After five years of absence, Charlie Kaufman, who was dubbed "Ghost Screenwriter", returned to the public eye with his new work "I Want to End It All".
This new work continues Kaufman's highly individualistic style of magical reality. If "Creed" is a "brain-burning" film wrapped in high concepts and physical appearances, "I Want to End It All" takes the opposite path to it, using a method of dissecting the inside of the individual and directly asking the meaning of personal existence, exhausting the mental strength of each audience.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="4" > magic realism in movies</h1>
Traditional Hollywood films prefer a very external classical realist method of expression, using naturalistic scene scheduling, continuous editing and anthropomorphic photography to create a coherent temporal and spatial environment, trying to provide the audience with an omnipresent objective perspective.
And Charlie Kaufman broke the shackles of a screenwriter, he replaced objective reality with a subjective, magical, or metafiction narrative: in "Becoming John Markovich", a secret passage to someone's brain becomes a motivating event for the film and leads to the story being completely out of control; in "Warm And Warm Contained Light", the storyline unfolds in the protagonist's memory space, breaking the balance between illusion and reality, and we seem to be peeking into the inner world of the characters; in Adapted Screenplay, Kaufman even rubbed himself directly into the film narrative as a character.
In "I Want to End It All", whether it is the changing name and identity of the heroine, or the beautiful girl in the ice cream shop that is still open at midnight in Blizzard, and the parents who constantly change their appearance and personality, they are full of magical realism.
When watching this movie, we seem to be groping in the fog, trying to find all the clues in the illusory and ethereal stream of consciousness narrative to piece together the plot in a reasonable way. By combining magical and absurd fantasies with journalistic realism, Kaufmann's work is torn between the boundaries of reality and non-reality, consciousness and subconscious.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="4" > projection of personal consciousness</h1>
Like their predecessors, each character in I Want to End It All is a "spokesperson" for Kaufman's personal consciousness. The tribulations that the characters have experienced are also the tribulations that Kauf has experienced, and the emotions of the film are also part of Kaufman's personal existence.
Late at night when the cold wind was raging, the heroine who was traveling in the snow with her boyfriend kept saying to herself: "I want to end all this." ”
In the more than half an hour of cramped car drama, the protagonists talk about physics, movies, philosophy and psychology, and the identity of the heroine is constantly changing.
Back at the manor where Jack lived as a child, the film presents in a fragmented way the changes in the lives of his father and nervous mother, who suffer from Alzheimer's disease, and we witness thirty years of history in this farmhouse in ten minutes, and the changing perspective of human names plunges us into a labyrinth of time and personality.
It wasn't until Jack drove the heroine back to his alma mater and we saw the dying scavenger that we learned that it was all his residual consciousness before he was on the verge of freezing to death in the snow.
All of the characters reflect Kaufman's thinking about "being." Kaufman said: "I think art should provide an opportunity to recognize our common human weaknesses, so instead of pretending to be an expert, I'm just telling you that I don't know anything." ”
Using such a perspective of anti-realism, Kaufman unreservedly exposes his self-knowledge to the viewer, and by placing himself in the axis of the unknown, he provides freedom for the difficulty of exploration, because the deeper he goes into the character, the more he understands himself. So while other screenwriters are doing their best to grasp where the plot is headed, Kaufman enjoys the unique experience of the character getting out of control.
<h1 class="pgc-h-center-line" data-track="4" > common human anxiety</h1>
Kaufmann put his own anxiety into the writing of the script, and his characters are metaphysical self-reflexive, and we can feel a unique sense of alienation and anxiety from his lens.
The obese and aging scavenger is familiar with film, physics and literature, and the beautiful things of his life before his death appear in his mind, and even fantasize about standing on the podium of the Nobel Prize and singing and dancing, but what awaits him is the tragic end of freezing to death at the school gate, and he finally ends up with the same fate as his mother's "pig eaten by maggots".
The discussion of identity and the meaning of life is a constant motif in Kaufmann's film sequence. The sense of uncontrollable loneliness itself is rooted in our existence. Kaufman accepted the idea and showed the inability to escape anxiety. In fact, each of Kaufman's characters is trapped in the personal world without being understood, and the author's creations and struggles exist in his work in an undisguised way, in which everyone's anxieties are exposed.
Kaufman's films do not seek to provide the viewer with a final, objective explanation. What he wants to do is to "expose" the loneliness and anxiety that are deeply rooted in what we as individuals feel. Describing an emotion is difficult, it can be the simplest or the most intricate, so Kaufmann resorted to abstract metaphors and symbols to convey the emotion. Because of this, it is difficult to repeat the narrative in Kaufman's work in words, but it is easy to be infected by the mood of the film.