What really affects our psychology and behavior is not the facts, but our interpretation of the facts. —[Au] Alfred Adler
Each of us has a corner in our hearts that we subconsciously do not want to approach. It may be someone who has been subconsciously forgotten by himself, it may be some place that he does not intend to get close to in this life, or it may be a memory that has been sealed by a heavy iron box. For those unpleasant people or things, we always use all our strength to escape.
Everyone in this world is saddled with untold stories.
Some people rejoice and look forward to those past, while others are always grumpy about them, trapped in them and unable to be relieved, and all their lives, they are struggling in the deep sea of despair and guilt.
"Manchester by the Sea" tells such a story of being trapped in the pain of the past and unable to extricate himself.
The film was shot in 2016, with its almost "life flow" film narrative skills and slow and orderly plot rhythm, the film has been nominated for a number of films after its release, and has won the British Independent Film Awards, the American Film Association Awards, the 74th Golden Globe Awards, the 89th Academy Awards Best Original Screenplay Award and the Best Actor Award, and also helped Amazon Pictures win its first Oscar nomination for Best Picture.
It is worth mentioning that the original idea of the film came from the producer Matt Damon (yes, the foreigner who starred zhang Yimou in "The Great Wall"). Damon thought the story fit the dark sad style of director Kenneth Ronagan and wanted him to write a screenplay with him as director and lead actor himself. However, after the script was completed, Damon had to abandon the film due to the conflict with the schedule of "The Martian", and although it was a pity, he also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in the Musical Comedy category and an Oscar nomination for "The Martian". And this "Manchester by the Sea" has also become the pinnacle of Ronagan's work.
Pictured is the director of "Manchester by the Sea": Kenneth Ronagan
The male protagonist of the film, Lee, is an ordinary community cleaner in the city of Boston.
He was taciturn, working all day and living on a meager salary. However, the residents of the community did not like him, because although he usually behaved carelessly, the gloom and darkness revealed on his body would always make people feel unpleasant.
He was indifferent in the face of the displeasure of the residents. When he went to the bar for a drink, a bold girl expressed his affection to him, but he also ignored him. Such a Lee is like the always gloomy sky of Boston, and there is not the slightest hope in sight.
It wasn't until the news of his brother George's death that Lee's murky life was stirred up in waves, and Lee, who wanted to handle his brother's funeral, had to set foot on the place where he had been fleeing again. And with the interspersed memory footage, we know that it was Li who had gone away to avoid any possibility of recalling the past, and it was Li's punishment for the unforgivable mistakes he had made.
Lee once had a very happy family. He has a loving wife, a lovely pair of daughters, and a newborn son. They had one of their happiest moments in their hometown of Manchester by the sea. One night, however, while Lee was out shopping for wine, he forgot to put down the protective panel of the fireplace before leaving, which caused everything that had been beautiful to be swallowed up by fire.
After the fire, randy, the only surviving wife, divorced him, and Lee fled in a hurry because he could no longer face the people he once knew and could not get past the level in his heart, and "exiled" himself to Boston.
During the day, he lives chaotically, and only at night, when he occasionally picks up a group photo of his former family, does he reveal the vulnerability that has been deliberately ignored during the day. I think many of us feel the same way about this scene. In the dead of night, fragility and memories always inadvertently rush out of the heart, and the strong or indifferent disguised during the day collapses in an instant, and we can only let the painful memories of the past rage, and even do not have the courage to resist.
Because he could not forgive the mistakes he had committed, it directly led to Li's chaotic nightmares in his future life, as a high praise from Douban said, "Since that night, Li is dying day by day."
In his best-selling book Mind Power: A Spiritual Journey to Reconcile with the Self, the American psychologist Printis Malford refers to this post-traumatic inability to live actively as "material thought," the mind that is obsessed with the past and unable to keep pace with the development of the body and time. One of the most striking features of this kind of thinking is "looking backwards."
"Looking backwards" is one of the main features of "material thought". It likes to reminisce about the past and mourn the past. In its retracement of the fading joys, it feels a constant stream of sorrow, for the happiness of the past will never return.
It is precisely because the happiness of the past is too happy that the pain it brings to us after it disappears without warning is even greater. For example, we have all experienced the death of a kind and lovely elder, right? The feelings that have been with each other for a long time suddenly lose contact at a certain moment, but the dialogue that has happened in the space where we have lived together and the things we have experienced together have not disappeared with it, so there will be a sentimental idiom of "touching the scene" and "seeing things and thinking about people", which will almost become the emotional division of a specific level of our nation.
Lee, under the condemnation and guilt in his heart, hid far away from distant Boston, precisely out of the escape from this "sad familiarity". In Boston, he did not dare to recall even a single memory of his hometown where he had lived for decades, because every time he remembered it, it was an unforgettable pain.
Occasionally he would think of those sunny mornings, when two lovely daughters rushed in to wake him up from his sleep, he turned his head and kissed his wife who was still sleeping, got up to pick up his son in the stroller, everything was so beautiful, beautiful like an unreal dream. But in the blink of an eye, the dream was punctured, and in front of him was a burning flame, and in his ear was the hoarse cry of his wife, and he opened his eyes hard in despair, and all he could see was the dark ceiling.
Life is beautiful because of memories, but it is also painful because of nostalgia. Printis Malford's expression of this pain goes like this: "Every regret, every sad thought, has taken away our excess vitality." They are a negative force that exacerbates our pain, gives our thoughts a tragic tinge, and the longer you use this power, the darker it becomes."
Under this painful torture, Lee had lost all his enthusiasm for life. However, his brother's death interrupted everything, and he even forced a guardian status into his will. However, can he, who has failed like that, be the guardian of his nephew Patrick? Whenever he thought about it, Lee was almost terrified, and he dreamed of a house on fire, and dreamed of two daughters asking him why he did not come to save himself.
Lee, who wakes up from a nightmare, weakly and desperately tells his nephew, "I cannot beat it." He never got over it, but he didn't notice that life was slowly getting better.
The youthful vitality of his nephew slowly infected him, and he slowly began to recall more and more of the past. Only by daring to recall can we be liberated. And in these memories, the dark memories of the big mistake slowly began to take up less space, and the time of the family's happy life slowly made a smile on his face.
As the Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler has pointed out, "what really affects our psychology and behavior is not the facts, but our interpretation of the facts." The most fundamental reason for Lee's escape and despair comes from the fact that he has taken all the faults on himself, because of his obsession with making a great mistake, he pronounced himself on his death sentence that night, and there will be no recovery; but if we let the grief stop at the sadness and bear all the faults with the face, then what we will take will be a completely different action.
The murky life in Boston was his punishment for himself. But when we changed our perspective and saw the changes brought to him by his lone nephew, we couldn't help but have a little expectation for manchester, which once represented despair and repression. The back of going to sea with his nephew and the calmness of attending the funeral with his nephew all let us see the possibility of him stepping out of the shadows of the past.
"Heaven never remembers the past," so what's the point of continuing to indulge in memories that doom you to ruin? There is no use in indulging too much in grief other than hurting your own body. People are entangled in seven emotions and six desires, regrets and sorrows are always like shadows, and throughout our lives, we are trying to reconcile with ourselves and the past. Only by learning to give up can we truly "look forward", and only by looking forward can we have a new life.