The "anti-pyramid scheme" and "crazy" elements in the early publicity of Wu Lei and Jiang Qinqin's movie "The World of Grass and Trees" made many viewers dream back to "All or Nothing" and "Eliminate the Three Evils Everywhere".
There are different forms of "pig killing plates" that are equally brainwashed, there are a group of "honest people" who are obsessed with ghosts and tricks, there are routines that frantically erode ordinary people, and the protagonist who tries to end it all.
But if you watch "All or Nothing 2.0" or "Everywhere You Eliminate the Three Evils 2.0" mentality, you may not feel happy, because it gives the crazy horror of MLM, but the real focus is not MLM.
The story is not a cool film. Instead, it uses pyramid schemes as an index to tell people's real desires and hesitations, crazy is a criminal group, and what is deep in mud is the grass and tree life that belongs to ordinary people.
Denied mother
If the role of "Life of Grass and Trees" is substituted into real life, the mother Wu Taohua played by Jiang Qinqin will definitely correspond to the elders in the news section who make young people miserable and brainwashed by MLM groups.
Their trust in MLM workers is far greater than that of their families, who have gone bankrupt and invested their life savings into a bottomless pit, dreaming of getting rich and enjoying the praise of fake "family members", but hurting their real family members.
They are like the ghostly "villains" in the family, who have destroyed the family by themselves, and in some cases, they may become the embodiment of ignorance and greed, which is a "strange thing" that people can't help but hate.
Such a family member, why does "The World of Grass and Trees" insist on arranging a son to "rescue"? Pull the camera to Wu Taohua's life before being brainwashed by pyramid schemes, and you can understand the problem that the director wants to show.
is completely different from the extreme madness after entering the MLM, the original Wu Moss Hua is an authentic honest person, and a very traditional mother, hardworking, simple, and takes her son as the axis of life.
But this hard-working and simple mother has always lived a life of inferiority complex that has been denied.
After entering the MLM team, Wu Moshua defined herself as "Wu Moss Hua who was disliked", "Wu Moss Hua who was driven out", "Shit, garbage", and every sentence was extremely demeaning to herself.
And this is the root cause of Wu Moss's falling into the vortex.
The "disappearance" of her husband is a thorn in the hearts of her and her son, but only Wu Moshua knows that this thorn is more painful and devastating than it seems on the surface, which means that her charm as a traditional woman has been denied.
Even though the follow-up plot has named her as a victim of being cheated into marriage and childbearing, for a traditional woman, her husband's indifference and abandonment have made her experience a long-term destruction of her self-worth and become an unhealable wound.
As a wife, her identity was trampled, Wu Moshua gave all her love to her son, and worked hard to be a mother who devoted herself to her son, carefully maintaining the sense of value that was needed in this parent-child relationship.
But as her son grows up, he is also experiencing the trials of life, and the mother who is a tea picker is pleased that her son has grown up, but she intuitively feels that she can give less and less to her son, and she is tormented in anxiety.
Her value as a mother is also experiencing the pain of denial.
She longs to be affirmed, she longs to be loved, but no one understands her heart's desires, or rather, no one wants to understand her.
The son's opposition to his remarriage, the dislike of his boyfriend's mother, and the shadow of the "missing" ex-husband are entangled, so that Wu Mosshua's inferiority complex and desire are constantly superimposed, making Wu Moshua live in pain and hesitation.
Then the hand of sin reached out to her. The brainwashing routine of the MLM team is almost "tailor-made" for her.
Here, Wu Moss was recognized for the first time, praised for the first time, became the focus of the crowd for the first time, was encouraged by everyone for the first time, and was endowed with infinite expectations and possibilities.
Making money to let her son live a good life is what made her obsessed with MLM and made her fall into lies and unwilling to wake up, but it was the pent-up desire in Wu Moshua's heart, and she also wanted to be recognized.
The trailer allows the audience to see Wu Mosshua's "madness", but the crazy demon in the feature film is wrapped in a poor woman, this abandoned wife, neglected mother, and woman who is disliked by the world, also wants a beautiful life.
Confused son
Whether it is the setting of the mother "going crazy and blackening" or Mulian saving the mother, it will make the audience subconsciously pity his son more, in this story, he takes the double victim buff of his father's disappearance and his mother to engage in pyramid schemes.
In the face of the pain of his mother's obsession, the torture and forbearance of entering the MLM organization all stem from a child's reluctance to let go of his mother, and he hopes to save his mother from the quagmire.
But both Mulian in the film and the audience outside the film have found a problem, in the straw that crushed Xu Mosshua, her son He Mulian, who once relied on her, is a very important one.
Both mother and child love each other, but love often does not necessarily reciprocate happiness, as well as pain.
Xu Moshua regards her son as the gift of everything, which is the warmth He Mulian feels, and it is also a shackle on his body, the mother is eager to give her son a good life, and the son is also eager to make his mother no longer work hard with his own strength.
In order to repay his mother's love, Mu Lian's life has been tight, but when the young people who grew up at the bottom enter the society, he finds that making money is not something that can be easily solved when he grows up and graduates from college.
I didn't see a broadened horizon of background, no human relationship bonus, he bumped around this society like a headless fly, and he couldn't talk to his mother as a tea picker.
He tried to hide his confusion about life in filial piety.
The son didn't want his mother to worry about him, but he also subconsciously exposed his definition of his mother as a person who "didn't understand", which was a "disgust" that made her afraid of the mother who took her son as the sky.
Regarding the relationship between his mother and his employer, the son subconsciously resisted angrily, and he had been nervous about "becoming a pillar of his mother", and he didn't want his mother to sacrifice for himself anymore, and wanted to prove that he could support his mother with his strength.
For the mother, it is her own demands that are once again ignored, she is a mother, but also a woman who wants to be loved, she will have low self-esteem, she will be helpless, and she will be lonely.
Witnessing the child whose mother grew up with hard work for him, the child who grew up in embarrassment, and the one who is more eager to become the one who "supports the mother", ignores his expression of his mother's love, and regards her more as a responsibility.
On the contrary, it was the missing father who took on more obsessions in He Mulian's heart, and these reactions were another frustration and denial in the eyes of her mother, who was deceived and abandoned by her father.
He wanted to repay his mother's efforts faster, but found that society was full of barriers, and he wanted to make his mother believe that he could be her pillar, but he ignored his mother's inferiority complex and demands.
When He Mulian found out that his mother was deceived and obsessed, he was desperate and worried, but the most painful thing for He Mulian was that when his mother was crazy because of the lock, he realized his negligence for his mother and realized his mother's desire.
We can't blame him, because in this kind of life background, He Mulian has achieved the ultimate that a young man can do, just as it is difficult for us to blame Wu Mosshua, she has also done the greatest effort of her mother in her own cognition.
The mother who was denied, the son who was confused, who eventually became the mother of the mad demon and the son who tried to save his mother, struggled in pain, one blindly obsessed, the other sober and trapped.
Is it a son, is it a mother?
In the past two years, there have been many professional analyses that show that people who use PUA as a means of crime tend to pick specific victims, and these victims often lack love, suffer from their original families, or desire to be relied on and relied on.
So the demon disguises himself as a redeemer and leads the victim into a trap in false happiness.
The same is true of the pyramid scheme of "The World of Grass and Trees", the tragic fuse of Wu Moss Hua is that the criminals arouse her deepest desire as a rescuer and repay her strongest desire.
But if you think about it, is there something wrong with Wu Mosshua's desire? No. She could have been a beautiful and confident woman, bold to love, brave to find her own life to do, and realize independent self-worth.
However, in the first half of Wu Mosshua's life, she didn't do this, because she wanted to live for her family and son, and be a traditional good wife and a traditional good mother.
So when her husband "abandoned her coldly", she couldn't get out of the shadow of denial, and when her son couldn't understand herself, she fell into infinitely depressed infinity and pain, and wanted to face her desires, but she fell into the trap.
She put her self-worth on the identity of her mother, ignoring that she is the real pillar of her life, and she gave her son maternal love with infinite dedication, but ignored that this self-sacrificing maternal love would also bind her son.
The same is true of He Mulian.
In the face of his mother's infinite dedication, he desperately wants to give back, both want to be the pillars of the other, both want to have value in each other's lives, and desire this value but it is difficult to ideally maintain this value.
Because they are at the starting point, they are on the wrong foot.
When the MLM company PUA He Mulian kept asking her to respond to "Who am I?", destroying her inner world in this way, in order to achieve the purpose of controlling brainwashing called "Nirvana".
But in fact, Wu Moss Hua and He Mulian need to recognize the same "who they are", in addition to the mother and son, who are they in, jumping out of the traditional definition, in order to love and be loved more healthily.
In the world of grass and trees, when the night passes, the sun will wake up the plants and trees in the mountains, and the dew will wash the world.
In the world of grass and trees, all living beings sometimes need to be "awakened".
Wu Mosshua's misfortune is that she bravely looked at herself when she encountered a pyramid scheme, and her desire was coerced by the devil and finally sank into the abyss, but what "Grass and Trees in the World" hopes to give to Wu Moss and He Mulian is a "call" that hopes to go to a better place.