Text: Overnight flowers
Popular ethics films are a genre of films that were popular in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War II, the economic growth and the growth of the number of middle-class families have created a rebound after a long-term consumption downturn, and the values of diligence and simplicity have been replaced by the concept of extravagant and vain consumption, and this change in values is reflected in the intergenerational differences and the change of the moral yardstick of young people, which is not difficult to understand why the "popular ethics film" (the moral conflict of the middle class family) has become popular. The anxiety of the traditional family ethics concept in the process of gradual disintegration by the impact of consumerism embodied in it is the projection of the general psychology of the audience at that time.
In 1945, Michael Curtis's "Sea Of Desires" was a masterpiece of this genre, and it was nominated for the 18th Academy Award for Best Picture. After winning the Oscar for Best Director for Casablanca, Michael Curtis reached the pinnacle of his creative career, and his ability to master all genres of cinema earned him high praise from critics at the time.
The film "Desire for the Sea" is a successful attempt to combine film noir and popular ethics films, and the use of suspense elements and feminist thinking also make the film have full milestone significance.
The original name of the movie "Mildred Pierce" is the protagonist's name, Mildred Pierce, and the translated name of "Sea Demon", although it has been criticized for a long time, has not been better replaced. The reason for this is worth thinking about, as a popular ethics film about the family, intergenerational, and love-hate love and hatred between men and women, words such as "desire", "love", "magic" and so on, although popular, are a popular way of paraphrasing. From Zhang Hexhui's civic literature to the popularity of Qiong Yao's film and television dramas, the popularization and popularization of modern popular literary and artistic works is an irreversible trend.
< h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" > form: film noir and suspense elements</h1>
The film's success lies first and foremost in its successful use of "film noir" and suspense elements. Audiences familiar with Hollywood genre films will understand that the charm of "film noir" is undoubtedly the dark side of the glamorous city and the profound revelation of human nature - the dangerous streets, the dark and hidden nights, breeding sin and depravity, this unpredictable, eerie, ambiguous, and dangerous tone is the standard of black film.
The wartime "film noir" and the post-war "popular ethics film" correspond to the ingenious changes in the audience's psychology. In the movie "Lust for the Sea", the common emotions in film noir - the fatigue of war, the despair of human nature, the confusion of the city, just for the ethical dilemma created by the moral conflict in the post-war new order environment and the unbridled expansion of desire in popular ethics films.
At the beginning of the film, the secluded and desolate beach house, the dappled light and shadow transmitted by the closed indoor shutters, the cold-tuned photography, and the use of shadows under the high-contrast light show that this is a story of betrayal, revenge, crime, and emotional entanglement.
The manufacture of suspense is also the key to eye-catching and looking and turning.
First of all, it is the "misleading" of the opening of the film. The director throws suspense at the beginning through the "incompleteness" and "selective presentation" of the picture information: the deceased shouts "Mildred" before the death of the bolt, while the heroine Mildred looks melancholy and has a dignified expression, which makes the audience mistakenly think that she is the murderer.
Second, it is the "reinforcement" of the middle section. The main expansion of the plot adopts the heroine's first-person self-narration, and the heroine confesses the fact of her murder during the interrogation (in fact, she covers up the crime for her daughter), reinforcing the false judgment deliberately guided at the beginning.
Finally, there is the "reversal" at the end of the film. The logical loopholes in the heroine's speech, the self-consistent self-statement, and finally failed to exonerate the daughter, and at the end, the director all explained the crime scene at the beginning, leaving the suspense until the end.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > Content: Feminist Thinking in Gender Rebellion</h1>
If in past "film noir" (such as Billy Wilder's "Double Reparations"), the cynical male protagonist (usually a police detective or a private detective) and the greedy and vicious Snake and Scorpion Beauty (Femme Fatale) are a conventional formulaic setting; then in the movie "Sea Of Desire", an obvious inversion and rebellion is that the female protagonist becomes the first perspective and the dominant role of the film, and the male character becomes a greedy and depraved person who is devoured by money and materialism.
Joan Crawford's own image temperament is tough and strong, making this division of roles that rebel against the traditional gender order convincing. Since then, she starred in "Desert Freaks", and she has also become a rare strong woman in the male-dominated genre field of "Westerns".
The heroine Mildred's personality traits and behavior style have autonomy and independence beyond the times. She has a strong independent personality, and she is circumscribed between men, but she will not be attached to any one man. Her value system is based on loyalty to her own will and personal will, and she knows how to plan her life and develop herself according to her own design and arrangement. And because of this, the characters embody a certain "feminist" appeal.
The attitude towards the three male characters is a refined embodiment of their personalities. In order to compete for the absolute right to education of her daughter and to seek the material conditions of fulfillment, she divorced her ex-husband Porter and raised her daughter alone; in order to obtain entrepreneurial capital, she knew how to cooperate with The Valley, who admired her, but always navigated this complex relationship without falling into the vassalage of others; in order to obtain a decent social status and prestige, she committed herself to the rich gentry and aristocrat Mundy of high society, but always knew the essence of her relationship in her heart.
The aesthetic value of independent women has strong social significance. Because of this, Joan Crawford won the 18th Academy Award for Best Actress for her victory over Ingrid Bergman of St Mary's Bells for "The Sea Of Desires". The frequent appearance of professional women on the screen is inseparable from the era environment of the 1940s. World War II forced a large number of men to join the war, and the lack of urban labor and the need for normal order to operate gave women room for self-reliance and economic independence.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > theme: Ethical dilemmas in the deformed mother-daughter relationship</h1>
It is worth pondering that Mildred, who rebelled against male-dominated discourse and gained a dominant position in the relationship between the sexes, fell into another deformity in the treatment of mother-daughter relationships. And this deformed mother-daughter relationship eventually brought a devastating blow to the family.
From a superficial point of view, it is the flaw in her conception of education as a mother, the irrationality of the way of love.
She did not teach her daughter how to establish a correct attitude toward money and material life, nor did she know how to cultivate her daughter's independent personality. What she did was to satisfy her daughter's inflated materialism and vanity through the satisfaction of material conditions and the supply of luxuries. When unbridled pleasing and satisfying, it becomes the norm. The formation of the daughter's sound personality has caused devastating damage. The daughter has lost the psychology of gratitude, the ability to love, she only knows the pleasure of material satisfaction in the endless taking. When she discovers that others cannot realize her materialism and vanity, she begins to erupt and become hysterical.
The way a mother loves also carries a wishful thinking and a domineering desire for solipsism. Her love for her daughter is more of a kind of self-satisfaction, showing her own value through her material attack on her daughter, but ignoring deep communication and thinking. This kind of love with extreme control twists and alienates the mother-daughter relationship into a pathological relationship.
From a deeper perspective, the deformed mother-daughter relationship is a universal dilemma brought about by consumerist values.
The mother's attitude toward money, although based on self-sufficiency and self-reliance, lacks sufficient self-confidence within her. This is also why she always has a good feeling for the aristocratic men who are pampered and relaxed in high society.
This underlying character flaw is amplified in the daughter. The daughter's desire to control is even worse than that of the mother. The most frightening thing is that she has lost almost all good qualities, whether it is traditional gratitude, loyalty, goodness, or modern independence, self-improvement, and autonomy. Her unbridled pursuit of wealth and her unbridled materialism are the death of the times under the prevalence of consumerism.
In the genre films that prevailed in the classic Hollywood period of the 1930s and 1940s, whether it was the grotesque "neuro-comedy" or the cynical "film noir", until the post-war "popular ethics film", the thinking on consumerism and money worship psychology occupied the absolute core of the core of the theme.
In detail, it has experienced the impact of industrial society on the traditional pastoral life form, the suppression of consumption by economic depression and war, the disintegration of traditional family values by materialistic civilization, and the intimacy and materialism of contemporary society, in which indifference and alienation are the norm of interpersonal relations, and the nihilism of the spiritual world is caused by the interests, and how to maintain rationality under the impact of consumerism is the thinking caused by "popular ethics films".