The greatest tragedy for the idealist is the realization of the ideal.
One
The Italian version of Martin Eden, released in 2019, is a beautiful, classical, and strong European film.
The story of the entire film focuses on a sailor named Martin Eden. By chance, he met the rich lady Rose and fell in love. In order to have a matching identity, Eden began to study and write hard. After becoming a famous writer, he suddenly found that everything he pursued was empty. That kind of mental gap and pain is hard to dispel. Disillusioned and struggling, he ended his life.
The film is based on Jack London's semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. In the novel, Jack London reflects on how he wrote and studied in lower-class society. In this state of life, which obscured class and origin, Jack London naturally developed a Marxist view of class and social Darwinism (Spencer).
Jack London wrote the novel at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The United States is in the midst of the so-called "Gilded Age." Industrialization grew by leaps and bounds, cities rose up, and new classes emerged. As a result, the crowd is divided by education level, wealth origin, and lifestyle. In the novel, Jack London meticulously depicts the life and ways of life and affairs of the proletariat, the working class, and the upper bourgeoisie. And martin eden, a figure who has woven several classes, has made a statement.
In fact, in the novel, the tragedy of Rose and Eden's love is not a crack in the emotions of the two young people, but the class forces behind them. Resistance everywhere, and Eden's maturity, the class divide— are the sources of tragedy.
Two
These contents are cleverly put into the film by director Pietro Marcelo, and show in detail the role of "knowledge" in the "transformation" of a young man. In other words, Eden, an enterprising young man, became a complex life after receiving the experience and beating of society, the baptism of life, and the fame and prosperity.
On the one hand, Eden has experienced the tempering of society, and the driving of words is naturally not comparable to that of the young bourgeoisie; on the other hand, from the social struggle to the top, he has not forgotten his birth and past, although he is in the top society, but the hypocrisy and decay of the people around him - lovers, publishers, readers, make him unbearable. The pain of this disillusionment of ideals was everywhere, until finally, he found that his favorite Rose was also a member of the pursuit of fame and profit. This sense of disillusionment came even more intensely.
In the film's formulation, the famous Eden faced the readers' questions and played the word game, and his ridicule and sarcasm were used as proverbs and pearls. It was only then that Eden realized that the novel he had worked so hard to create was nothing more than an accessory to the façade of others, and that people were no longer concerned with what he had written, but only on whether he had written it or not.
Content is no longer important, the author is the key. The celebrity effect became a footnote to money worship. Only then did Eden feel the hypocrisy of class—death was the only relief.
In 1916, a writer died at Glen Ellen Ranch in California. Before he died, he drank a lot of morphine. While the writer has always used morphine to relieve the pain of uremia, this time morphine was clearly overdose—he was Jack London.
Three
The "Gilded Age" of the United States was a product of the Civil War. In the more than 30 years after the war, American industry developed rapidly and vertically embraced monopoly capitalism. The era of money soon arrived, and people temporarily gave up their spiritual pursuits; the development of science and technology also made people's lives change dramatically.
At this time, large enterprises began to build new cities, and wealth began to slowly gather in the hands of a few capitalists. In the film, Rose was born in such a privileged family. As a poor sailor, Eden naturally understood that assets were exploited from the poor. Soon, he became a big believer in social Darwinism and came into a violent conflict with Rose's family.
On the surface, Eden is angry because of love. In fact, Rose is just a "medicine primer", and what really makes Eden change is the socialist Bressenden. In the film, Bressenden takes Eden to the party branch, making him aware of the limitations of class. Although Brisonden suffered from tuberculosis and died soon after, the impact he had on Eden was incalculable.
Eden's whole ideological composition was thus determined—a "hybrid" of social Darwinism, Marxism, and Nietzsche's philosophy. Although not pure and academic, for Eden, the collision and contradiction of these ideas are enough to reflect the chaos and misery of the "Gilded Age".
In fact, the term "Gilded Age" also comes from the creation of an American novelist. In 1873, Mark Twain published The Gilded Age. The novel depicts the social situation of speculation, fly camping, and corruption and bribery in the United States at that time. Because the novel aptly reflects the face of the times, the words "Gilded Age" entered the realm of historical research—and eventually, the "Gilded Age" became synonymous with American history from the end of the Civil War to the early 20th century.
Four
Pietro Marcelo did a lot of subtraction for the film. The Italian version of Martin Eden has 600 pages, and Marcelo abbreviated the novel, from 400 to 200 to 100 pages. The final screenplay of the film is only 50 pages. This drastic modification naturally does not fully show the whole picture of the novel, but it makes the story consistent with the novel on the spiritual level.
In order to make the film closer to his own life and a sense of the times, Marcelo moved the story to Naples, and the era also moved to the beginning of the 20th century. While it is true that doing so can give the story a one-size-fits-all premise, it also dissolves the sociological significance of the novel's original work to some extent.
As a result, Eden's hysteria in the film, and even the source of his ideas, becomes even more empty. Therefore, the whole film becomes a young man, because of his own struggle, he has gained identity, status, and love, but he finally finds that all this is nothing more than the disillusionment of idealism. His beloved Rose is not a specific person, let alone a woman, but a symbol of social class. In Eden's poems, Rose is a sparkling elf. But in reality Rose is nothing more than a rich lady with all the faults inherent in the bourgeoisie.
Therefore, when he lost and regained her, everything changed. The tearing between ideal and reality began, individualism in European culture began to stir, struggle no longer had meaning, and everything became mechanical labor.
The tragedy of Martin Eden is the tragedy of the idealist. The greatest tragedy for the idealist is the realization of the ideal.