On Saturday morning, the heroine Jess took her son to Greg's appointment at half past eight and went out to sea together (the note on the refrigerator reads: Greg, the-trangle-harbor-8:30, which she reminded herself to use), but because her son spilled paint and delayed the time, Jess drove a fast train in order not to be late, and the mother and son died on the spot, and the time of death was 8:17, which is the time when Jess's watch and the ship's wall clock stopped forever.

When Jess's soul was dying, she remembered that there was an appointment that had not yet been made, so she asked the Grim Reaper to take her to the port to see Greg, and she promised that the Grim Reaper would definitely return to die, but she broke her promise and never returned, so there was a subsequent condemnation. (There is also an analysis that Jess's 'first time' is deliberately to enter the cycle, and only after going through the cycle again can he see his son again, so that the reason for the first time on the ship is the same as the reason before and after)

Two dialogues on the boat and in the taxi are the key to understanding the subject:

When the group passed through the corridor and saw the ship's name, Aeolus, it was mentioned that Aeolus' son, Sisyphus, had been punished by God for pushing stones up the hill endlessly, and then watching the stones roll down the hill. Victor wondered what great sin Sisyphus had committed to suffer from this, and Sally replied, "He-cheated-death.No, he-made-a-PROMISE-to-death-that-he-didnt-keep." No, it should be said that he made a promise to the Grim Reaper, but did not keep it)

At the end of the film, Jess takes a taxi to the port, and the driver (i.e., the Grim Reaper) says, "Ill-leave-the-meter-runningyou-will-come-back-wont-you?" (I'll keep the odometer on, you'll be back, right?) Subtext: You can only go to the pier for a look, and then come back to continue taking the hearse to the underworld. Because the fate of your death is an irrevocable fact) Jess replied, "Yes, IIPROMISE." This PROMISE is the key, that is, Jess's promise to the Grim Reaper, which is surprisingly consistent with the commentary of Sally on the ship.

So the theme of this story is the futile struggle of a soul who does not want to admit that she has died, and she wants to go against the laws of nature to restore her lost life and her lost love. Make up for the damage he once brought to his son. And this qiē is destined to fall into the purgatory created by her own heart, and the endless cycle continues.

There are two contexts to this film:

1) It is the Greek myth of Sisyphus pushing stones. - After being sent to the underworld, Sisyphus asked for three days to return to the Underworld to bury his body, but when he returned to the world, he refused to leave, reneged on his promise, and was eventually captured by Hermes. Aeolus is the god of wind in Greek mythology, and his son Sisyphus is the wisest of the world, repeatedly teasing gods such as Death and Hades. Later, he was captured by death and taken to the underworld to suffer.

2) is a famous narrative poem by the English poet Samuel-Taylor-Coleridge "THE-RIME-OF-THE-ANCIENT-MARINER" (translated as "The Song of the Old Sailor" or "The Song of the Ancient Boat"), which tells the story of an old sailor who led his companions out to sea, because he recklessly shot an albatross, which brought bad luck to the sailing ship, so the wind stopped, the world seemed to stand still, and the ship that could not sail by the wind was trapped in the middle of the sea. The crew, weakened by extreme hunger and thirst, removed the cross from the old sailor's neck and hung the dead bird as punishment. At this moment, a deserted ghost ship sailed in the distance. On board stands a lone banshee, symbolizing The-Night-Mare and LIFE-IN-DEATH-was-she. After getting on board. One by one, the sailor's companions fell to their deaths under the banshee's curse, their corpses staring at the old sailor with their eyes open and their deathbed gazes, as if to condemn his negligence for causing a catastrophe. Only the old sailor could not die in any case, and he spent seven terrible and painful days and seven nights on the ship, and finally repented and began to pray for a qiē creature. At this time, the albatross around his neck fell off of its own accord and fell into the sea. The Virgin Mary apparitions, gave the old sailor a sweet sleep, and sent him back to land in a ship of corpses. The old sailor survived, but he was destined to live alone for the rest of his life in self-reproach and resentment against the undead, and he repeated the story when he saw people. People are exhorted to be careful with their words and deeds, and not to trample on any living being, no matter how weak it may seem.

The theme of "The Song of the Old Sailor" is about the original sin of Christianity. I remember that when Jess saw a seabird pecking at Downey's corpse on the deck, he snatched the apple from Victor's hand (Victor took a bite in the dining room and ran out with it) and smashed it at the seabird. In the poem, the crew once hangs a dead bird around the old sailor's neck to remind him of his sin, and Jess hangs a picture of her son around his neck, suggesting that her son is like the innocent albatross who was hurt by his mother's roughness and selfishness (Jess always beats and scolds his son because of the pressure of raising children as a single parent), and finally dies in a car accident caused by his mother. And Jess can only live in repentance forever with a necklace symbolizing his sins.

There are many details in this film that deserve Du Xinghe's attention-

1) The time on the ship is static, the first time I looked at the watch in the dining room was 8:17, and then the wall clock behind Jess in the room with a record player was still 8:17, and of course Jess's watch stopped at 8:17 (it can be seen that the mother and son were about to be late on the morning of the car accident). And the time of 11:30 for others is the time to advance after the normal sea. The implication is that Jess is stationary, the ship is stationary (dead), and the others are mobile (passers-by, accumulating traces on board).

2) Room 237 on the ship, which is the same as the house number of Jess's house, shows that the big ship is a nightmare created by Jess. Coincidentally, there is also room 237 in the movie "The Shining", which must never be approached. It was the beginning of a murder, and in The Shining, Jack saw a young woman and an old woman in room 237, both of them rotting, the ghost of the same woman who was killed in that room. It is also implied here that Jess's seemingly youthful body is actually dead. It's the same thing when Jess is alone, the fruit in front of her appears to be rotten.

3) The music on the ship's skipping needle record is exactly the same as the melody played by the children's band on the side of the road when Jess takes his son to drive at the end of the film (you have to listen carefully to hear it), and this is also the music that Jess left in his subconscious before he died. So on the ship it was reproduced in another way.

4) The pattern on the drum surface of the restaurant on the boat is exactly the same as the pattern on the drum in the hand of a child watching the car accident, which is also a reproduction.

5) The masked Jess who was shot in the head was wounded and bleeding from the same fatal wound to the head of the body of Jess in a skirt in the car accident, and it is reappearing again.

6) Jess's drive to kill a seabird is similar to the bad luck caused by shooting a seabird in "The Old Sailor's Song", and Jess also has an albatross on the wall, and there are many close-ups of seabirds in the film. Albatrosses are also famous for their scavengers and love to eat waste thrown from ships.

……

There is another point that Du Xinghe also noticed, that is, Jess's sudden psychological change of being "cold-blooded and ruthless". It's also an important structure that he needs to break.

According to his inference, he thinks that Jess in the film should have two personalities, one kind. An evil, so that Jess's sudden change could be explained.

But when you think about it, this reasoning is somewhat untenable. Essentially, all Jess are supposed to be kind, they are all in the same state before they get on the ship, and by the third stage, each Jess is very determined to kill the whole ship, and their starting point is to save all the people and go back together. Because she believed that after killing everyone, the dead would all be resurrected.

Why did Du Xinghe come to this conclusion? The key is in the phrase "It-return-when-theyre-dead", which means in the first layer. When the last of each group of five people on board died, the small sailboat would bring in a new group of five people, which was the epiphany that Jess finally had after witnessing the death of two groups. At this time, Jess glanced back at the corpse of Sally, which was piling up behind him, and suddenly said "It-return-when-everyones-dead", which not only refers to the return of the dinghy, but also refers to the resuscitation of the dead people, and then everyone goes home safely. Note that she is not using I-return. It's It-return, and she doesn't just focus on herself.

In Jess's eyes, there is no such thing as a group of 5 people living in different time and space, and she believes that all the recurring people are essentially the same person, including herself, so after killing everyone on the ship, including herself. Everyone will wake up (resurrected) in the dinghy, and the qiē on the boat will only be regarded as a nightmare.

Otherwise, with her kind nature, she can't accept the cruelty of some groups of companions being sacrificed, and some of the group's companions will survive, and she is not a selfish woman who can kill her friends for her own selfishness. The evidence is that Jess had just told the dying Sally a few seconds before she made the decision to "kill" that she would never hurt her, and after she realized that she was going to "kill" everyone, she went to comfort the seriously injured Vector and said, "Don't be afraid, I can save you." I know how to save you." So before she shot Greg, she said, "Now I'm not me, I'm really with you in a sailboat." "When I kill you, we can all go back." (This time she didn't use I-will-return, but We-will-return.)

Jess's plan was supposed to kill everyone on board, wait at the boarding gate, stop the rest of the group from getting on board, and kill himself. She believed that when she woke up, she would return to the original small sailboat and join everyone in her original state. That's why Jess forced himself to kill the killer decisively and simply, which is cruel in his means. But the starting point is to save everyone. So Jess, who had a wound on her face, also killed for this reason, she was not evil in her heart, but armed herself to force herself to be strong.

Another detail in the film is worth playing, and that is why Jess's son was able to predict a car accident.

Masked Jess ran home from the shore after being pushed into the sea, and saw herself in a skirt beating and scolding her son, which was indeed a scene that had happened in real life. Her hacking of herself represents a desire to punish herself for her past mistakes, a materialization of the strong idea of atonement and repentance.

Why did his son seem to have foreseen the accident in the car? Because he was imagined by Jess, and it can even be said that the whole ship and purgatory are also made by Jess's heart, how she hopes that the ending is that her son did not die, and she herself did not die, so that she can start over, compensate the child, and be a good mother. But the end of death is the only reality, and Jess subconsciously doesn't believe in the illusion of peace he's constructed. Her son's cry symbolizes the shaking of her spiritual world, and that Gensokyo eventually collapses back to the end of the car accident.

Note that Dressdress Jess kills Dressdress Jess and seals her body in a black travel bag and stuffs it in the trunk. But after the car accident, the skirt Jess was directly exposed to the road, and the natural force of the car accident should not be able to untie the black bag and take it off, and the skirt Jess has been cut so many times with a blunt object, but the body on the road looks like there is only a fatal hit on the head.

At the same time, Jess's car overturned. All the passers-by immediately gathered around, assuming that Jess in civilian clothes climbed out of the driver's seat at this time. Passers-by wouldn't leave her alone. But the scene seen in the film is: the light is dim, and Jess in civilian clothes is standing alone outside the crowd looking at Yiqi with a dull expression, there are no external injuries or stains on her body, and except for the taxi driver dressed in black, no one else seems to see her.

At this time, Jess sees the last scene of his own dead looking back at the world after a car accident. The taxi driver is Hermes-the-Psychopomp, who says he is just a "Driver", i.e., an undead extraditer, and he repeatedly stresses that Jess cannot resurrect his dead son, saying that all attempts have been in vain.

Jess at this time. Because he has realized that he is a dead soul, his mind has returned to the state of ignorance and chaos when he first died, and he only vaguely remembers that he was going to the port, so he ordered the god of death to go to the port and fell asleep in the car.

After waking up, she got out of the car in a state of confusion promising that the Grim Reaper would return, but as she approached the port, her mind gradually cleared.

The desperate mother was unwilling to say goodbye to her son like this, even if she knew that going to sea again would not change the outcome, but even if it was just poor self-deception, it was the only thing that could support her, so she insisted on going to sea, and said sorry to Greg.

Throughout the film, when did Jess lose her memory, and why?

It should be said that Jess hypnotized himself into amnesia when he fell asleep on the ship, but he could only clear the surface of the memory, and the deep subconscious still had the accumulated memories of the past, so he would have a sense of déjà vu when he got on the Aeolus, but he could not give a rational explanation at the conscious level. Why is Jess able to make herself lose her memory? Because "people only want to see what they want to see, and only want to believe what they want to believe", this is especially true for a deceased who is very nostalgic for the world and has an obsession.

Jess wants to forget the fact that she and her son are dead and cannot be resurrected, so that when she wakes up on the sailboat again, she will once again struggle and strive in vain to return home, even if this struggle must end in defeat and deeper despair, but in the process at least she has a moment of "false hope", and the only country that her beloved son can live in is in that land of false hope.

Jess doesn't really have a choice, because desperate motherly love is a catastrophe.

The entrance & exit (starting & ending) of the film is the key to Du Xinghe breaking the cycle of this world.

1) At the end of the movie, JESS arrives at the port. THE ENTRANCE TO THE PORT IS MARKED WITH THE FOLLOWING WORDS: ENTRY&EXITRESTRICTED. It means restricted entrances & exits. This can be considered the beginning and end of the entire reincarnation, and every time you cross here, it means that JESS has reneged on his promise to death and started a new reincarnation. From here on, the qiē that JESS is about to face, and the qiē she is about to make, are all in vain, because this reincarnation has been limited by the god of death, and she will never be able to get out of this reincarnation unless she follows the god of death.

2) Regarding the beginning of the whole reincarnation, it can be considered that JESS woke up on a sailboat to begin. Because the dead JESS did not mean his own death and the existence of the whole cycle because of the mentality of redeeming and saving his friends and sons, after going through reincarnation after reincarnation, the first question he asked every time he was awake on the sailboat was: Is-Grey-Okay?, and the answer he got was: Hesfine. And when she got out of the "Grim Reaper" or "Exditerist's" taxi, she still clearly remembered what happened in the past and understood the purpose of going to the cruise ship again, so it can also be assumed that JESS's reincarnation began after taking a nap on the sailboat. "This is the process of pushing the stone again after it has really landed."

So for the "Grim Reaper", reincarnation begins with the port JESS's renunciation of promises; For JESS, reincarnation begins every time he wakes up on a sailboat.

If Du Xinghe wants to break the cycle of this world, this is an important entry point for him.

There is another possibility:

Jess was standing in front of the car after the car accident, looking at his son and his body (in a skirt). realized that he was still a dead soul after all, and he also killed his son. At this time, the driver came to her and said, "It is in vain to save this child, there is no way to save him." Meaning to tell her to stop being obsessed and give her a chance to go with him, Jess agreed, but she wanted to go to the port first. When she got out of the car, the driver asked her again if she would come back, and Jess said that she promised to come back.

Jess, who goes to the port, hugs Greg in a trance and tells him that she is sorry because she has decided to get on the ship again and kill them all, and Jess is the beginning of the story. After killing all your friends, stop another group of people from boarding. When they are saved, they can return home to prevent the car accident from happening, so that they can save their son and themselves. But she didn't remember it when she got on the boat, maybe she drank the glass of champagne, and people said that Heather was a messenger like Meng Po who made Jess drink ecstasy soup. In fact, everyone on the ship is an illusion, an illusion made up by the Grim Reaper to punish Jess.

Jess is destined to be unable to change a qiē, she has three experiences, the first is forgetting everything, but there are still many foreboding premonitions, seeing her friends killed, and then a second group of people appearing on board. Jess then tries to stop this qiē, she tries to save them, and witnesses the second Jess kill the man in black and push her into the sea, and the second Jess repeats her role. Then a third group of people came, and at this moment Jess knew that the only way to go home was to kill them, and then turned into the man in black, and the second Jess was playing the role of Jess who she was trying to stop a qiē just now. Finally, the third Jess knocked the man in black (the first Jess) out of the sea. Jess was washed ashore, and then immediately rushed home, and saw himself (wearing a skirt) beating and scolding his son, this time Jess did not relent, resolutely killed himself in a skirt, and took his son to throw the body, thinking that it would be over in one qiē. When she threw away the carcasses of the seabirds, she saw many of them, and was shocked to realize that the nightmare continued, and finally there was a car accident. (Want to know more exciting news about "The Song God of Rebirth"?) Open WeChat now, click on the "+" sign in the upper right corner, select Add Friends to add an official account, search for "Qidianzhongwenwang", follow the official account, and never miss every update! (To be continued......)