Hayao Miyazaki's pornographic films and the metaphorical addiction of test-takers

Yesterday I watched Hayao Miyazaki's controversial work last year, "How Do You Want to Live?". After watching it for 20 minutes, I thought of the line "Huang Xiaoming rewards himself with a film about a domineering president every time he shoots a few decent works." I felt that the director was a bit self-indulgent, and lacked the foreshadowing to drag the audience into a high context to listen to him muttering. Halfway through, I felt that it was overstepping. Using Huang Xiaoming to metaphorically describe this work is overstepping, and this kind of self-indulgence is at least at the level of Chen Kaige. Although the title is "How Do You Want to Live?", the director doesn't care about the life experience of the audience when watching the movie. After watching the whole film, in addition to discovering that the Douban score dropped from 7.8 to 7.7 in two hours, I also realized that this film won the Oscar, Golden Globe and British Academy Film Awards last year: Obviously, no matter whether my life is satisfactory in these two hours, Hayao Miyazaki has lived the life he wants.

Thinking of a joke, Gorbachev asked Reagan: "Recently, people's hearts have been scattered, and it's hard to lead the team. The masses don't believe in our line. How do you Americans brainwash them?" Reagan said confidently: "We are a democratic country in the United States. We never need brainwashing. The people support us from the bottom of their hearts." Gorbachev: "Yes, yes, that's exactly what I want. Tell me how you do it."

The camera turned and Miyazaki asked me kindly: "Young man, have my works inspired you? What kind of life do you want to live?" I said: "Yes, yes, I want to live a life like yours, feeding shit to others and having them thank you. It's so cool."

As far as I know, the last person who peed in someone's hat and still got compliments was Liu Bang, the first emperor of the Han Dynasty. I don't want to say much about the content of this film, not because I'm afraid of spoilers, but because the plot is fragmented and not worth mentioning; and if I force myself to explain some metaphor or "connotation", it will become another target of complaints in the title of this article. Let's start with complaining about Hayao Miyazaki.

Hayao Miyazaki has created a new type of pornographic film, cute porn. Whenever the plot is inexplicable and awkward, he gives the audience some soft and cute animals to get some cheap laughs and psychological comfort. The audience who can accept the director's self-climax throughout the film are probably the test-takers who think that "such a high-level style must have some profound metaphors", which shows that cute-porn is really promising. Moreover, the Oscar judges have said, "I can also be profound, I can also understand."

The term cute porn proposed in this article is modeled after the slang term disaster porn, which satirizes people's obsession with disaster scenes. The public is keen on disaster-themed movies and media reports because they are addicted to the drama and excitement of disasters, rather than out of a desire to learn or prevent them. But what's interesting is that people are often reluctant to admit this, and instead find more politically correct reasons for disaster movies or reports, such as "awakening the world" and "people's livelihood suffering." The reason why "Do You Want to Live" is cute porn is that it always acts as glue in the incomprehensible and fragmented plots, and it is precisely the cute animal images that give the audience a brief visual comfort when their brains are about to burn. Fans are naturally reluctant to admit this, and they must dig out some profound metaphors behind this harmless style of painting, as if it is enough to justify their hobby.

This leads to the second target of this article's complaints. Nowadays, more and more film critics are suffering from metaphor addiction. More and more audiences of movies, TV shows, and text regard riddles and metaphors as the only standard to measure the depth of literary works. It seems that if you don't tell the central idea hidden behind the story, and don't put some historical memories and grand narratives on the fragmented pictures, it will not appear "profound". This trend can be traced back to "Let the Bullets Fly". "Are you sure you understand Let the Bullets Fly?" and "XX metaphors in Let the Bullets Fly" have been unstoppable since then. By the time of "Zhou Chu Eliminates the Three Evils", which became popular again at the beginning of the year, similar interpretations such as "What is Eliminating the Three Evils about?", "Do you understand Eliminating the Three Evils?" and "What metaphors are there in Eliminating the Three Evils" are still popular. However, "Eliminating the Three Evils" was a double kill in Taiwan's box office and reputation, and was regarded as a mediocre bloody and exciting film. How come mainland China, from film critics to audiences, is more sensitive to metaphors in Taiwanese movies than Taiwanese people?

This kind of pathological mining of metaphors can be called metaphor-porn. In fact, it is not a passion for rhetoric (most metaphor-addicted self-media cannot distinguish between concepts such as metaphor, synecdoche, and allusion), but a language concept unconsciously trained in the exam-oriented education. In everything, we must summarize the central idea and summarize what is the beauty of using this word or concept here. Even the author cannot answer this new eight-part essay accurately. For example, in the 2019 Suzhou High School Entrance Examination, there was a 20-point modern Chinese reading. The students asked the original author for advice, but the answer given by the author only scored 6 points. What's even more humorous is that the author later apologized to the teacher who set the question, saying that "the questioner did not misinterpret the meaning of the text, but he failed to understand the answer system."

The original author's apology to the question setter is enough to show that the requirements of the examination determine that this type of question will not only not be abolished because it deviates from the original text, but will also become the only standard for most students who have no opportunity to receive literary training and analysis outside of class to understand and imagine the depth of literary works.

To be fair, the bad habit of over-interpretation is not uncommon in foreign film and television criticism, and directors often accuse critics of making up stories. But this is an occupational disease in the literary and artistic criticism circle after all, and it has not yet spread like the metaphor addiction in China.

Metaphor addiction is not only a crude interpretation of the original film, but also destroys the audience's understanding of the depth of literary aesthetics. A direct example is that in recent years, domestic TV dramas have set off a climax of suspense and mystery dramas. Whether in publicity or film reviews, the brain-burning plot reversal is regarded as a synonym for "the depth of the work." However, reasoning is at best an intellectual game, and it is not inherently profound just by using labels such as death, depression, bullying, and gender. That is another variant of disaster porn. The adrenaline brought by suspense reversal is not necessarily related to humanistic care.

In addition, even if we do not talk about literary aesthetics, but only about abstract formal logic, we will find that this metaphor habit is anti-intellectual and vulgar. There are countless videos of "deep interpretation of xxx's metaphors", all of which follow the same set of eight-part format: a, b, and c in the film respectively imply Zhang, Wang, and Li in history. Because Zhang, Wang, and Li had events A and B in history and had an impact of C. So the film actually uses abc to talk about A, B, and C. The test-taking soul in the audience awakens, as if they have returned to the Chinese language examination room in middle school. From abc to Zhang, Wang, and Li to A, B, and C, the three sets of symbol systems are self-consistent with each other, and the new knowledge of A, B, and C is injected into the brain. This is too profound.

But if you use your brain a little, you will find that the so-called Zhang, Wang, Li, Jia, Yi, and Bing exist independently of the movie. Regardless of whether the film critics over-interpret and link the unrelated abc to A, B, and C. Even if we assume that the director wanted to talk about A, B, and C, and the film review also saw it, then are the director and the film review profound? Of course not. Whether it is profound or not depends not only on whether the induction of ① A, B, and C is profound, but also on whether ② abc itself is presented smoothly, completely, and reasonably.

These two points are indispensable, and the problem with many film reviews lies in the first point. People cannot surpass their own cognition. The A, B, and C imagined by the test-taker's thinking are often like "everything looks like a nail when you hold a hammer", which will only lower the style of the original work. For example, some indexers say that Dream of the Red Chamber has a long foreshadowing, and in fact someone is a metaphor for someone in the Ming Dynasty, and the core is to resist the Qing Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty. But the problem is that this kind of anti-Qing and restoration of the Ming Dynasty that looks like a picture has no literary value. "Do You Want to Live" is no exception . Just click on a certain "in-depth interpretation video", and the author says that the parrot in the film obviously symbolizes Nazi Germany, because "Duch next to the parrot is only one letter t away from Germany", and then there is a fabricated history of World War II... However, Dutch is the Netherlands. But this does not prevent metaphor lovers from being moved in the comment area of ​​this video with millions of views.

As for the second point, whether abc itself is complete, it is also a simple logical problem. Even if the director wants to talk about A, B, and C from abc, but abc is poorly explained, can this be considered a good work? The imperial chef made delicacies from land and sea disgusting, but insisted that he had a vision of a full banquet of Manchu and Han. Would Cixi buy this? Unfortunately, "Do You Want to Live" also made the second problem, which is even more glaring. The multi-layered world in the film is fragmented, and the plot transitions jump abruptly. It feels like the director assumes that the audience has read the script. There are many shots of sailing in the sea in the last second and fighting with a parrot as a cute porn star in the next second.

In addition to yawns and cheap laughter caused by cute porn, there is more silence in the cinema: the top note is the innocence of the black man's question mark face, the middle note is the astonishment of the old man's mobile phone in the subway, and the bottom note is the relief like a fake-smiling boy after realizing that he can't eat fine food.

If the first problem is that the fans flattered the horse, the second problem was completely planned by the director. Miyazaki obviously knows this, and it's not that he can't make the film more friendly to the audience, but he just doesn't care. Spending other people's time and money talking to yourself or even having fun, and even having people understand, what a self-adaptive life this is.

Although this article uses porn to satirize metaphor addiction, porn itself is also an interesting metaphor. The interesting thing about it is that although pornography can be traced back to the innate reproductive impulse of human beings, it has a certain original sacredness; but people who watch porn rarely learn experience for the cause of human reproduction. Sexual impulse only serves sex itself. From this perspective, sex is much simpler and purer than morality. However, it is precisely because of moral discipline that people are reluctant to talk about sex, so they want to create new folders, want to be romantic, want to teach people about lust and theft.

Whether it is disaster porn, cute porn or metaphor porn, the irony is that people always only focus on the surface of disaster, cute and metaphor without delving into their essence. The essence of these phenomena does not lie in the prefixes, but in the suffix porn: by pretending to care about disasters, they cover up the immoral excitement at the disaster scene; by portraying cuteness, they cover up the emptiness and confusion behind cuteness; by pursuing and attaching so-called metaphors, they cover up the poverty and weakness of the test-taker's thinking in literary aesthetics.

However, porn is just porn. Some people are really high, while others are fake high. Some people think that since everyone is having a good time, they should also have a little high. That's all.