Dogtown as a whole
"Dog Town" is a very test of patience and endurance of the film, its framing is very unique, the drama stage-like virtual set, like the floor plan of architectural design, with a white chalk grid painted on the ground instead of the main body of the space, the actors are completely no physical performance, open the door in the void, shuttle in the non-existent street, churches, houses, shops and even grass vegetable gardens are only marked with words to mark the existence.
"Dogtown" Douban score has 8.4, the first time I clicked on this well-known movie, I suspected that I had read the wrong resources, searched for information and repeatedly confirmed, and only dispelled my doubts when I saw Nicole Kidman appear. The empty scene is monotonous and simple, the character dialogue is long and boring, it is easy to cause visual fatigue, and several times they are patient and watch for ten minutes before quitting. It turns out that just like a good book in depth, only by sinking your heart to read the part that has been laid, will you find it excellent in hindsight.
Residents of Dogtown
The story is set in the United States during the Great Depression, and "Dogtown" is a small enclosed village located in the Rocky Mountains. The remote geographical location has created a small, isolated autonomous society, where the inhabitants of the town have no definition of authority and do not interfere with each other in their respective lives. The bells of the chapel represent the assembly, and the biggest community activity of the people is to listen to Tom, who calls himself a writer, trying to "awaken" the moral sense of the villagers with the height of spiritual leadership.
People work numbly for three meals, and in addition to filling their stomachs, they are mentally desolate. Grace had come to town with the sound of gunfire in the valley, she was richly dressed and beautiful, and the gray inhabitants of the town were dazzled by her. Grace's arrival completely breaks the town's lifeless tranquility, acceptance, which means the beginning of disorder...
The only dog in the town barked at Grace, and the hungry Grace took the meat bone from the dog basin. This flesh and bone made the kind woman fall into self-blame, because she took food that did not belong to her, and only by paying corresponding compensation could she feel at ease. Tom discovers the panicked Grace, a young man who has never left the town or even finished a novel, who has helped the town's snit deer to cultivate his unprecedented conceit. The beautiful Grace inspires Tom's desire for protection, and he tries to convince the residents to let her stay.
Grace has a complete and beautiful belief in human nature, the closure of the town, the indifference of the residents, and Tom's talk about "philosophy", all of which she understands as simple and simple, grace who has just fled from the prosperity of the city to the "far away", and believes that the dog town is the peach garden she is looking for. In order to stay, Grace made a gesture of compromise and flattery.
Tom found Grace
Although the residents were not friendly to Grace's arrival, tom persuaded them to agree to let Grace work as a reward for living in the town. Grace's excellent work ability and gentle personality gradually gained the recognition of the residents, and in the process of getting along, Grace's understanding, optimism and cheerfulness, like a gentle spring breeze blowing the town's long-standing gloom.
She takes care of the children of the anxious housewife, shares the worries of the black maid who takes care of the paralyzed daughter, chats with the elderly who are out of control after blindness, teaches the intellectually inferior young people to play Go, takes care of the apple tree with the farmer, comforts the frustrated bachelor... People feel sincerely fortunate about the arrival of this girl, from rejecting the unknown outsiders to rejoicing in acceptance.
The residents began to accept Grace
Everything began with the police putting a poster of Grace's "Wanted" on the bulletin board, and in the face of questioning, the townspeople united in hiding Grace's whereabouts. It was this cover-up that indulged the courage of the inhabitants, and the originally pure and flawless Grace had a handle on people, so they sent Grace to do more heavy labor. Grace was busy every day, and she didn't think there was anything wrong with the residents' oppression of her, and even felt that they could protect her in front of the police, which was enough to make her grateful to Dade.
The film can be roughly condensed into three parts: the unknown of Grace, the first time to see Grace's wanted notice, and the discovery that Grace is a major suspect in the "suspected murder". On this basis, the residents' attitude towards Grace has progressed layer by layer, and the evil of human nature has been stimulated step by step.
After learning that Grace was wanted, people initially only stopped feeling sorry when they beckoned her to work, and slowly felt that their cover for Grace deserved more rewards, so they began to pick up the quality of Grace's work, the blind man tried to inadvertently touch Grace's leg with his hand, and farmer Chuck began to lose his temper with Grace, thinking that she should not see him as a father of four children, but should treat him like an attractive opposite sex. Even Chuck's son was required to sit on Grace's lap all day or tell his mother she had beaten him.
After the second time the police arrive in town and Grace's "identity" is further upgraded, Chuck is the first to open up the evil of human nature. He forcibly possesses Grace's body and threatens to report to the police immediately if Grace dares to resist. The blind man throws his hand at Grace, and the women speak ill of Grace and beat her up for seducing Chuck... After Grace acquiesced to Chuck's violation, everything was like opening Pandora's box, and Grace's situation was pushed into a spiral of uncontrollable control.
Tom is Grace's only emotional reliance, this young man full of philosophy and ideals in life, has been rendering his own noble morality, Grace's dust does not stain his fantasy love, in the face of Chuck's fearlessness, the residents bully, he chooses to be silent. Because defiance meant upsetting the usual equilibrium of the town, in addition to the impassioned language, his material life depended on his retired father.
Tom strives to play the role of a supporter, stealing money from his father's hidden medicine cabinet and asking Grace to find a truck driver to take her away. Grace had gently comforted the frustrated old bachelor, but the truck driver who had collected the money climbed into the body and possessed her like Chuck. Even so, the truck driver eventually pulls Grace back to town, where she is betrayed by Tom, who discovers that he has lost the money, and Tom, out of fear, insists that Grace stole it. The townspeople already regard Grace as a slave, and it is naturally impossible to "allow" her to leave without permission.
Based on Grace's "evil deeds" of escaping and stealing, the townspeople tied her around her neck with a chain that locked her dog, and a large iron plate was attached to the other end of the chain. Grace had to drag the heavy iron plate to work every day, and late at night, the men of the town took turns burrowing into her hut and treating Grace like an animal.
What's interesting is Grace's attitude towards Tom, even though all the men in the town possess her, she wants to be pure with Tom. Because those people are based on blackmail and hurt, and Tom and her are because of love. Grace's perfect sense of morality makes her want to keep the purity and innocence of love. Tom has always tried to be a morally perfect person, at least above the townspeople, and the blind confidence given to him by culture has always made Tom want to distinguish himself from the people of the town.
However, Grace's refusal pains Tom immensely, and also makes Tom realize that he is no more noble than the townspeople. It was this that frightened Tom, and when he questioned Grace why all the men in the town could do it, but he couldn't, Grace's illusion of love was shattered.
Grace's presence confirms Tom's hypocrisy and ridiculousness, that his self-contained idealism is threatened by reality, and that his belief in saving the villagers' moral consciousness underpins his rightful ability to justify his ability to speak in church all day without doing anything for the sake of writing a book. Self-elusiveness causes Tom not to face his own problems, but to attribute it to Grace's existence, so he dials the phone left by the people who hunted Grace at the time, and there is no Grace dog town to have his survival value.
The most surprising thing about the movie is the reversal of the ending, Grace, who has always been the weak side, not a wanted criminal, but the only daughter of the gang leader. Grace chose to flee precisely to distance herself from her father's business. Grace chooses to stay in the remote dog town to escape her sins, and she firmly believes that it is wonderful to be away from the hustle and bustle of the town. However, there are also cloud shadows under the sun, the dark side of human nature, which exists all over the world.
Grace's Jedi Strike Back did not make people feel happy, but there was something heavier that touched the depths of human nature. The kind Grace ended the lives of all the people in the town, leaving only the dog she stole her flesh and bones, perhaps, only the dog, and did not ask for anything in return for her.
Xun Zi said, "Human nature, evil, its good, hypocrisy." Whether to "sexual goodness" or "sexual evil" has always been a topic of contention. The individual is to support the inherent evil of human nature, and education and secular etiquette are the process of making people slowly aware of evil and understanding good. Conventional moral requirements and the positive binding force of the law, let us follow the "right" code of conduct, once we enter a dog town-like environment, free from external constraints, all behavior does not need to pay a price, then can we still uphold strict self-requirements to do the best?
Dogtown itself is like an image, a vacuum of "outlaw land" that imprisons a numb and almost instinctive soul. The townspeople refuse to admit their cruelty in the face of Grace's accusations, and they repeatedly emphasize that "we protect her", and Grace only pays for her "protection". One can see the panic that they refuse to admit wrongdoing, because between the self-evaluation of good and evil, the vast majority of people tend to the former.
Grace has a wonderful conversation with her father in the car, and both sides are accusing each other of arrogance. Grace believes in the beauty of human nature, but her father defines everything with his evil eyes, grace wants to escape her father's arrogance of ignoring others and pursue the complete world she defines. Grace's father said something meaningful:
"You don't give others the opportunity to take responsibility for their actions, it's an extreme arrogance."
The people of Dogtown should be jealous of Grace, her tolerance to accept no matter what kind of treatment she faces. Her elegance, gentleness, innocence, and kindness all reflect the stupidity, indifference, selfishness, and insensitivity of the townspeople. Grace's bottomless tolerance has allowed the villagers to test her boundaries again and again, and there are many such people now, observing the "air bag" group in work and life, who, like Grace, will not refuse the demands of others, become the object of everyone's call, and the sense of boundaries that has been violated comes from the silent compromise again and again.
Although it is too cruel to say that Grace's encounter is somewhat self-inflicted. But as Grace's father said, she always satisfied her sense of moral nobility with kindness, did not resist the unreasonable demands of the villagers, defended their actions in various ways, did not give others the opportunity to take responsibility for their actions, and aided the courage of "evil". In the process of watching the movie, grace has always felt a little magical about the innocence of logical self-consistency, interpreting all unreasonable demands as "they protected me, they deserve it", so that it gave a perverse illusion: she could not do it.
Marina Abramovich, the "mother of performance art" of the former Yugoslavia, once made a famous performance art work "Rhythm 0", she anesthetized herself to sit quietly for six hours, and the audience can choose seventy-two objects on the table to contact her incapacitated. There are pleasant roses and honey in the items, as well as sharp objects such as daggers and bows and arrows.
She gave the exercise entirely to a general audience. As a result, the performance became her closest to death, someone cut her clothes, someone scratched her skin, Abramović was scarred, her eyes were full of tears, and someone pointed a loaded mobile phone at her, which was taken away by a sane onlooker in horror. After the anesthesia was over, she walked up to the audience and made a silent accusation to them with her eyes, and the crowd fled in fear.
These viewers are ordinary people in life, just like the residents of dog towns, living in peace and not doing anything evil. But when the sense of rebellion is lost and they are allowed to exercise sovereignty, the first person to choose to hurt determines the direction of the matter. When "evil" is dispersed throughout the group, the individual's responsibility is minimal, and all misconduct is rationalized.
There is a classic sentence in the novel "The Ragtag Crowd": Grace's meekness is like that of an anesthetized Abramovich, and if she categorically refuses when the townspeople make the first unreasonable request, these "ordinary bad people" will most like the scattered audience, after all, no one wants to bear the substantive accusation of "you are a bad person".
Grace concluded by saying that "it is better for this village to disappear into the world than to exist in this world." This time she is the exerciser of power, using her moral standards to define the life and death of the dogtown residents, and when you think about it, what is the difference between such "in the name of good" and actual "evil"?
-end-
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