◎Zhang Chong
With the aging of society, the question of the desire of the lonely and widowed elderly in their old age has also attracted more and more film attention, the most recent being the British Sophie Hyde indoor film "Good Luck, Rio Grande" (hereinafter referred to as "Good Luck"). The film stars British actress and screenwriter Emma Thompson, who graduated from Cambridge University. Emma, 63, plays Nancy, a 55-year-old widow in the film, a rigid and serious religious education female teacher, who retired two years after her husband's death, at this time she is in extreme imbalance and anxiety, she wants to break this state, but "those who only desire and no action can only produce the plague", so she decides to break the routine and choose to risk another life.
The film discusses both the repression of physical desires by culture and the possibility of "communication between the senses and the soul." In the process of breaking the convention, Nancy gradually experienced the truth that "everything that is alive is sacred", and faced life and herself with this recognition, ready to be healthy and instinctively happy.
Hesitation, restlessness and despair: the "denied" body
British scholar John Stuart Mill believes that "man is an animal that obeys authority, and in history, there have been three major authorities: virtue authority, religious authority and secular authority, which dominate and guide people's actions." "Nancy, the heroine of the movie "Good Luck", is under the control of such authority, cautiously and walking on thin ice to abide by all rules and order. In everyday situations, she wears light makeup, dressed in a middle-class suit, her hair is also groomed with the inherent smell of the middle class, and she wears modest black flat shoes. After arriving at the hotel where she is dating Leo, Nancy changes into high heels, representing Nancy's inner and subconscious desires at this time, but in sharp contrast to her external actions: cramped and incoherent.
In normal life, Nancy, like many women, tries to balance her "always disappointed" mood by dressing outwardly, and the life of losing her husband and retiring makes Nancy, who has always been accustomed to living in order and authority, lose her center of gravity, and is full of frustration, disappointment and fear, resulting in her depression, panic and anxiety, and a sense of guilt and pressure spreads everywhere in her emotions. She kept saying things like "I'm sorry" and "sorry" to Leo, her daughter, the waiter, and others.
But in fact, she feels that her children are "a burden on the neck", and their pressure "is like a bruise on the thumb" that never leaves, so life for Nancy has no happiness, subjectivity and freedom except to obey various rules, and she seems hesitant and anxious in irrational emotions such as resentment, disgust and fear. Nancy is unsure of what her life will hold, and in extreme cases, she needs to change the status quo by breaking the rules and using her "sinful" desire and body.
Nancy's anxious condition and guilt are traced in Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morality": "The medicine prescribed by ascetics, without exception, is a medicine that suppresses the sense of life", and its logic is to make people deny life, deny themselves, and fill people with "pain, division and self-contradiction", causing them to fall into a state of "enslavement" and resentment, and because people have "free will", they will weigh and act on this state of negation, pathology and slavery.
Nancy grew up obeying the moral, religious, and secular norms of society, as she analyzed herself when she finally met Leo: "I've never done anything interesting or amazing in my life, I always follow all the rules, line up, never drink heavily, never steal my husband's limelight at parties, I've always been the designated driver after the party, eating five different vegetables and fruits a day, and always answering the phone when it rings." Nancy, who is accustomed to conformity, is "domesticated" in the lifeless, day-to-day "everyday", and under certain circumstances, it is bound to explode from quantitative to qualitative change, just as Jung discussed from the perspective of the "shadow" archetype: "Sometimes you have to do unforgivable things in life so that life can really go on." In order to continue to live, Nancy is ready to take active action to trespass and break the commandments.
"The disciplined and the corrupted": arrogance of authority and order
Max Weber considered most of the qualities of the "Puritan" ethic to be "thrift, honesty, relentless work, and reason," and Nancy and Leo's moms in "Good Luck" were disciplined to mechanically fulfill and follow the rules and try to do the right thing. Therefore, in the process of being "disciplined" by various authorities, they also "discipline" their children with their own invisible or tangible ideology, and if they do not want to, they will exercise the power of "judgment" and "expulsion". In this "disciplined" life, Nancy is both the "damaged" and the "destroyer" who inflicts it. They live in indifference, lies and misfortune, and as the film's lyrics describe, "everyone walks around with frowns, ugly expressions on their faces." Unlike Leo's mother, Nancy chooses to act in the midst of widow, independence of her children, and anxiety and directionlessness after retirement.
British films are used to tie thought, cognition and social problems, and in "Good Luck", Leo uses the phrase "consumerism" to persuade Nancy when he calms her self-blame and unease: "You don't buy me, it's my service, I set the price, you agree, I'm not being exploited, I'm just doing my job." Leo told her from a consumerist perspective that he was not breaking the law: his job was a buying and selling activity. Nancy, who lives under the domination of various authorities, does not dare to face her own body or the bodies of others directly, and in four meetings with Leo, Nancy gradually shatters the order, guilt and shame established by authority, recovers the instinct of life, and has a pleasant experience. During the month of contact with Leo, Nancy felt "more energetic and powerful than at any time she can remember", and through this adventure and transgression, her self-confidence and self-subjectivity were gradually revealed, and she felt that she was an "invincible" free and "powerful", which was the gain and creativity of "transgression". As Bataille asserts: "Transgression is not the negation of taboos, but transcending them and supplementing them." ”
"Song of Innocence" and "Health Instinct": From "breaking" old perceptions to "creating" new lives
Nietzsche discussed the continuous transcendence and development of the realm of human existence from the three spiritual changes "camel-lion-baby", "The camel bears all difficulties so that it will not be crushed by old values, the lion throws all the baggage of traditional ideas into the dustbin of history, and finally next to the remains of the fierce lion, a baby with an innocent smile is showing a new green field before the rising sun." "The appearance of the baby heralds the restoration of the health instinct, the reversal of the impulse to destroy and the impulse to create."
Leo in "Good Luck" is different from A-Qing in "The Cruel Story of Youth" with left-wing characteristics, he does not "serve older women" work "to save money for college", Leo just likes to do such things. His view of the body as good, to bring pleasure, goodness, or fulfillment to people, was his basic view of his own body or of his body and desires, as opposed to the disciplined Catholic mother and the domesticated Nancy.
According to Lacan's "mirror theory", the "lowercase other" between mother and son is full of imaginative perfection and privacy, but this is not the case with the mother-child relationship in the movies "Good Luck" and "Masquerade". In "Good Luck", Leo's mother hates Leo as the eldest son, ignores his existence for a long time, and even expelled him from his home with indifference and ruthlessness when he was 15 years old, telling everyone that the son is dead. She pretended not to know her son and ruthlessly walked past him, because she was a strict "Catholic" and could not accept and forgive her son's exploration of the body for more than ten years. The lyrics of the ending song sings "It feels like a bucket of gunpowder / Waiting for the flame to come / I need a little spark / Light in the dark", "gunpowder" and "spark" are designed to break this force full of rigid order and contrary to human nature, so Connor, as a son, created the person, this identity, this job "Leo" to contend with his mother's rejection and indifference, to transgress and blow up her cage of "guilt" and "shame", and freely construct his own subjectivity, And help individuals who have lost their warmth and subjectivity to rebuild their subjectivity.
After Leo and Nancy met for the fourth time, they also completed the sublimation and re-acquaintance of themselves: he went from not daring to tell his brother about the work he was engaged in, to telling him calmly. Leo has constructed his own "healthy life" and "song of innocence" from the outside to the interior, and is independent, confident and responsible like a gentleman; The same is true of Nancy, from the cautious at the beginning to the relaxation and calmness at the end of the film.
British scholar McQuailly believes that "man appears in two basic forms, male and female. Anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically, each person is doomed from the beginning to turn to another person's relationship. ”
At the end of the film, Nancy not only reconstructs her own life, but also allows Leo and the elderly women who have experienced the same experience as her to begin to reconstruct their lives. In this performance art of the body, Nancy re-understands the concept of the body, desire, and self intellectually, and transgresses the discipline of "self-denial". At the beginning of the film, she "likes to plan everything", does not like "surprises", is afraid of physical contact, and by the end of the film, Nancy stands alone in front of the mirror, touching and looking at the body that is no longer young, not depressed, but smiling and accepting and appreciating the gift of life and the gift of time. At this time, she not only found the courage to live, but also discovered her subjectivity and freedom full of infinite possibilities and creativity, which is Nancy's "smile of victory", "sacred joy" and "song of innocence".