This must not be written by me

Chapter 190 Nine Demonic Beasts ([-])

This movie is so good and this review is so good.

Although I have my own understanding, after reading Ma Boyong's film review, I feel that everything has been solved.

Of course, aside from the bunch of bananas, Pi insisted to the insurance company: You can try it yourself.This banana should be readable in depth.

After reading the film reviews and my own understanding, I still found out that he believed in Judaism in the end, because there is a story of "Abraham offering Isaac" in the Old Testament.

This is the most powerful and convincing interpretation of Boys Pi I have seen so far. It turns out that Boys Pi is not only two stories, but also a third story.Ma Boyong Weibo: #1354520021611

#1354520021611

"Ang Lee's Forest of Metaphors and Three Stories of Young Pi" Author: Ma Boyong

Before talking about the movie Boy Pi, several premises need to be presupposed.These premises are like the axioms in mathematics, from which all deduction and reasoning come.If we cannot reach a consensus at the starting point, then we will only part ways and go further and further apart.

First.Young Pi's novels belong to Jan Martel, and Young Pi's movies belong to Ang Lee.Ang Lee's film is based on the original book, but it is not the same.He kept the story frame, made changes, additions and deletions, and mixed it with Li's genes, thus turning it into something else.Therefore, in my subsequent analysis, I will completely ignore the interference of the original work—it does not involve the plot of the original work, does not involve the intention of the original author, and does not compare the differences between the two versions. Movies and books—just focus on what the director shows us on the screen.

second.Irfan Khan, the actor of adult pi, said in an interview: "This movie appears to be a teenager's adventure story on the surface, but it actually hides a lot of metaphors. It has many parallel spaces and many layers." In other words , this is an allegorical story, the metaphors in it are restrained and concise, and the mapping relationship between each other is very obvious.In this way, Ang Lee gave Jan Martel's story frame an "Ang Lee" soul.Only when we admit that Ang Lee's handling of these details is deliberate, every place has been carefully designed, and every line has its function and direction, can we piece together the meaning he is trying to express.Denying this point, one becomes a Trisolaran who listens to Yun Tianming's fairy tales, and what he hears is only a pure and beautiful story.

third.I have always believed that film review is a subjective job. Everyone has different perspectives and perceptions. They are all right. The so-called benevolent sees the benevolent and the wise sees wisdom. There is no such thing as objective film review, so naturally there is no right or wrong. .For those who write film reviews, his only responsibility is to admit that his evaluation is only a personal experience, not an objective truth about others' right or wrong.So this article is just some of my personal thoughts. It does not involve micro-speech or the extension of the theme. It only does some analysis on the clues of the movie itself.Maybe right, maybe wrong, maybe over-interpreting, maybe far-fetched.If everyone agrees, I am deeply honored; if your opinion is very different from mine, it shows that there are multiple interpretations of this movie, and it shows its mysterious charm.

Without further ado, let's start with that dinner.

At the beginning of the movie, pi, who believes in Hinduism, Christianity and Islam at the same time, has a conversation with his parents at dinner.This conversation is so important that it is the first preview of the whole theme of the movie.

The father of the teenager Pi said: "If you believe in three religions at the same time, it means you don't believe in anything. Instead of this, you should choose to believe in reason and science... I would rather you deny me after careful consideration than blindly accept it without discrimination." .” (Written from memory, just repeating its general idea, the same below.)

And my mother said: "Science solves external problems, not internal ones." In fact, it implies that reason and faith play different roles. In a word, it actually became the psychological source of all pi's subsequent actions.

The background of the two is mentioned in the movie: the father was saved by modern medicine, so he believes in science, which represents reason; the mother tends to be religious, which represents faith.The movie also specifically emphasizes that the mother abandoned the family to follow her father, and faith is her only connection with the past.

The father and mother have different accounts, and the boy Pi is faced with a choice.To be rational or to have faith, this is a classic dilemma in the spiritual field. The final choice made by the young Pi is: "I decided to be baptized." That is to say, he chose the latter, which means that he agrees with his mother's words ,

But faith requires piety, and pi is not a pious person, he is a pantheist.Some discussion of the adult pi shows that what he needs is a supernatural and supreme power to rely on for his belief.It doesn't matter whether it's God, Allah or Vishnu.It can be said that in his consciousness, what he believes in is faith itself, not a specific god.

For the pious, he chooses faith to solve problems.As for a person like pi, he chooses faith just to avoid problems.For him, faith is not a specific object of worship, but a sustenance, a space where he can escape.

That's why, pi wants to tell two stories.

The veracity of both stories has been debated.But it seems to me that the first story is beyond doubt a fabrication.Ang Lee is cunning. He never speaks openly about whether the story is true or false. He knows that to maintain the charm of a movie is to keep the audience arguing endlessly.But his arrangement in the movie showed his inner attitude.

A fantasy story can be unrestrained without any scruples; but a real story must conform to reality.In the first story, there is Cannibal Island, a tropical jungle in the deep sea, in which there are countless meerkats that can only be found in deserts.The desert and the sea are two completely different images.

If the story is true, why didn't Ang Lee make it more plausible by setting up a normal island with palm trees and rats?But instead of doing this, Ang Lee took great pains to choose the desert meerkat that is farthest from rationality. This is deliberately enlarged and unreasonable, in order to imply the illusory nature of the first story and tell all audiences that this is just an illusion. This is just imagination.We all hope that the first one is true, but there is no way to say that the first one is true.

It's kind of like we usually joke around.For example, if I tease a girl and say: "You are so beautiful, I like you very much." This sentence may be taken as a joke, or it may be taken seriously.In order to avoid the risk of being taken seriously, I will deliberately exaggerate this sentence "You are more beautiful than Lin Chiling, I think about you every day and I don't even want to eat meat." joke.

So, the first story is pi's fantasy, and the second story is real and rational.But pi can't solve the torment brought by the second cruel story. He can only escape to the first story and transform the victims around him into various animals to calm himself—just like his mother's dinner As the saying goes, reason solves the external, and faith solves the internal.His sentence "I decided to go to be baptized" was actually a prophecy of his decision to escape.

In this movie, Ang Lee has two ways to guide the audience to cleverly perceive the existence of metaphors.One is a rehearsal.Before every big action, there will be a small action as a rehearsal; the second is to allow the ontology and the vehicle to reappear to strengthen the relationship between the two, and then to reveal the destiny of the ontology by constructing the relationship between the vehicle.

The dinner conversation is undoubtedly a rehearsal of the motivation for pi to tell the two stories; and the sentence that the Christian pastor said to pi: "youmustbethirsty." The metaphorical relationship between pi and the tiger is constantly being established in our minds.

Some people say that the tiger represents fear, but I think it should go a step further, representing the instinctive emotion of pi.In the first story, pi divides himself into two, and he represents humanity or rationality. The tiger is the original instinct stripped of rationality-instinctively angry, instinctively afraid, and expresses the roughest of himself unabashedly *.

In other words, the man and the tiger in the first story are the projection of the battle between man and nature in the second story between human nature and animal nature. Pi didn't want to face up to the reality of cannibalism, so he had to split into two, turning into a fantasy drifting between man and tiger.This has been mentioned in many movie reviews.

But, don’t forget, we deny the authenticity of the first story on the grounds that it is unreasonable, and Ang Lee retains the label of “unreasonable” to remind the audience of the illusion of the story.

But does the second story really make sense?

Recall the process of the second story: pi, mother, sailor and cook board the lifeboat.The sailor was wounded and soon died.The chef eats it.Then pi accidentally let a turtle go, and was beaten by the chef.The mother argued with the cook and was killed by the cook.The chef threw the mother's body into the sea to feed the sharks. Pi killed the chef out of anger and ate him.

In this story, various elements perfectly correspond to the first story, mother = orangutan, chef = hyena, sailor = zebra, tiger = pi's instinct, seemingly perfect and reasonable, even the most rational insurance company is about to Agree, but there are two flaws in it.

The first flaw is the banana.

When pi tells the first story, the orangutan comes on a floating banana.Insurance investigators immediately pointed out that bananas do not float.When pi told the second story, he didn't change this detail, and still insisted that the mother came on the floating banana.

The second flaw is the death of the mother.

The chef is a person who is very obsessed with food. He will eat mice and kill sailors and use meat as bait.To him, every piece of meat is extremely precious.But after the mother died, the cook didn't eat her, and threw her into the sea to feed the sharks-this is a waste, especially the chef has already eaten the sailor, for him, the biggest psychological obstacle has been removed, there is no reason to do it Such wasteful behavior.

The second story itself is very complete, but there are two more eye-catching snake feet.In fact, they are also deliberately reserved labels to remind the audience that the second story is not true either, at least partially concealing the truth.

These two flaws are both related to the mother.Undoubtedly, the truth concealed by the second story is the whereabouts of the mother,

As I said before, Ang Lee likes to use various metaphors to repeatedly strengthen the metaphorical relationship.Teenage Pi and Tiger are the most striking of the couple, but there is another pair of tropes that are easy to miss.

Mother and lotus.

The relationship between the lotus and the mother is very close, and this has been hinted at twice before.Once at the beginning, mother draws lotus flowers with chalk on the floor for Pi and Ravi to see.Once in the middle of the movie, pi looked down at the bottom of the sea, first the fish formed a lotus flower, and then turned into the appearance of his mother (the faces of pi's father and Ravi didn't appear here, and the pointing was particularly obvious), and finally superimposed on the sunken ship.So to be precise, the lotus represents pi's longing and love for his mother.

At the same time, Ang Lee specially arranged for Ananti to explain the dance to pi, leading to an important metaphor about lotus: the lotus in the forest.

When pi asked Ananti what the lotus in the forest meant, she did not answer.It wasn't until we entered the most critical plot of the whole movie: Cannibal Island that we suddenly realized.

Pi plucked a lotus flower in the forest at night, and when he opened it, there was a human tooth inside.Therefore, the metaphor and direction of "lotus in the forest" is completed here.

As we know, the first story is pi's fantasy.Then his actions on the island must be projections of various realities.The lotus flower is Pi's longing for his mother; the human tooth in the lotus flower represents the mother's remains, that is, death.And the mother's body is actually the entire cannibal island.

The island is the mother, and the acid tide surging under the island is the fate of the mother.

Acid tide is a metaphor that is both remarkably clear and eerie.If you want to express the image of your mother’s death, there are many ways. The simplest one is that the tide slowly submerges the island, representing the mother’s drowning; An unusual metaphor, one that has almost nothing to do with the ocean, was chosen: acid.

This acid is naturally human stomach acid.The acid tide hits the island. This imagery shows that the mother was eaten and digested by stomach acid, so the remains are represented by teeth.

Pi ate plant roots on the island, and tigers ate meerkats, which is a metaphor for the mother-eating.There is a saying that rhizomes and meerkats represent the muscle fibers of the corpse and maggots represent cannibalism. These two metaphors have no reference point in the movie.If Ang Lee wants to set up a metaphor, he will definitely not set it up once, but will repeat it many times, or find another reference point, so whether this conjecture is true, whether it needs to be so detailed is open to discussion.But the cannibal is unmistakable.

The reason for saying this is because the food mother has previewed it once before.

Pi is a vegetarian, the first time he catches a big fish, he smashes it to death with a hammer while crying.After being crushed to death, Pi knelt down on the raft, cried and said to the fish's corpse: "Vishnu, thank you for being a fish and saving me." To be able to eat fish to pass the day, in order to achieve a spiritual compromise, pi must find an excuse in his belief.The moral teachings of Christianity and Islam are too clear to use, so pi can only choose Vishnu as a reason.This also reflects pi's religious views from one aspect.

Thus, the fish became the incarnation of Vishnu, pi had an acceptable reason, and his heart returned to peace.

This fish-eating incident is very important, connecting the past and ushering in the future.

Looking ahead, it contrasts with the dinner conversation.My father said something during dinner: "Today's mutton is delicious, but unfortunately you can't enjoy it." It shows that my father is the only meat eater in the family, and he represents reason, and reason wants to eat meat.The mother told pi that reason can solve the external, and faith can solve the internal.This point is also reflected in the fish-eating incident, pi rationally kills fish and eats meat, and then uses faith to find a refuge for himself, an excuse.This very flexible and even a little cunning move is in the same line as pi's spirit of easily saying "I decided to go to baptism" at the dinner table.

Looking back, the mother is the fish.The fish was transformed by Vishnu, so the mother must also be born by Vishnu. Pi eats fish because it is an incarnation of Vishnu, and pi eats mother because she is an incarnation of Vishnu.One turned into a fish and the other turned into a pirate.The fish-eating incident is a preview of the mother-eating incident.

Religion has become Pi's spiritual shelter, and he has built a solid shell for himself.For Pi, the teachings of Christianity and Islam, the moral judgments of good and evil, are too clear, and the only choice he has - which also happens to be what her mother believes in - is Hinduism.Only the mythological nature of Vishnu can construct a plausible excuse for the pi cannibal.

Ang Lee was afraid that the audience would not be able to understand the metaphor, so he deliberately gave a close-up of the outline of an island.Some say it's a silhouette of Vishnu, some say it's a woman, both are correct.This outline originally has both the characteristics of the mother and Vishnu.The lotus is the symbol of Vishnu, and the mother believes in Hinduism, and she told Xiaopi the myth of Vishnu.From this close-up, the connection of the three elements Mother-Lotus-Vishnu is unmistakably strengthened.

This is why the outline of the island resembles both Vishnu and the mother. Pi, in order to find a religious reason for his cannibal, has long regarded them as one.

The pi should have done something similar before this.On a fantasy level, the hyena kills the orangutan, and the tiger kills the hyena, but soon the hyena, zebra, and orangutan carcasses all disappear, all eaten by the tiger.Projected to the reality level, the chef killed the mother, and pi killed the chef.Facing starvation, pi then ate the remainder of the sailors and the cook, and finally set his sights on his own mother's corpse.

Cannibalism is one thing, cannibalism of one's own mother is quite another. Pi can still remain normal when he eats sailors and chefs—in the fish-eating incident, pi kills the fish but feeds the tiger instead, which shows that he blames his cannibalism on his animal nature, and his humanity still remains He was sober - but facing his mother, one can imagine the panic and struggle in his heart.

Before landing on the island, in Story [-] there was a huge storm of shocking power, the tiger was shivering, and the pi was screaming for the ground.In the beginning, pi still called out to the gods, but soon gave up.This shows that his humanity and animal nature encountered a big setback in reality at the same time. This setback may be a real storm, or it may be other disasters. In short, the result is extreme lack of food and extreme hunger.The only food, only the mother.

If you eat it, you will definitely not be able to accept it psychologically; if you don't eat it, you will definitely starve to death.

But this crisis was too strong, so pi’s humanity and animal nature had to temporarily unify, or compromise, and regard the mother as the incarnation of Vishnu, repeat the story of eating fish, and construct a Vishnu cannibal island phantom.As the movie opens, at night we all live in Vishnu's dreams.

Then, on the fantasy level, man and tiger landed on the island at the same time, pi ate the roots of plants, and the tiger ate the meerkat.I don’t know if you still remember, when pi bid farewell to Ananti, Ananti tied a rope around his wrist, which represented the farewell to the person he loved the most.Recalling that pi tied a rope on the island as soon as he landed on the island, it will suddenly become clear. pi is saying goodbye, saying goodbye to his mother, because he is about to eat her.

At night, the acid tide surged, and only one tooth remained in the lotus.When pi opened the lotus at night and saw human teeth, the metaphor of the lotus in the forest played a role, and his rational fire finally awakened, realizing the terrible thing he had done.

The author has something to say: The anti-theft has not been changed, and the text is being edited crazily...