherited for thousands of years - food and clothing and children are full of children.
Therefore, instead of reflecting on the meaning of the Spring Festival, it is better to reflect on the meaning of life, to reflect on the pursuit of a person who is a history and at the same time a personality, and how to express this pursuit.
At the end of "Wedding Feast", Ang Lee still gave a happy ending, the parents seemed to be satisfied to open the United States, and the three people who were married and actually married also reached a certain reconciliation because of the children. Before their parents got on the plane, they looked at the photos of the wedding feast, and life was like that photo collection, with different scenes and memories pasted under the same background.
The New Year is nothing more than giving us time to look through the photo albums of life, in the background and prospects, between the past and the future, or to accept the settings given to us by culture, or to explore the boundaries of life, or to express the deepest desires. In any case, when we want to put desire on the table, the adherence and restraint of the will is what people need to balance the most.