Stephanie’s NetBlog

When I perform, I usually show a different state than I usually do in my daily life. When I’m singing I’m a confident and expressive person, but in my normal life, especially during my time studying in the US, I usually don’t interact with other people. The difference between onstage and offstage makes me feel like I become the character I play when I step on stage.

The first self and the second self are the first two theories of the self put forward by the French actor Coghlan in his book “The Double Personality of the Actor”, so that it is Coghlan who first completes the problem. But as early as the 18th century, when Diderot was watching the famous French actress Clairon, he had already vaguely discovered this unified and divided state of the actor’s “incarnation”. After detailing the state of Clairon’s performance, he said, “At this moment, the actress is a double personality: she is the petite Clairon and the great Agrippina.” The actor’s first self is the “control”, like a third-person monitor.

Actors have dual personalities. In “The Double Personality of the Actor”, there is a passage that says: “The two natures that exist in the actor are inseparable, but the first self of the character should be imagined as the main one. The first self is the soul, the second self is the body.”The ideal state of the actor is that the second self is like a pile of soft clay in the hands of a sculptor, who can make it into various shapes and play various roles as he pleases. And after playing another person, the actor should be able to return to the first self.

The actor’s two selves should be one. They are interdependent and inseparable. The actor controls the character and the character reacts to the actor. They complement each other. The first self controls the role and the second self influences the actor into the role.

The actor has two selves in performance, the first self and the second self. The first self is the ego, which is the actor himself, and the second self is the superego, which is the character portrayed by the actor. In the Chinese acting system, the actor is supposed to become the character during the performance, that is, the first ego is integrated with the second ego, but at the same time the first ego also controls the performance of the second ego. The contradiction between the actor and the character is, in general, that the actor himself is both the creator and the instrument of creation, as well as the created work of art itself. This explains why many viewers hate the bad guy in the play in their lives. At the same time, the audience loves a character and may also love the actor at the same time.

If one abandons the use of the first self and becomes totally immersed in the character, it can cause many problems.

For example: Lack of typicality in the role.

The actor portrays a character as a personality within a commonality, a typical character distilled. Or a collection of images. And the actor in the process of preparing the script, in the experience of life, and experience the role in the process of refining a suitable role for themselves. A role that starts from the first self, the actor himself. And if one is completely in the role, there is a lack of control and depth. — will come out of the role like that, but superficial.

The actor builds the character based on the script and life experience. Some of the roles in the script are known to the actor, and they usually fit the actor’s personality and have similar experiences, so the actor will do a great job in the role. Some roles are not known to the actor, so it becomes difficult to play them, so the actor needs to experience what the character is going through.

The opening scene, the eerie style of painting, the yellowish tones instantly pull people into the movie situation. The main character, Simon, is a very ordinary, unusually ordinary, in the buttocks can sit until retirement company work, surrounded by employees are also full of white temples, no friends, the only family members appear in the film mother, is also full of incomprehension of him. The only shade of gray in life is the one person he likes – the heroine Hannah.

Perhaps, as the film says: a person who has been alone for a long time, will get sick.

The original tasteless life is broken by a person who looks the same as him and whose name is the opposite of his. The main character is named Jameson Simon, and the emergence of this “personality” called Simon Jameson. Simon is weak, timid and unnoticed. Jameson, on the other hand, is confident, charming, and in the limelight. All the reviews say that Jameson is another personality of Simon, also, the name of the movie is called dual personality well. But ….. In my opinion: this is an ordinary person, in the internal pursuit of the real self in the road, the illusion of another debate with their own self.

Why do you say so? Because everyone talks to themselves. I don’t know about others, but I love talking to myself anyway. This is one of the very important reasons why I quit my phone. The self in myself also needs company, and company must take time. Instead of connecting with the other side of the phone, I’d rather spend time with myself first and internalize it.

So, Jameson is the self that Simon’s heart first aspired to: to please the girls, to be respected by his boss, and even to meet with the Colonel …… completely and totally met all his expectations. But slowly, he saw Jameson’s gray: whoring others work results, cheating girls feelings, and even his beloved woman Hannah is also deeply involved. Finally, everyone thinks that Jameson is the real existence, even Simon himself doubts his own reality. Originally will be “I am a lonely ghost” as a will to kill himself, but found opposite his beloved woman Hannah’s anomaly and ran over to save her. Perhaps it is the power of love, so that he had the courage to kill his other self Jameson in the end. And he then really became the end of Hannah and the police officer said: you are a unique person.

In fact, Simon’s victory over Jameson must be an inevitable ending, into the self’s perseverance. The movie shows the tangle and mess of a man’s search for himself, as Marxist philosophy says: development is the unity of forwardness and tortuousness. The process of Simon’s victory over James is too difficult, but how easy is it for us in reality? The world is full of choices and temptations, just like the weights on both sides of the scale, left and right, wavering.

The most impressive scene in the movie is the conversation between Jameson and Simon on the train home.

“I want so badly to never be inside myself.”

“It’s like you can reach through me if you want to”

“I don’t know what I want to be compared to the real me”

“I’m trying, but what I need to do I’m not able to do”

“I’m like Pinocchio”

“I’m just a wooden man”

“And not a real person”

“It makes me sad” (actually, the excerpts are all Simon’s words)

1. The Bad Seed
   The original Bad Seed was published in 1954 and made into a movie in 1955, becoming the cinematic progenitor of the evil children’s genre. 2018 sees McKenna Grace starring in a new version of the Bad Seed. First the movie starts with a shot of a dead cat in a pool, and then a clip of what is going to happen at the cast table. The next clip gives the female lead Emma then indifferently watching the dead cat inside the house, the first scene in which the female lead appears can be seen that she has no empathy for other beings.
   This lack of empathy for other lives is very common in real life, such as animal cruelty, and regardless of age, some people think it is a congenital disease, while I think most people with this tendency is due to childhood family education and the influence of the acquired environment. For example, when they are still children, these children may have been influenced by bad people or violent images, and began to have a tendency to abuse and violence. And when the child makes a mistake parents do not guide them verbally, but to abuse and beat.
   In the film Emma very carefully draws a circle on the calendar and corrects the trophy, and even the direction of the crayons on the dresser are placed in line, indicating that she is an extremely good and excessive pursuit of perfection. Later, during a dinner with her father, the actress expresses her determination to win the gold medal in the next competition, and also shows Emma’s excessive desire for the gold medal. Emma’s father realizes this and privately tells Emma not to take it too seriously, but when Emma’s aunt arrives, Emma’s father starts bragging that his daughter is about to win a gold medal, which is a serious double-standard behavior. It also reflects the extent to which children have become a tool used by parents to compare themselves to each other. Emma uses the words “faith, honesty, compassion, quality” when referring to the qualities of the winner, which is clear that she does not possess all of them, and suggests that at only nine years old, she is trying to pass herself off as such a student at school in order to win the award. Emma’s father, who cares only about his own vanity, uses his children as a tool for comparison, and such behavior also affects Emma, leading to Emma’s climbing mentality and the willingness to do whatever it takes to achieve her goals. And in such a conflict of repression and apparent good behavior, Emma develops a dual personality.

I think this film is a good illustration of the impact that family has on children. Children may pretend to be what their parents expect them to be because of the expectations and pressure they feel, but because their true emotions are repressed over time, they develop dual personalities, demons and angels.

2.Flashing Spirit

Wendy, the wife and mother of the female character, if Jack is to build up the “Shining” horror world of “Adam”, then Wendy is and his equivalent “Eve”. For example, the famous scene of axe splitting bathroom at the end of “The Shining”, its sense of horror is certainly inseparable from Nicholson’s performance, but at the same time we can not ignore Wendy’s reaction.
Shelley Duvall in “The Shining” to perform a frightened expression, not to lose Janet Leigh in the “Psycho” the famous scream of film history. And both expressions are very similar to the famous painting “The Scream” by the expressionist painter Munch, conveying the feeling of extreme fear. The Scream” if this shot is only Jack and the axe, and not cornered Wendy, and there is no expression of extreme fear like the famous painting “The Scream”, it is just Jack smashing the door, the sense of terror is not to speak of. For an abuser, the abusive behavior must be implemented to an object, the audience can accept the fear brought about by the abusive behavior. Wendy in the film played a good role of the abused. So how did Kubrick deal with the role of Wendy? In short, the first half of the film constantly weakens and alienates Wendy, while the second half constantly abuses her mentally and physically. This “half” of the dividing line, is Jack and bartender Lloyd that classic dialogue scene. The bartender is the only one who has ever been in the hotel. When Wendy is mentioned in the conversation, Jack uses the extremely derogatory word “sperm bank” (sperm bank), and Lloyd replies with the phrase “Women. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” These messages indicate that the first half of the movie is extremely derogatory to Wendy (the woman represented), and the evil spirits in the haunted store are also a side-note to remind Jack to get rid of Wendy (the woman) as soon as possible as an obstacle. Jack’s conversation with bartender Lloyd is interrupted by a shrill scream from Wendy, and this scream precedes Wendy’s appearance in the scene, resulting in a very abrupt transition. This deliberate audio-visual desynchronization is the exact opposite of Kubrick’s dubbing/soundtrack principle of “when you see a dog coming, you hear a dog barking”. The reason for this operation is that Wendy could not see the ghost at this time, and Kubrick did not use surreal means to show the ghost throughout the film. Wendy can not be at the bar to bump into Jack and the bartender conversation, so only with an abrupt transition caused by the end of this conversation.
Before this line of demarcation, Wendy’s characterization is summarized as “a good wife and a good mother, the shortcomings of the family”. Wendy’s first shot in the movie is her and her son Danny having breakfast at home. On the other hand, it shows that the whole family relies on the father Jack alone to support the family, Wendy is a gentle housewife. After Jack gets a job at the hotel, the hotel staff makes introductions to Jack’s family, during which a lot of time is reserved for the head black chef. He introduces Wendy to how well-stocked the hotel is, continuing to reinforce the role of Wendy as the person responsible for taking care of her husband and son’s lives. The film has a black screen subtitled “One Month Later” and Wendy reappears, pushing the hotel’s food cart to deliver breakfast to her husband, which is the first time Wendy comes to Jack at the hotel. Wendy’s behavior took over the previous bridge of her visit to the food warehouse, and continued her “housewife” persona. Wendy was in a relaxed mood doing housework, and she said things to Jack like what time it is, what I made you to eat, the view outside is nice, do you want to go for a walk with me and so on. When Wendy brings breakfast to Jack’s room, Kubrick’s shot of Jack is always the Jack who appears in the mirror, not the real Jack. This mirror reflection clearly implies that at this time Jack has begun to be possessed by the evil spirits in the hotel, he is no longer entirely himself. Next, Kubrick continued to portray Wendy as a good wife and mother, while slowly pressuring Wendy mother and son. Wendy wants Jack to go for a walk with her, but Jack refuses on the grounds of writing, and she has to go with her son to wander the huge and spooky maze.
Wendy went to Jack for the 2nd time in the movie. But this time Wendy’s appearance is completely different from the first time she walks head-on to the camera lens. We can see that Kubrick used a long shot, Wendy from the far corner of the hotel lobby into the picture, looking very small, at first did not even see Wendy appear, while Jack is like the owner of the hotel in the middle of the hotel, controlling the whole scene. Looking back at Wendy’s first visit to Jack, she has almost always walked head-on toward the camera, and this camera position conveys the state of the character is mostly confident and relaxed. And look at Wendy’s appearance this time, as if from a bloody mouth of the hotel, and Jack seems to be one with the hotel, together to bring Wendy a great sense of oppression. This also foreshadows the oppression of men for women. This time Jack’s attitude towards Wendy is extremely bad, and the shots of Wendy when she comes out also suggest that Jack’s relationship with the hotel is getting closer and closer, while his wife is getting more and more distant and oppressive. These are all the major scenes of Wendy before Jack and the bartender talk (formalize the contract) demarcation line. These scenes, Wendy is doing the work of a typical housewife, wandering outside the main story line, and the relationship with Jack increasingly tense and distant, but also increasingly feel the oppression from Jack. The main purpose of this shot is to convey what the typewriter typed, but instead of showing us the eerie words written all over the manuscript paper at once, Kubrick evokes the viewer’s curiosity through Wendy, who finds out about it. Wendy’s numb and shocked expression upon seeing the words begins to twist as she realizes that the phrase is written on every page. (The familiar becomes unfamiliar.) By this time Wendy is 100% sure that her husband is in trouble and could kill her at any moment. Jack, a character in the lower middle of the scene dispatch, but a threat to the point of view above, while the light on the character’s face is gradually reddening blood, while Wendy’s little physical relationship is retained, extreme compression at the edge of the frame. This creates the magical effect of Jack, who is in the lower part of the frame, but brings a sense of oppression upwards. Wendy as the female lead, and also represents a universal female role that Kubrick wanted to convey, is naturally the top priority in the film.

This film reflects the growth of women, from the initial tendency to attach themselves to their husbands and take care of their fathers and sons to finally become great mothers who save their sons.

3. Coraline

This story is actually about a girl’s dream. In the real world, her mother treats Caroline badly and completely disregards her spiritual needs. So, in the dream, Caroline projects the bad parts of her mom onto the ghost mom. In exchange for good food, new clothes, and other material things, the ghost mother wanted to sew buttons on Caroline’s eyes. Caroline’s dream expresses the meaning that the bad mother tries to satisfy in material terms as much as possible, in exchange for the imprisonment of Caroline’s mind and her dependence on her mother. In fact, it is not accurate to say ghost mom, it should be bad mom, and this bad mom is represented by a spider. It gets a web, in fact, represents a very strong psychological control, in addition to the web, the spider also has a characteristic, it has a very large number of claws, a very large number of claws is the role of what? You can’t escape my hand, these two things means a very strong control. In the movie, the spider mother’s hand is a steel skeleton. Steel symbolizes toughness and coldness. The skeleton symbolizes the lack of love, no love would be only the skeleton without flesh and blood. (A very controlling mother gives the impression that she is in charge of the head and feet everywhere, and that she is in charge of him, as if he is not free at all, as if he is tied up, his feeling is that his mother is like a spider. Why is it his mother and not his father? Would a father be like a spider? Yes, at least in Chinese families, the spider role is mostly played by the mother, and not only that, the spider image is most of the time a symbol of the woman. The father’s control is with the force of violence, while the mother’s control is pervasive, like a web, the mother is a little more in charge of details and specific things, so then, the spider here is very often a mother.

Coraline’s “mother-monster” role of physical performance, reflecting the dual nature of a mother, the real mother lack of care for coraline, busy with work. The other mother is considerate. They transform into each other’s roles

4. Black Swan

Visions

Nina’s frequent visions are the most direct reflection of her split personality. The struggle between “white and black” within Nina’s mind is clearly expressed. Nina was the perfect candidate to play the White Swan, but due to the lack of charm can not play the role of the Black Swan. But in order to get on stage, she had to play two roles in one. From then on, she starts to desperately lean towards the direction of the Black Swan, rebelling against her mother; throwing away all her stuffed toys; the sexy and confusing Lily, the embodiment of the Black Sky, becomes the idol of Nina’s heart, and she fantasizes about becoming the perfect “swan” like Lily, but is secretly afraid and jealous of Lily taking her place as the main character, who is also Nina’s subconscious Lilly is also the strongest competitor in Nina’s subconscious. Nina defies her mother’s advice to stay out all night with Lily, drink and take drugs, and she feels the freedom and debauchery of the “black swan” more truly. All these behaviors are the manifestation of Nina’s self-release and desire to turn into another dark personality.

The absence of a father, the “symbiosis” of mother and daughter

Nina’s father is completely “absent”, she lacks the power of fatherhood, and her personality lacks a balance of rational factors. In the family relationship, she and her mother are in a tense confrontation, lacking a balance between father and daughter, mother and daughter, and parents (husband and wife).
Nina’s mother is always a widow dressed in black, and one can imagine her strict training of Nina from childhood, as she desires her daughter to fulfill her long-cherished dream. The mother and Nina are “symbiotic” and do not develop their own independent personalities.
The single mother, burdened with the stress of life and finances alone, places all her hopes and meaning on her child. The mother lives for the child, and the child lives for the mother. When the mother again emphasizes that she gave up her dancing career for Nina, Nina wants to say, “But I’m already twenty-eight years old …….” The mother reads the words behind this statement. The mother reads the meaning behind this sentence – “Please stop using me as an excuse to escape your own sense of worthlessness” – but she does not have the courage to face such a cruel truth, and Nina cannot bear to pierce the thin veil between mother and daughter.

Personality structure; ego, self, superego

According to Freud’s theory of “personality structure”, personality is divided into “ego”, “self” and “superego”. three levels. The ego is the social self, which follows the principle of reality; the superego is the ideal self, which follows the principle of morality. The ego and superego are often in conflict with each other and need to be regulated by the ego.
Nina’s mother symbolizes Nina’s superego, the white swan, while Thomas and Lily symbolize Nina’s ego, the black swan, and the two forces are constantly pulling at Nina, causing her to tear apart. Nina is constantly repressing her ego, and she does not accept her side as the “Black Swan”.

This is a very similar genre to the previous one, where the mother shifts back and forth between victim and perpetrator. First of all, as a single mother raising her daughter alone is very poor, but also because of this brings a lot of depression to her daughter eventually leads to a tragic end.

5. The Duality of Fame: the Divided Self of Celebrity

“But to be talked about is to be part of the story, and to be part of the story is to be at the mercy of the storytellers – the media and the audience. Celebrity, therefore, is not so much a person as it is a story about a person – which is arguably about the social characteristics of each of us. Like some particular aspect of ourselves, celebrity offers the possibility that there is an alter ego inside, one that is not entirely defined by the social story. Under the uninterrupted spotlight, the ongoing tension between these stories – the talked about self and the unexpressed self – becomes more acute. Similarly, the fundamental conflict of modern fame is between the ideal isolation that has served as the propagation of fame since the eighteenth century and the expanded impulse toward recognition that has developed under the pressure of secularization and expanded franchise. In one view, the famous person exists in a solitary position of prominence; in the other, it is part of the audience’s story about itself.”

Just as children develop a dual personality, facing the expectations of their parents, keep displaying a state of sameness that leads to a split personality. (Like the little girl in Bad Seed)The mother’s identity is constantly shifting; she can be a powerful protector of her children or a figure who undermines their mental health.

6. US

Us is a thriller that focuses on a family that comes to a beach for a vacation and is then attacked by clones. These clones were created by the government to manipulate real people, but the operation failed, resulting in the clones mechanically replicating the lives of people above ground underground. The people above ground live a life of beaches and amusement parks and families. Below the ground are the clones in the tunnels that nobody cares about. Like marionettes, they are clumsy and awkward imitations of humans in the upper world. When the people below the ground strangled and replaced the people on the ground, it gave me a feeling of fear. The person on the ground becomes a prisoner, a tortured person who cannot escape in hell. She is determined to break the bondage of the class between the upper and lower worlds and leads the person below to kill her true body, not forgetting that she is also the true body, but the change of class also changes everything. This reversal back and forth between identities is frightening, just as the mirror replaces the real self, just as the painting in Dorian’s portrait replaces Dorian.

Film US can be connected to Freud’s uncanny. Those familiar things become strange can be frightening. Because the clones in the world know all your behavioral habits, have exactly the same appearance and family environment, and are no different from you except for your soul consciousness.

7.

FILM REVIEWS Black Swan (Dir. Darren Aronofsky) USA 2010 20th Century Fox International

Ballet school principal Thomas Leroy introduced his cast to the new season featuring Swan Lake, and he needed a new lead dancer, one who could embody the naive
of the White Swan and the seductive Black Swan. Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” takes us on a journey from rehearsal to the stage as a delicate young woman, Nina, prepares for the role and undergoes a tragic transformation. Rather than delving into the world of ballet, Aronofsky’s latest film uses it as a beautiful backdrop for his psychological story of artistic obsession. Nina’s life consists of dancing and nothing else. She seems to have no interest in anything other than ballet, and her mother, a classic horror movie psycho mother, (truly frightening) lives at home and has a tighter grip on her daughter than Nina herself has on reality. Already unpopular with the other dancers and with her sudden promotion to prima ballerina, the company’s introduction of a new dancer (Mila Kunis) throws Nina off balance. Nina’s descent into madness is accelerated when her obsession with perfection clashes with Thomas’s insistence that she needs to lose herself.
Lily’s fluid and effortless movements in the dance are consistent with her promiscuity, while Nina’s inability to seduce the audience is due to her perceived crippling sexual indifference, so Thomas does not suggest that
Nina might need to touch herself, but instead instructs her to go home and “touch herself. Of course, if “Black Swan” is about a woman’s psychological breakdown, then the choice of ballet requires the dancers to be beautiful and delicate on the surface while concealing all sorts of things society might consider ugly, such as deformed feet and eating disorders. Nina was a professional athlete with an exquisite body, but she took no notice of her mental health, and her psychological deterioration manifested itself in slow and subtle damage to her body.

In this article it is mentioned that Nina lost the balance of her life due to multiple factors, which led her to develop a dual personality. Nina’s mother’s strictness, described as “neurotic”, is mentioned in this article. And the conflicting views that led Nina into madness. Including the pressure brought to nina by the new dancer is a sign of the mental stress that causes nina’s heart to deteriorate.

8.

CHRISTIAN COLLEGE CHENGANNUR, KERALA

Vol. 1 Issue 1 Dece. 2016

This article describes the relationship between Nina, who plays Black Swan, and her mother.
Nina’s behavior is different from that of an ordinary person. When we carefully analyze her behavior, we can see the image of a paranoid schizophrenic overlapping with the image of Nina. Nina’s mental illness is the reason for her tragic life and death.
What really happened between Nina and her mother, Erica?
The reason why Erica feels the need to restrict Nina’s movements and social interactions. This also explains why Erica protects Nina and places stuffed animals and other infantile
childlike elements in Nina’s room. It is possible that Erica molested Nina. In the film, we never see Erica in the sex scenes. But the film gives us huge clues as to this possibility. We can attribute a “homosexuality” in the relationship between Erica and Nina in the film.
The rotten mother-daughter relationship in the film makes us aware of the inadequacy of laws that support heterosexuality.” Queer theory asserts that heterosexuality confers certain privileges and constructs a hierarchy of sexual values through discourse. This constructivist view of sexuality suggests that sexual identity is always socially determined. It is never static and is in constant need of reaffirmation.”
The mother in the film is homosexual. She molests her own daughter. This seems to be a crime and is unacceptable in a social setting. It is certainly a serious crime by the mother. In the film, we never encounter a sexual act between a mother and her daughter. We see Erica forcibly undressing Nina. But why does Erica molest Nina? It is simply because the constraints of society prevent Erica from having a female partner. This leaves her in utter confusion and mental conflict. Erica slowly transferred her sexual feelings to her daughter. She probably began molesting Nina at a very young age. Gradually, Erica may have taken complete control of Nina.
Her passion for becoming a Swan Queen and the trauma she experienced contradicted each other, pushing her from the borders of sanity to the depths of insanity.
Nina can only become the Black Swan by killing Lily, which is also a symbolic killing of her mother. As a final act of defiance, she kills Lily in a hallucination, but unfortunately
, in reality, she kills herself. This proves that her trauma is irresistible and inescapable. Scary events horrific events may include accidents, rape, or natural disasters. Trauma cannot be seen as a sudden reaction to an event. Trauma cannot be seen as a sudden reaction to an event. It develops over a period of time. Trauma can be man-made or natural.
Nina began to experience trauma at a very young age and and it stayed with her for a long time. time. Traumatic experiences followed her like shadows throughout her life. New painful experiences added to her past trauma. trauma. Homosexuality in mother-daughter relationships, workplace exploitation and abuse in the workplace, etc., were the root causes of Nina’s trauma and underlying causes of Nina’s trauma and madness.

In my opinion this essay reflects the relationship between nina and her mother, but also the influence of her mother on Nina. In Nina’s view her mother is the one who caused her trauma, but at the same time her mother, as a homosexual, is not accepted by society, which leads to the “homosexuality” of Nina, which is a sad act in itself.

9.

All roads lead to the Abject: The monstrous Feminine and Gender Boundaries in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.

American culture tends to suppress those who may threaten “the interests of enslaved labor and patriarchal families. Such threats include, among others, the sexuality of women and female behavior, any non-normative heterosexual sexuality, racial (usually non-white) subcultures, foreigners, alternative ideologies
, the proletariat, and children. Horror films often portray such marginalized groups and ideas as monsters, as in Hm1- Making a Monster” with gay makeup artist Pete However, “The Shining” shows us a white parent who is convinced he must discipline his family by killing and dismembering them with an axe.
The film’s apparent demonization of Jack is so overwhelming that critic Frank Mancher felt compelled to defend the villainous protagonist: “By failing to examine closely why Jack is seduced by false myths of success and patriarchal tyranny, we ignore the appeal of that seduction and focus only on the symptoms”

This article describes Jack in The Shining, and in watching horror movies we rarely focus on why the man is scary and frightening and why he becomes scary. This essay made me realize that I could use it as an overstuffed paragraph to explore characters that are frightening, like why Nina’s mother became the way she did. I will put this in the paragraph after Black Swan.

10.

The Uncanny Sublime: Black Swan

Nina still lives with an overprotective mother who gave up a sort of ballet career of her own in order to be a mother. The theme of “Black Swan” is that of the double of self and This is reflected in Nina’s search for confirmation of her sense of self by habitually studying the way she looks in a mirror or other reflective surface. Indeed, the mirror is a very prominent scenic element in Black Swan, through which the film expresses the multiplicity of Nina’s self-identity.
In “Black Swan,” the mirror functions to showcase Nina’s repressed sexuality, which is ultimately embodied in her incredible double. (and Lili)

As mentioned above, a central theme of “Black Swan” is Nina’s repressed sexuality.
her relationship with her overprotective mother, Erica. In fact, Erica personifies each of Nina’s troubled relationships: she is her idol (Beth), her acquaintance (Lily) and her mentor (Thomas).
There is a rivalry between mother and daughter in that, on the one hand, Erica seeks personal validation through Nina and, on the other, she sees Nina as an “improved” version of herself. As Mark Fisher points out, this “fatal contradiction” contains “the structure of the double bind that is the basis of schizophrenia: two contradictory demands (“do better than me”, “don’t surpass me”) at the same time”
This embodiment of the mother’s jealousy over her daughter is also reflected in the colors. Except for Nina’s room, which is pink, all the other rooms are predominantly dark green. In Western culture, green is usually associated with toxicity and jealousy, while pink represents sweetness and all things “girly”. In Nina’s room there is a green armchair which represents the toxic influence Erica has on her life. In her masturbation scene, Nina notices with horror and shame that Erica has been sleeping in this green armchair, and she rushes to hide under her pink duvet. Finally, in a fit of rage, Nina destroys all the pink things in her life. First, she slams her music box to the ground, then collects all her soft toys and shoves them into the scrap well. By destroying pink, by destroying pink, Nina gives up the realm of feminine delicacy, which satisfies her inner darkness.

In my opinion this essay helps me firstly to establish the dual personality of Nina in Black Swan, and secondly it also tells the story of the mother’s jealousy towards her daughter, which leads to the trouble she brings to her daughter and thus creates a dual personality.

“Looker” is a suspense / science fiction film that reviews and satire on media, advertising, television influences on the public, and absurd standards of beauty. Dr. Larry Roberts, a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, is confused. The four women in the film talk about their imperfections, some of whom think the bridge of their nose needs to be a little two more millimeters higher, but they are subtle changes invisible to the naked eye. And the cosmetic surgery is therefore required. When the models later begin to die in mysterious circumstances, he discovers that they are all linked to the same advertising research firm. Digital Matrix Research uses a scoring system to rate advertising models to measure the combined visual impact of various physical properties in television advertising. Each model has a contract to scan her body to digitally create 3D computer generated models and then animate the 3D model for commercial als.

It is a 1981 film that satirizes media, advertising, television influences on the public, and absurd standards for beauty. With this demand for female perfection, the mannequins appeared in the 1950s. Such patterns of behavior were criticized by 20th-century women, fiction writers, and historians. Especially in the fashion industry, especially models, reducing models to specific, often idealized body parts. The mannequin shows this social expectation very well. Because the mannequin is built based on the female body, but the model is not exactly consistent with the female body. These models are more “perfect”, they have perfect body proportions and golden proportions shape of the face. These models are lifeless, but lifelike, just like women who really have life. It creates a sense of fear, as Freud said “… that terrible thing, it leads us back to what we knew long known and were once very familiar with.”

On a rainy night, 11 guests of various identities were forced to gather in a suburban motel. An unknown commonality connects them and leads to an irreversibly tragic ending… This is the opening scene of the famous film “Identity” directed by James Mangold.

At the beginning of the movie, there is also a scene that seems to be unrelated to the main line: a murderer with a tragic childhood experience who killed six people in a row on his birthday on May 10, was discovered by a psychiatrist on the eve of his execution and wrote a book Strange diary, a hearing was held urgently… The sight returned to the previous hotel. Among the 11 guests on the rainy night, female stars, young men, prisoners, middle-aged couples, young women and children died one after another in a strange manner. At the same time, they also found countdown-like number plates (No. 10, No. 9… …). Then, the driver Edward was woken up in the hotel and saw his psychiatrist, and the biggest mystery of the whole play was also revealed. Through the conversation with the doctor, Edward learned that he was not the real Edward, but a murderer inside the body. One of the eleven split personalities, and the remaining personalities hide the murderous personality who once committed murder. Edward, who represented justice, was ordered to return to the personality hotel in danger, eliminated the fake police personality representing violence, and finally saved the woman who represented kindness, and left the terrifying personality hotel…

Let’s talk about a core concept in the film – split personality. Schizophrenia, scientifically known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) in the United States, the diagnostic criteria for split personality are as follows: presence The disintegration of two or more identities characterized by distinct personality states may be described as an experience of possession in some cultures. Disruption of identity involves a marked disruption of self-formation and sense of self-control, accompanied by changes associated with affective, behavioral, consciousness, memory, perception, cognition, and/or sensorimotor function. These signs and symptoms can be observed by others or reported by the individual. There are recurring gaps in recalling everyday events, important personal information, and/or traumatic events that are inconsistent with ordinary forgetting. These symptoms cause clinically significant distress or result in impairment of social, occupational, or other important functioning. The barrier is not part of a widely accepted cultural or religious practice. NOTE In children, these symptoms are not better explained by imaginary playmates or other fantasy games. These symptoms cannot be caused by the direct-loading physiological effects of a substance. (For example, amaurosis or disorganized behavior during alcoholism or partial onset of other body disorders.) In layman’s terms, split personality is the feeling that several different souls are inhabiting one’s body; At different times or scenarios (or after being stimulated), certain personalities will wake up and “control” the body’s initiative, and “they” also have their own identities, character traits, and behavior habits. Moreover, the subsequently derived personality may inherit some of the memory of the former personality, but the former has no impression of the latter.

The characteristics of clinical symptoms and the course of the disease in general DID patients are considered to be closely related to the early trauma experience, and acute stress response and post-traumatic stress disorder can be seen clinically. For example, the murderer in the movie “Deadly ID” is due to his tragic childhood past (the mother was unable to raise him and often beat and scolded him, and the father was absent from his life for a long time), which caused his tragic situation of split personality. The eleven personalities split in the film also reflect his various pasts or expectations from the side: Edward the driver represents his inner sense of justice (superego), middle-aged couples are the expectations of his ideal family, The woman who planted the orange tree is his projection of the ideal mother… It is true that split personality is a very rare disease in our lives, but we can still learn from the movie: the family education that everyone receives from childhood is It is very important that if the parent’s care is lacking for a long time in the process of a child’s growth, even if it does not lead to serious consequences such as the formation of a split personality in the child, their minds are certainly not very sound, which is not conducive to their health and peace of mind. growing up.

A defense mechanism is a holistic, natural, adaptive way in which a person experiences the environment, usually when people want to avoid or control something strong and scary. Freud proposed four defense mechanisms.
The first: repression. Freud called repression “the basis of the entire theoretical structure of psychoanalysis”. Repression is an active effort in which a person tries to keep the content of his pain out of consciousness through repression.
The second is sublimation. It is a so-called successful defense mechanism in which people convert impulses that are not socially acceptable into behaviors that society can accept and even reward.
The third denial. Deny the existence of unacceptable facts.
In the primary defense mechanism, it is divided into concentrated form.
Extreme idealization and devaluation: The more a person lacks independence, the stronger the sense of dependence, the easier it is to induce idealization, and idealization will inevitably lead to devaluation.
Self-splitting: Splitting is a black-and-white defense that is either completely good or particularly bad.
Somatization: If children do not learn to use language to name and express their feelings, they tend to express their feelings through the body, usually by using illness instead of language.

If you, as a woman, were unfortunately born in ancient times, how many levels would you have to overcome to survive “lucky”?

Even if you survive and survive, how much inhuman treatment will you have to experience before you can reach the end and end well?

Level 1: Drowning kills baby girl

In an era when birth control methods were extremely scarce and backward, poor families were faced with the contradiction between the continuous birth of children and the lack of ability to raise them, so parents could only kill baby girls with low “cost-effectiveness”.

Second pass: child bride

If your parents think that giving birth to a daughter is to help someone else’s family to raise a daughter-in-law, and they have to endure the pain of being separated from their relatives when they marry their daughter, they will be poor and change their minds. They should just give you away from a young age and give them to rich people to support their wives. Also get some money.

The third pass: martyrdom

Either die for her husband and become a “martyr girl”. Swallowing gold, drinking arsenic, going on hunger strike, hanging yourself, you can die any way you want, but you have to be quick. As soon as your husband dies, you have to die immediately.

You don’t want to die, you have to be a widow and be a “wife”. When the in-laws are sick, they have to “cleanse and taste the feces, eat the gangrene to heal the relatives”, that is, to taste the feces to identify the disease, and suck the abscesses on their bodies.

Stage 4: Selling a Wife and Renting a Concubine

Husbands may also sell their wives for money. Treating women with clearly marked prices as goods, the 5-year contract of the Republic of China “sells a wife”, a man named Chen Zhengjie “sold” his wife to a man named Jia Fuxiang, and gave birth to a child for the Jia family. The children born, whether male or female, all share the Jia family name. For this, Chen Zhengjie can get 180 pieces of ocean. This contract contains the fingerprints of the wife, the middleman, the witness, and the writer, but the most important person in the contract, the pawned woman Chen Zheng’s. She was not even allowed to put a bond on this contract of persecuting and slaughtering herself.

In this contract, every word and every word is related to her, but there is no recognition between the lines that she is a person.

In a rational and normal society, it is also difficult to exist independently. Super ego is moral self, is the last formed in the personality and is the most civilized part, it reflects the children grow up from the social moral requirements and behavior standards, it is differentiated from the self that the self-critical moral control part, and I am in a direct and sharp conflict. This state based on high morality and even beyond morality cannot maintain a long vitality in a complex society. They are always a minority, a moral symbol for respect rather than a practical operational template. We have said that Ben and super ego are always opposite, to a normal society will not allow Ben I to occupy the mainstream, super ego is the same. In the book “Mirror Flower edge” once wrote about a “gentleman country”, everyone in this country is a gentleman. But the country is full of rigid and mechanical versions, which cannot be called a normal society.

Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, man, always, and will always be selfish. The profit-seeking and primitive desire in human nature provide me with fertile soil for Ben I. It can be said that a normal person can never drive away from Ben I, and also can he achieve a lasting superego state. And the state of the self is what a normal society needs. Self is the conscious part of personality, it is the perceptual system formed from the influence of the external world, and it is the part differentiated from this self under the repeated lessons of reality. This part, guided by the principle of fact, needs both to gain satisfaction and to avoid suffering. Self-responsible contact with reality is the arbiter of the Ben I and the Chao I, who can both supervise the Ben I and satisfy the super I. Both Ben and ego are absorbed into the state of self. They cannot achieve a long-term form of existence, but can only express themselves in different forms at one moment. For example, when we encounter criminals, our instinctive desire is to protect ourselves first, and then to impose humanitarian crisis management. At the moment of committing a crime, I will automatically activate the defense mechanism to ensure that my interests are not harmed. However, due to a series of factors such as morality, we will enter the value judgment. At this moment, our moral level and values will play an important influence. Some people will choose to continue to maintain my state, such as the Yao Jiaxin after continuing to fill the knife, such as the cold passers-by in the little Yueyue incident. However, some people enter the super state of self because of their own factors or objective conditions, such as the brave college entrance examination students, such as the public sympathy skyrocketing when they encounter a major disaster.

Social stability lies in balance, balance of the forces in all aspects, do not let either side to polarization, the same. A stable society needs to be able to maintain a balanced state of self. It is a perfect balance between destructive power and high morality. It is also the driving source of social development and an important means to maintain a stable order.

The reason for the appearance of Taylor hidden in Jack’s heart reflects every one of us who is not particularly comfortable in this world and unwilling to change the status quo. There is a concept in society – “social regulation”, which refers to the process of educating family ethics to shape an egoistic child into an educated social person. This process occurs subtly, for example, in order to gain the approval of peers. , and constantly motivate himself to become stronger. Judging from the male protagonist’s existing work position, perhaps he has always been the one who better adapts to social values.

But if the nature is suppressed for a long time, people will resist sooner or later, and the body is the one that sends out the first signal – that is, he starts to lose sleep. In the end, he had to choose a method that was not recognized by the society, but he was still subconsciously controlled by the social consciousness. Under the contradiction, a second personality appeared to help him solve this psychological conflict.

Taylor’s development, at first, he was a spiritual leader who resisted secular powers. In fact, the military empire he built was another power-a series of “can’t ask questions” rules in the organization, just like this they want to resist The rules of oppression in society are just as annoying. Sometimes, resistance will return to resistance itself, just like staring at the abyss, and the abyss will stare at you; because anti-control is also a kind of control, once you adapt to a certain form of comfort, it is difficult for you to surpass it. The further back in the film, the more the male protagonist feels the shackles of the organization he established. This is a joke God made to every rebel.

Is Norton dead? Where was the gun shot, and whether there were bullets? The director leaves the right to make choices to the audience, and to find the answers to these questions is torturing our hearts – after this barren and fruitless resistance, should we choose to return to the established standards of society, or choose to die and make it clear own attitude? Jack’s experience proves that life is a war that cannot be won. But you can also understand that life lies in the meaning of its struggle, not the victory of the struggle, so choose a positive attitude to survive.

However, the question of practical operation is – as a modern person with emotional weaknesses, after realizing the absurdity of society and the sighs that he cannot get rid of, can he bravely and resolutely go forward without suffering from “insomnia” again. Troubled? A standardized answer is “Love life even when it’s so dark”. So the final shot is sensible, kill yourself, or keep going? This question will run through our lives – each of us will, at some point, be the Jack standing in front of the window with a pistol and making our own choices in the face of a collapsed building.

The Sandman novel describes the horrific story the protagonist experiences. Influence the final protagonist to death.

As a child, Nathaniel secretly observed Coppelius from behind a curtain because she was curious about the so-called sand man, but when Copelius found out, he was so angry that he had to gouged out her eyes. The young Nathaniel was traumatized because of this, and he could not rely on such a shadow as an adult, and finally chose death to free himself.

The intimidation completely frightened the young child, and this effect was reflected in the first sentence he woke up after being stunned, “Is the Sandman still here?” Like a dark cloud, blocking every ray of light in my life.” Before this incident, Nathaniel’s world was warm, the family gathered around the round table to listen to his father’s stories, and after experiencing the threat of eye gouging, the previously stable self was deconstructed and replaced by panic, Avoidance, insecurity, confusion, irritability and suicidal tendencies. So that when you grow up, you can’t get rid of {influence anxiety}. To his relatives and friends, it seemed that he had been so lost that he couldn’t even tell the dummy apart. But it was with that special traumatic experience that Nathaniel’s cognition of the world was irreversible. So at the end of the story, the way Nathaniel chooses to commit suicide is precisely the absolute defense of himself and the permanent escape from the trauma.