At about 20:00 p.m. on May 2, 2020, it was supposed to be a relaxing and enjoyable holiday, but a human tragedy was happening: Ma mou in Shaanxi Province took his paralyzed mother to a cemetery near the Yulin oil refinery with a trolley, abandoned it in an abandoned tomb, and buried his 79-year-old mother with a prepared shovel.
Although the victim was later found in time and survived, the incident caused widespread concern and in-depth discussion after the incident.
Are people really damned when they are old and have no value?
In modern society, why is such a tragedy happening?
Is Ma damned or is there something else going on?
Without making too much judgment here, I will share an old Japanese movie to see if there is some connection between the two, hoping to arouse the reader's thinking.
In ancient Shinshu, Japan, a small, isolated mountain village surrounded by mountains.
In the barren mountains, even if every family grows rice and potatoes, there is still not enough to eat.
Oyama, Fukushima
There was a boy abandoning a baby in the paddy field, because there was not enough to eat, it could only be like this. People seem to be accustomed to such things.
There is a strange custom in the village: in every household, only the eldest son can marry and have children, and other young men are not allowed to marry. As for the elderly, as soon as the man reaches the age of 70 and the woman reaches the age of 60, the eldest son must carry him to the mountain behind the village to worship the mountain god.
Ah Ling Po was almost old enough to visit The Mountain, but she was still healthy and had a lot to worry about. For example, when the eldest son Tatsuhira continues the string, when Ah Ling's wife is old, there must always be a woman to handle the housework and pass on the generations.
Ah Ling Po's family
And her second son, Ritsusuke, who was sexually depressed because he couldn't find a woman, was determined to find a woman for him before he went to visit The Mountain, at least to give him a taste of the pleasures of men and women. In order to express this strong primitive desire, the director even uses a white dog to illustrate the degree of hunger and thirst of Ritsu.
Food in the village is so scarce that food is equated with life here, and all human activities revolve around eating.
There is a family in the village that has too many children and has to take advantage of the dark night to steal unripe potatoes and other grain. The consequences were severe, with the whole family buried alive, while the participating villagers collectively divided up their family's food.
Villagers punish theft
The drama film directed by Masahira Imamura and starring Ogata, Sakamoto, and Akitake Castle was released in 1983. There is also a version directed in 1958 by Keisuke Kinoshita and starring Sadaji Takahashi and Atsuyo Tanaka. The 1958 edition adopts the style of a stage play, gorgeous and artistic, while the 83rd edition more realistically restores the isolated mountain village environment.
The Mountain Festival
In times of extreme material scarcity, human beings will always do terrible things. Should we say that human nature is inherently evil, or should we condemn it from the highest point of morality? The director does not directly indicate his likes and dislikes, but metaphorically describes the human situation through the living conditions of animals such as snakes swallowing mice, mantises eating husbands, and frogs eating insects.
Food color, sex also! Humans evolved from animals. When survival cannot be fully satisfied, what kind of human nature is there to talk about?
At the end of the "Examination of the Mountain Festival", when Ah Lingbo fulfilled all her wishes, she decided to go to the mountain. The eldest son, Tatsuhei, was speechless all the way, carrying his mother up the mountain. The winding mountain road guides Tatsuhei and carries his mother to his destiny destination.
Carry the mother up the mountain
When the scenery on the mountain is gone, the impressive sight is the remains of humans and the hovering crows. Finally, Tatsuhira understood that to worship the mountain god was to let the old man starve to death here. Although Tatsuhira was frightened and helpless, he still obeyed the rules of the village, reluctantly settled his mother in a flat place, went down the mountain by himself, and continued his hard life.
Abandoned old land
It is undeniable that in ancient times, "abandoning the old" was a more common custom. For example, in some areas of Hubei, there are sites of "dead kilns" or "abandoned old caves". In ancient times, as soon as people reached the age of 60, they were sent to the wild by young people to let the old people live in a pit, and the family would deliver food for three days, and then let the old man fend for himself.
Abandon the old cave
In the new century such as 2020, when materials have been greatly enriched, the ideal of the ancients "old and old and old" has been realized, but it is really unbelievable that such a tragic event as Shaanxi Ma buried his old mother alive has occurred.
The one who gave birth to me and raised me, my parents. In modern society, mixing well makes parents live better, if the mixture is not good, at least a bite of rice can always be eaten, right? It really can't work, and there are national policy guarantees!
Director Masahira Imamura portrays the evil of human nature to the extreme in this film. However, at the end, the director still leaves a glimmer of human divinity.
Death
When Tatsuhira looked pitifully at her mother, who was sitting alone in the snowstorm, and asked her if she was cold, the mother just waved her son back quickly. At this moment, a trace of divinity beyond human nature flashed by. It is at this moment that the audience is thoroughly moved, which is also the reason why this film is worth watching.
Human beings are not only selfish, sometimes even in the face of life and death, human beings still have a spirit of self-sacrifice.