Daughter Jesse informs her mother one evening that she will end her life tonight...
Goodnight, Mom is a 1982 play by American playwright Martha Norman. The pulitzer prize-winning work, in which the cause of the suicide of daughter Jesse, is the focus of attention.
01 Housework, the "button" that holds the mystery of fate
"Good Night, Mom" movie poster
Some viewers say this is to be explored on a metaphysical existential level, while others prefer to interpret Jesse as a depressed person — although the original script, stage plays, and movies say nothing about "depression."
The playwright does not use a straightforward description in the script, covering the fate of the characters and leaving a moderate space for interpretation for the viewer.
And the creator of the film or stage play, when making secondary creations, from the perspective of the creator's individual, find the button that closely holds the mystery of the character's fate, and more strongly present the creator's theory of the play, which has become a particularly important thing.
That is, as the creator of a film and television drama or stage play, you must have your own clear point of view and position on the work, have a very clear expression core, and very clearly use every frame and every scheduling to interpret this core, even if it is not explicitly stated from beginning to end.
In recent years, in the record of commercial performances of stage plays that are available in the mainland, "Good Night, Mother" has been put on the stage of theatrical stage at least four times.
The last two were composed by the Drum Tower West Theatre, starring Lin Yinyu, a professor of the Department of Chinese Opera Directing, and Liu Dan, a young actor; the other was composed by Jiao Yuan Experimental Theatre Troupe, starring Actress Jiao Yuan, who had played Cao Qiqiao in the stage play "The Golden Lock", and Hong Kong actress Michelle.
In these works, did the director grasp the "buttons" that they explained at the heart of the play?
In my opinion, it is insufficient, especially compared to movies.
One of the successes of the film lies in the interpretation of the fate of the characters, which adopts a very appropriate way of presenting it.
Do housework.
Jesse was "doing housework" almost non-stop.
Calibrate alarm clocks; tidy up the bath towels after drying; call to unsubscribe newspapers; put away the shoes and bags that moms threw away when they went home; squeeze toothpaste skins; pull shut the shutters regularly in the evening; help mom get gardening gloves; hand mom pajamas; fill sugar cans; clean the refrigerator; throw away the garbage, change the garbage bags...
These chores, which happened to Jesse all the time, were reasonable and so natural that I almost ignored its existence.
Only when you realize its existence and go back and forth again can you find that these trivial chores are the "buttons" that the film director secretly places in the movie.
It is unremarkable, you only have to look at the past again and again, until you finally stop turning a blind eye and solving it yourself, in order to solve the mystery of the character's fate, to understand Jesse's real living situation.
Just as we treat the real world.
02 How to treat housework is how to treat the self
Jesse put the bath towels neatly
At first, Jesse's chores gave me a general impression:
They look "too good" to confuse me.
In the bathroom, for example, bath towels are of a modest size and folded into square stacks where they are readily available.
This kind of storage is beautiful and convenient for the user, but for the caretaker, it is the most inconvenient -
Because there is no way to hang it back when it is finished, and a bath towel that has just been wiped on the body must be wet, you can't fold it back into tofu blocks and stack them together, the only way is to use it to wash, dry, and re-stack.
This process seems to be seen more in hotels. In hotels, because there are room attendants who change and tidy up every day, people can use the towel and leave it in one place.
Apparently, at Jesse's house, the mother wasn't the one responsible for changing and sorting out the towels, that person could only be Jesse, and always had been.
Many of the chores that Jesse does in the film are expended to maintain in this way:
For example, on Jesse's bed, there is a blanket at the end of the bed, which is more decorative than practical and needs to be taken care of;
For example, the sugar that was returned in a paper bag was sorted by Jesse and poured into different glass sugar cans, and the paper bag containing the remaining candy was sealed and then put back in the cabinet in the inherent order...
Sort and store candy bags
At the same time, these happen by no means accidentally.
From Jesse's movements, she was already too familiar with these chores; from the reaction of her mother, Selma, it seemed that all that Jesse had done was too ordinary in her eyes, and she had become so accustomed to not paying attention.
What Jesse had done this evening, in this house, was by no means a pre-holiday cleaning preparation, but her day-to-day routine.
This makes Jesse in the film camera, even today, a housewife with an extremely high standard of housework.
A person who maintains standards so seriously about housework is unlikely to have no demands on other aspects of life.
Just like entering a home, the personality of the owner can be seen from the home decoration and cleanliness. In this film, housework is to Jesse as life is to her.
The director put Jesse's hopes and requirements for life on the slice of life of "housework". The film's detailed design of housework seems to reflect this "superego" in Jesse's personality.
She wants everything in the home to be clean and tidy, just as she wants to be a beloved wife, a mother, a working woman, an attractive woman, a normal "superego" who seems to be beyond reproach in society.
But there is no choice, she has epilepsy, her husband cheated on her and left her, her son is a troubled teenager, trying to work but running into walls everywhere, being regarded as a freak by the neighbors...
The ideal she was too far away from her, the "superego" pressing down on her head like a cold hood.
03 The relationship between people and household chores is a reflection of the relationship with the real world
Jesse told his mother like a housekeeper about the placement of items in the room
In the film, doing housework is set up to give Jesse a sense of control.
In this house, Jesse has more control than his mother, Selma, the owner of the house. Jesse knows every corner of the room, and the film designs a lot of details about it.
She knew that the lights in the house would come on on time, where her mother couldn't find the gardening gloves, and everything else like washing machines, tape, mouse clips, garbage bags, and so on.
Like a housekeeper, she explained to her mother what to pay attention to, took her mother to tour the room, with a steady pace and a confident expression, not to explain what happened after her suicide, but to do a job transfer before leaving.
What the film focuses on here is not that Jesse had to choose housework because she couldn't go out to work because of illness, but that she was able to do the job well, and she had complete dominance.
She has to choose what she can control, not the world outside the house, but the housework inside the house, just like she chooses death.
04 Housework, the riverbed of mother-daughter relationship
Jesse told her mother what she would do after she committed suicide
This night's mother-daughter back-and-forth between the housework presents a microcosm of the relationship between mother and daughter over the years.
Most of the design of the housework in the film is jointly involved by the mother and daughter, and the participating roles are very clear.
The mother looks more like a naughty child in the housework:
After returning from the market, he casually threw down his bag and shoes, and couldn't wait to go to the cupboard to find candy, biting into a pink ball snack, the coconut shreds fell to the ground, and when Jesse wanted to come over and talk to her, she was gone, Jesse silently picked up the food scraps on the ground, and then went to pick up the shoes and bags that his mother had just thrown away.
In the bedroom, the mother took off her clothes, took off her glasses, necklaces, and used tissues and threw them everywhere, like a spoiled little girl, not worried about cleanliness, there will be a mother or servant to clean up, of course, in this film, it is conceivable that it is Jesse who cleans up everything.
In the garden, the mother could not find the gardening gloves, and asked like a small child if the raccoon had taken them, and Jesse handed her the washed gloves with ease. The mother seems ignorant of everything in the kitchen and bathroom, does not know where the soap used for washing is, does not care about the pot for cooking, and needs her daughter to remind her of the time to throw away the garbage.
Apparently, in life, Jesse was the mother and Selma was the daughter.
Until the end, when her mother almost collapsed in the face of Jesse, who was determined to commit suicide, Jesse whispered to her, "If someone has to ask me why I did this, you say you don't know..."
The mother is like a small child who is about to be alone at home, full of fear of abandonment, because she is comforted by her mother and feels bearable for the loneliness that is coming.
At this time, the inversion of the relationship between mother and daughter is not only reflected in the real housework, but also completely exposed to the emotional relationship.
This moment is a moment to show Jesse's heart, she is not a strange person, she is a weak person with strength to live, able to give comfort to others, but also her own insistence that she can't handle, she finally made her own will choice -
Leave the housework, leave the mother.
05 Under the housework, is the real living situation
"I feel taken advantage of"
Jesse's behavioral characteristics are presented in the film in part with the symptoms of a depressed person: emotional depression, inferiority and depression, pessimism and world-weariness, suicide attempts or behaviors...
In my opinion, the film's more explicit main point of discussion focuses on the philosophical propositions of mother-daughter relationship and "will" and "choice", but the director of the film positions Jesse as a depressed person in the setting of the character. It's just that the creator, out of choice, did not break this little bit, and chose silence from beginning to end.
So in the play, Jesse's depression becomes the elephant in the room, drowned in the trickle of life's trivialities, and even the mother who spends her days and nights turn a blind eye to the truth and choose to ignore her daughter's true feelings.
This is a reflection of the incomprehensible reality faced by depressed people in reality. How many people with mental disorders can not get the understanding and approval of their families until they end their lives.
Jesse was a strange man to neighbors and relatives; jesse was never lonely in his mother's eyes.
These two perspectives are just the Jesse they want to see, not the real Jesse.
The real Jesse needs to look through the day-to-day chores and go under the trickle of life.
We only have to look at those seemingly ordinary routines again and again,
Until the filter is erased,
Seeing it as it is,
Only then will there be a chance to admit and change.
(End)
#Emotional Writing Little Master # #影评 #
Author's Note:
The first draft was originally published on the "Mu Wei'er" public account on October 10, 2019; the second draft was revised on April 4, 2020