"Life is so short, let's fall in love." Before the red lips fade, before the enthusiasm has become cold, no one knows tomorrow' events, no one knows tomorrow's events; how short life is, girls are going to fall in love, before the black hair has faded, before the flame of love has not been extinguished, today is gone, today is gone..."
This is a Japanese song from the Edo period, and it is also a song sung many times by shimurahashi, the male protagonist of the movie "Desire for Life".
Verse lyrics about time, ancient and modern, domestic and foreign, not to mention more than a hundred sentences.
Su Shi boated in Chibi and sighed, "Mourning the beard of my life, envying the infinity of the Yangtze River." ”
Li Bai was drunk and said to his brothers, "And if you are born like a dream, how much is it for joy?" ”
Zhang Ruoxuan stood in the clear and clear night sky, looking up at the eternal firmament, thinking that "life is infinite, and Jiang Yue looks similar every year." I don't know who Jiang Yue treats, but I see the Yangtze River sending water. ”
What is even more interesting is that there was an anonymous person in the Tang Dynasty who actually crossed time and space, and tenorson in the Victorian era chanted the same verse, "The blossom can be folded straight and must be folded, and it is not waiting for no flower to fold the branch." ”
From a young age, I was taught to cherish time, but when I was a child, I still looked forward to the time to pass quickly and grow up early. No, in the blink of an eye, I reached the age of wrinkled faces, but I still haven't thought about it, I haven't thought about how to live.
We follow the plans of our parents, follow the pace of those around us, take a given path, and sometimes we have to pass, about time, about life, about living, about our own will, we think too little.
This is precisely the most important question, the sooner you ask yourself, the better, otherwise you will be like the head of the civic section, Watanabe Kanji, bored and die of pain.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" >, Akira Kurosawa's thoughts on death</h1>
In 1952, Akira Kurosawa and Shinobu Hashimoto's second film, Desire to Live, was released, which did not bring Akira Kurosawa many honors. Surrounded by Rashomon and the Seven Samurai, it was really difficult to break through.
Although it has not won many international awards, the film is a favorite of many directors and critics.
The American film critic Ebert liked it very much: "I watch 'Raw Desire' about every five years, and every time it moves me and makes me think deeply." The older I get, the less Watanabe looks like a poor old man and more like each of us. ”
The protagonist, Kanji Watanabe, is the head of the municipal government's civic division and a model civil servant who has been working full-time for nearly thirty years.
One day, he felt unwell, went to check, and found that he had stomach cancer, and there was only half a year left. Watanabe returns home and wants to tell his son about his pain, but his daughter-in-law only thinks about his money, which breaks his heart.
He ran to borrow wine to pour sorrow, met a third-rate writer, asked the writer to teach him how to spend 50,000 yuan at a time, and the writer took him to nightclubs, cafes, and dance halls, but this temporary joy still could not get rid of the troubles, and it was still very uncomfortable.
The young female subordinate Oda Che came to the house to stamp the resignation letter, watanabe was attracted by Oda Cut's youthful vitality, envied her, and always looked for her to eat and play, but Oda Cut's work was very hard, and gradually got tired of him. At the last meeting, Watanabe asks Oda about the meaningful way to live, and inspired by Oda, Watanabe decides to do something meaningful while he is still alive.
This movie is Akira Kurosawa's reflections on death.
"Sometimes I think about my own death, and this 'Desire for Life' is the product of those thoughts." Akira Kurosawa said.
There is a line in the movie that Watanabe says to Oda:
"I don't have a son, my son is in the distance, just like when I drowned, my parents were in the distance, and now I think of it only pain."
Watanabe compares the fear of death to drowning, which is the truth that Kurosawa Akira derived from his childhood drowning experience: at the moment of drowning, he was afraid, afraid, and eager to get a life-saving floating board, but in front of him was dark, his parents and brothers were so far away, so lonely and helpless, and suddenly found that in the face of life and death, no one could help him.
Kurosawa quickly understood this truth, but the others could understand it quickly, so he spent an hour and a half forcing Watanabe to wake up and find himself.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > second, self-awakening under the threat of death</h1>
"We are born lonely."
This phrase is all too common, as Jarmusch said in The Long Holiday, Haruki Murakami in The End of the World and Cold Wonderland, and Márquez proved it with a copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude.
But people still subconsciously want to find warmth and dependence to dissolve loneliness.
Under the threat of death, Watanabe searched and lost three times, and finally found that loneliness could only be dissolved on his own.
1.
The first man was his son.
Watanabe was young and widowed, a man worked hard to raise his son, relatives once advised him to remarry, because the son grew up, married, will feel the father trouble, Watanabe insisted on raising his son alone.
After losing an important person, people cling to the important people who are left around them. After losing his wife, Watanabe is reluctant to remarry, insists on raising his son alone, and excludes a third person from entering his world, which is a manifestation of loneliness and uneasiness.
Because there was no third person to share his loneliness and uneasiness, he put all his hopes, love, and attention on his son, who gradually grew up and formed a family, an independent individual, and was getting farther and farther away from him, and he never found out. Until he suffered from stomach cancer and wanted to tell his son, he heard his son say, "If you don't agree, tell him to live separately, this trick works best for him" words.
He was knocked down by his son's cold words, and slipped back into his room.
In the room, he worshipped his dead wife, recalling that when his wife had just died, his son Mitsuo was still a child, looking at the car carrying the dead mother, shouting "Hurry up, mother is leaving", suddenly heard the voice of the son upstairs calling himself, immediately got up to find his son, the stairs climbed to the halfway point, but heard the son say "To sleep, downstairs please close the door." ”
He recalled when his son played baseball in middle school, when his son had appendicitis and wanted to be with him, when his son was going to join the army. Hikari leaves by train, and the train slowly disappears at the end of the track, symbolizing that his son gradually fades out of his father's life as he grows older.
But Watanabe did not understand, and thought that his son and he were still one, he called out to Hikari, climbed the stairs to find Hikari, and when he climbed to the top of the stairs, he suddenly stopped and slowly retreated.
That staircase was the chasm between him and his son.
Upstairs is the world of sons and daughters-in-law, downstairs is the lonely world of a man.
2.
Neither his son nor his brother could find support, and discouraged, he ran to drink. In the tavern, a third-rate writer wants to buy sleeping pills, but the pharmacy is closed, and Watanabe gives him his sleeping pills and tells him that he has little time with stomach cancer.
At this time, Watanabe had accepted the fate of death and gave up on himself, but looking back on his life, he found that compared to the fear of death, he had never enjoyed the pleasure of being alive in this life, and did not understand how these decades had been. Originally, he wanted to commit suicide with sleeping pills, but when he thought about this, he didn't want to die.
He asked the writer to teach him the method of enjoyment, to teach him how to spend 50,000 yuan at a time, and the writer listened to his words and was deeply moved:
"You made me reflect. Unfortunately, there is indeed a great side, unfortunate will teach people to understand here, stomach cancer makes you face life again. People do not know the preciousness of life until they are dying, but there are very few such people, and some people do not know life until they die. You are great and able to rebel against your past self, and I am touched by your spirit of rebellion. You used to be a slave but now you want to be a master, enjoying life is the duty of human beings, people must have a lust for life, it is not in line with the trend to say that covetousness is a failure, and it is a virtue to enjoy life. ”
The writer was a mediocre man who could only take Watanabe to playgrounds, bars, and cabarets.
But these places can only take away a momentary worry, after all, adults are not children, tired, drunk, sleep, forget. The wine woke up, the dawn came, and the pain in his stomach reminded him that to be alive was still an emptiness.
After a night of red wine and green songs and laughter, all that is left is a hat and an endless loneliness.
The path suggested by the writer did not work, and Watanabe also reacted that what he really wanted was not a temporary anesthesia, not a stimulus from the environment, but a longer-term happiness from the heart.
3.
Oda Che, a young and lively female subordinate, worked in the civic class for a year and a half, was persuaded by the boring work in the department, resigned and found a new job, and needed her boss to stamp her resignation letter.
The Oda family lives in a small crowded house, the salary is not high, but the personality is very likable, the heart is straight, always with a smile, a big grin, and does not worry about life.
Watanabe inadvertently sees that Oda's stockings are broken, and kindly buys them for Oda and invites her to dinner. Oda Is like today's post-95s, lively and assertive, and she likes all the popular games of young people, she took Watanabe to play street games, go ice skating, go to the playground, go to the movies, go to the izakaya to eat hot pot, and always invite her to go out to play. And Oda's play makes Watanabe feel like he's back in his youth.
Young people, even if the status quo is not satisfactory, because young, are always full of optimistic hope for the future.
Family members and relatives all think that Watanabe's late festival is not safe, and he faints for a woman, but in fact, the dying Watanabe envies Oda Cut's youth, and there is a lot of time to waste, and he is more envious of Oda Cut's always energetic appearance, as if he has endless energy.
The last time he met with Oda Che, he asked Oda Che almost persecuted:
"Why do you live so vigorously, this is where I, the mummy, envy you, I want to live like you until I die every day is meaningful, otherwise I will die blind, I just think, want to do something, I want to do something, I don't know what to do, but you know." 」 Tell me, how can you live like you? ”
Oda can't tell him how to live to be meaningful, and she's just a factory worker who worries about filling her stomach every day. In order to appease Watanabe, he told him about his feelings of being a toy rabbit, and suggested that Watanabe also find something to do.
But what can be done at city hall, Watanabe thought for a long time, suddenly got up and rushed out of the hotel, saying, "There must be something I can do." ”
4.
The three people represent three stages, and the director's questioning continues to escalate, so that Watanabe gradually realizes the deeper problems.
First of all, let the estrangement of the son and daughter-in-law take off the veil of affection, let Watanabe be emotionally lonely, and take his attention away from others and focus on himself.
Watanabe no longer pays attention to his son, examines himself, and finds that there is nothing to boast about in his soul and memory like a dry water.
It is more tragic than emotional loneliness, spiritual dryness.
So he began to look for ways to fill the void in his mind.
The vulgar writer brought him a burst of happiness, but unfortunately it was a temporary anesthetic, addictive, hastening poison.
Oda's youthful vitality, gentleness and thoughtfulness are all he wants. Unfortunately, young and gentle, none of them can be obtained, and the only thing that can be possessed is the same yuan qi as Oda Cut, so he asks Oda Cut the secret of life.
The director borrowed Oda's mouth and gave the answer as "a meaningful job that I want to do from the heart."
With this job, you don't have to focus on family love, with this job, you will not be attached to the temporary sensory stimulation, with this job, work hard, so that every loss of time becomes concrete and tangible.
Watanabe has always lived like a mummy, not because he has no job, but because he has not done a meaningful job according to his own will, and because his soul, his free will, was killed by the environment twenty years ago, leaving the mummy Watanabe.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > third, the self assimilated by the environment</h1>
Watanabe is the head of the city hall civic division, and the entire city government is in a state of overstaffing, bureaucracy, and mutual blame.
The film seems to criticize the degeneration of the municipal government, but in fact it is a criticism of the assimilation of people in the environment.
As mentioned earlier, poems, songs, essays, and novels about time are more or less, from Zhuangzi's "Ephemera" to Zhu Ziqing's "Hurry", from "Song of Edo" to "Live like we are dying", but how many people really care about time.
Man forgets time in time, forgets himself in the environment.
Watanabe was not a mummy at birth, presumably as a child, he also played with friends in the wilderness, had a passionate love in his youth, and when he first entered the workplace, he also had a desire to do a lot.
At the beginning of the movie, there is a narration by Satanabe:
"No, it's so bad, it's like walking dead, in fact, this man died 20 years ago, lived a while before that, and thought about work." 」
After the narrator finished speaking, Watanabe opened the drawer, and inside was a zaka, and the cover page was "Plan to Promote Office Efficiency", the time was November of showa 5, this plan was made by Watanabe, put in the drawer, and it was also cherished, and now, he calmly used it as toilet paper to wipe the stains on the seal.
The narrator at this time was: "He has no will or enthusiasm for this, and this emotion has long since disappeared in the meaningless busyness of the city government." ”
In thirty years of work, his only achievements were to guard the chair of the head of the class, and two full attendance awards.
After thirty years of confusion, under the threat of death and three questions, Watanabe's self, which had been killed by the environment, was reborn. I was determined to do something meaningful in that unsaved environment, in an institution that couldn't do anything. It is the "community sink" problem that various departments kick and kick like balls at the beginning of the movie.
There is a sewage pond next to the community, there are many water stink mosquitoes, children will have rashes after touching the water, affecting the health of life, the opinion of residents is to fill in the pool and build a children's park.
The film uses a small fragment of the third person to recall Watanabe's difficulties in promoting the construction of the park.
First of all, the city halls are fragmented, and the construction of the park involves many departments, and it is difficult for the departments to cooperate.
Secondly, the leader did not act, Watanabe applied to build a park, asked for the approval of the deputy mayor, the deputy mayor refused, and then calmly chatted during office hours and colleagues about the topic of the previous night's pastime.
Third, vicious competition. For the treatment of "community sinkholes", Watanabe's proposal was to build a park, while another group demanded the construction of traffic lights, and the other side openly threatened Watanabe.
In watanabe's working environment, no one does practical things, no one takes responsibility, no one dares to take responsibility, everyone gets by, mixing time, mixing wages, not knowing what to do every day but very tired.
Watanabe's colleagues argued for themselves in front of Watanabe's shrine: "I was not such a person before, but over time, the city hall is a place where nothing can be done, because doing anything will offend people, we just pretend to be doing things, but in fact we don't do anything, such as you have to empty a trash can, but you also need all kinds of applications that can fill the trash can... Seals, seals, seals..."
Despite the willingness and enthusiasm for work, watanabe has only two paths to go, compromise or escape in the face of the busy and meaningless working environment of the municipal government.
In order to fit in, Watanabe compromised, turned into a mummy, bravely rebelled, and Oda Chi fled.
Watanabe woke up before his death and became his master.
In front of the shrine after death, a group of colleagues who had been in close contact with each other swore at the shrine that they would follow In watanabe's footsteps and would be as brave as if they were born again, and would dedicate themselves to the people.
In the end, this group of shouting people, as in the past, kept stamping.
The egos of this group of people are all eaten away in a boring environment, and even the oath is blind.
The working environment of the municipal government described in the film, if you change the reference object, you will find that this environment is universal, and the people who make up the environment are also universal.
The system, institutions, and working environment are all composed of people, but people are always seen to be assimilated by the environment, but it is rare to see people completely resist and change the environment.
The Matrix gives the answer to this. In the movie "The Matrix", Erwu Zaili was one of the first few people to awaken, and after years of confrontation with the mother, he gradually got tired, so he betrayed Neo and his party and re-entered the mother.
It is difficult to resist, but the compromise is very simple, it is still very happy, after the compromise of the two or five boys, you can become a rich man, no longer need to eat snot porridge.
In the universal environment, in the universal matrix, there are universal colleagues, universal two-five-boy, accidental Watanabe, and accidental Morpheus.
Every person who is assimilated by the environment is, to some extent, the result of his own choice of compromise.
Of course, there are some people in this world who will not compromise, such as Akira Kurosawa himself.
This movie, he shot when he was 42 years old, most of his life is about to go, how to treat life, whether the past life is worth it, how to do it in the future, after thinking a lot, he made this film that contains self-vigilance.
How should we, the people in the environment, live, when watching the film, we can also reflect on it by the way.