I went to see the film in the last few days of the show.
Unexpectedly amazed by the ending!I couldn't sleep that day, and I had only one thought in my heart: I must praise "Dog God"!
If you look at the plot alone, this movie is not outstanding, but if you look at the core, it must be rare, and it may even be unprecedented, because it touches on a very deep problem:
What is bestiality, human nature, and divinity?
This answer was even hidden in the title from the beginning, why is it called "Dog God"?
To sum it up in one sentence:OutliersNot a beastIt's the gods
1 To protect each other, bend down as beasts
"Dog God" tells the story of Douglas, a little boy who was put in a dog cage by his father, how he escaped from the "devil's hole" of the family, how he found a job with a disabled leg, how he survived, how he met love, and how he became a "dog god".
The first half of the story seems to be deliberately uncomfortable for the viewer, with the camera shaky and the image constantly out of focus, the close-up deliberately zooming in on Douglas's fat stuffed into a bright red, blood-stained tight dress, a thick residual makeup hanging on his bruised face, and a cheap blonde wig that doesn't even tell if the face is male or female.
The rhythm of the plot is very slow, a large number of immersion sense of distraction, helplessness, trembling hands lighting cigarettes, and unexplained refracted lamps, which are testing the audience's patience in general, making people feel extremely depressed, especially in childhood scenes, it is estimated that it is difficult for any normal person to understand why the father put his little son in a dog cage, and why he wants to arbitrarily ** puppy, the whole childhood is in an extremely gray tone, The bloody fingers came to lay out, and quickly ended in the encirclement of the police, its appearance and end were very abrupt and incomprehensible, it seemed to be a painful slice in Douglas's memories, which was taken out separately and placed in ***, full of tears, blood stains and the smell of disinfectant potion.
The impressive footage is of a child in a dog cage, barking at a group of dogs through the cage in order to prevent his father from slaughtering the puppy. At that moment, the bestiality was vividly expressed.
Outside the cage, **holding** and praying to God is actually hiding the animality in the heart;
The dog and the child in the cage, in order to protect each other, "evolved" into a beast, sharpened its claws and opened its fangs.
At that moment, who exactly is the beast?And who is being judged in a cage?
The next moment, the child is saved, the father and brother are imprisoned, and the dog changes the tragic plot, and the gray tone finally shines into the sun, but the next second, the muzzle of the gun takes Douglas's legs, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
"If I try to stand up and walk around, the bone marrow will flow into my legs, which is equivalent to dying. ”
HumanityIt's always about love
Douglas is the main character, and there is only the middle part in the whole movie, which makes people feel that "he is most like a person".
The starting point of all this stems from the fact that he met his lover, met understanding and care, began to try to study, cultivated new hobbies, took social exams, found a suitable job, worked hard to stand on the stage and sing, and was applauded by the audience.
Seeing the middle, I even thought it was an inspirational movie for people with disabilities, and I thought of "Forrest Gump" again, running with disabled legs until I ran out of the smooth road of life - then again, I have always disliked the movie "Forrest Gump", I haven't watched it yet, I always feel that ** is wrong, but I can't say it, maybe because it is too smooth, so it seems bland.
Fortunately, "Dog God" did not follow such logic, but the turning point in the middle also came abruptly, he lost his love, lost his job, lost his residence, and after he was taken away from everything again, he became alone, with nothing but a few hundred dogs.
People only make choices when they are in a desperate situation, but many people's choices are just ordinary choices based on human natureFor example, do you want to change jobs, who do you marry, do you want to go left or right?
But the protagonist of "The Dog God" did not have this passage from the beginning, he could not have been an ordinary person from the beginning, whether it was his very different family, terrible childhood experiences, crippled legs, or his unusual talent: he could communicate directly with dogs, and from any point of view, his path to ordinary people was closed, although he tried hard, but failed.
Not only am I thinking that what can pull people back to the human side seems to be love and understanding, nothing else, and after falling out of love, he is like the only light has been extinguished, he returns to the dark cage, and needs to face a difficult choice: is to return to animal nature?Or take yourself to the unknown?
When he struggled in agony in front of countless cages, the dog in the cage broke through the fence and surrounded him, and humanity ended at that moment, and then what spread out was the intersection of animal nature and divinity.
Contradictory integrity
Douglas, who chose to "not be a man", gradually lived as a "dog god", he has a talent that ordinary people do not have, and can do both good and evil.
Dogs are more like a kind of "apostle" in the movie, they are at the mercy of dispatches, they have no criteria for judging good and evil, if the master does evil, they are the knife, and when the master does good, they are the shield.
At the end of the movie, this contrast becomes more and more obvious, and the most prominent feature is that Douglas, as a man, wears women's clothes and smoke-painted makeup all the time, and his yin and yang face really makes it impossible to tell whether he is a man or a woman.
There is only one last place in the movie, when he returns to the male role, and after telling the policewoman about his life in prison, it feels like he is praying to a strange priest, receiving complete acceptance and soul redemption, and he begins to change into male clothes, but I notice that under his men's blazer, there is still an eye-catching purple lace shirt.
At that moment, I began to think about the question, "Why did the director deliberately let a man play a woman?".If you want to show femininity, why not just find a woman to play the role?But I quickly dismissed this idea, because I found out that the black policewoman was characterized by a man.
These two people are simply mirror images of each other, whether it is a man who wants to dress up as a woman in order to escape his identity, or a woman who wants to work hard to play a man, in fact, they are all set in the formula of "role playing", only half, not complete.
But divinity is complete and integrated, and it must have both a feminine and a masculine part.
At the end of the movie, I almost had no suspense to see that the black policewoman also returned to the identity of a woman at the end, she came home, picked up her sleeping daughter, and her face was full of maternal softness.
And at the same time, Douglas also walked step by step to his full side. He seemed to have expected that in prison he would change into new clothes and wait for his "apostle" - the dog helped him open the prison gates, at that moment he seemed to be omnipotent, the door of freedom was open to him, he could return to the darkness, but he walked step by step into the light and shadow of the idol.
"If I try to stand up and walk around, the bone marrow will flow into my legs, which is equivalent to dying. ”
Very Shakespeare's words, with this lethal romance, he walked step by step to the end of his life, and finally fell into the shadow of the cross by self-sacrifice, his body spread out and the shadow became one, at this time the dog formed a circle around him, the divine metaphor of this scene is too strong.
It wasn't until I saw this that I really felt that this was a masterpiece that exceeded expectations!
If you don't see the end, you can only stay in the first two layers, but if you don't finish the first two layers, you can't comprehend the third layer.
What is divinity?
Whenever this happens, I find it difficult to present it in words and words, because divinity is difficult to express in words full of "humanity", because no matter how it is expressed, it is very easy to be ambiguous and misleading.
I often feel the lack and narrowness of words, including language, especially when "summer insects can't speak ice".
It can only be said that divinity is pluralistic and overlapping, but it is intrinsically complete and rich because it has two poles at the same time.
God has no gender, it can be in male form or female form, but in essence it is both, just as Tai Chi cannot only have yin and no yang, only mixed in one, it is a complete body.
God is essentially invisible, but in fact can be in any form and can be transformed into any object according to one's own needsFor example, when encountering the sea, it becomes a whale, when it hits the reef, it turns into a bird, and when it lands, it is a person, Zhuangzi has long recorded, "There is a fish in the north of the underworld, its name is Kun, and it becomes a bird, and its name is Peng".
However, the form of the god is almost all solidified in the clay gold, and although it is indeed a divine incarnation, in fact, the god is everywhere and is not limited to the statue.
God is not judged by what people understand as good and evil, but in fact God has both, just as Tai Chi cannot only have white and no black.
But it is completely different from the evil of human nature, it is yin and yang, heaven and earth, white and black, light and dark, just a form, a bit like "it was originally like this, so it is so".
Excerpt from a passage from the book "Conversations with God."Eastern mythology defines gods as nothingness or emptiness, while Western mythology holds that everything tangible is a god, both of which are inherently false. Some people think that God is both Taiji and Tai Xu, and their understanding is correct.
And in a worldly relationship, you don't recognize "between." That's because worldly relationships are always bivalent, whereas relationships in the divine realm are, without exception, trivalent.
So, there are left-right, top-down, big-small, fast-slow, hot-cold, and the greatest bivalent relationship God has ever created: male-female. There is no "between" between these bivalent relationships.
In these relationships, things are either/or, or one of the larger or smaller variants of the two poles. In the realm of secular relations, nothing that is conceptualized can exist unless its opposites are also conceptualized. The vast majority of your daily experience is rooted in this reality.
In the realm of divine relations, there is no opposition to what exists. All things are one, and everything is connected to each other in an endless cycle. Time is such a sacred realm in which what you call past, present, and future exist in the way of intrinsic connection. That is to say, they are not opposites of each other, but different parts of the same whole, different stages of the same idea, different cycles of the same energy, different aspects of the same irrefutable truth. If you infer from this that past, present, and future exist in the same "tense," then you are correct.
Divinity is the merging of two forms, experiencing everything, eventually merging everything and transcending everything, but in essence it is everything.
If you haven't experienced darkness, you can't know what light is, you haven't seen ugliness, you don't know what beauty is, you haven't felt love, you don't understand what hate, you haven't seen good, you don't understand what evil is.
The essence of divinity is light, but it cannot exist apart from darkness, because apart from darkness, light ceases to be light.
Once upon a time there was a soul that recognized itself as light. It's a new soul, so can't wait to get the experience. "I am the light," it said, "I am the light." However, all its knowledge, all its telling, cannot replace its experience. In this realm where the soul appears, there is nothing but light. Every soul is the best, every soul is the most beautiful, and every soul shines with the splendor of my awesome light. So that little soul is like a candle in the sun. In the most brilliant light, which is an integral part of it, it cannot see itself, nor can it experience its true identity and nature.
What happened later was that the soul became more and more eager to know itself. Its desire was so strong that one day I said, "Little thing, do you know what you have to do to satisfy this desire of yours?"”
God, what is that?What is it?I'm willing to do anything!The little soul said. “
You have to separate yourselves from all of us," I replied, "and then you have to keep yourself in the dark. ”
The only god, what is darkness?The little soul asked.
That's not you," I replied, and the soul understood.
So the soul did so, separating itself from everyone, and, oh, it went to other realms. In this realm, the soul has the ability to summon all kinds of darkness into its experience. It beckoned.
Yet in the darkness** it cried out: "O Holy Father, Holy Father, why have you forsaken me?"."As you shouted in your darkest moments. But I have never forsaken you, but I will always stand by your side, ready to remind you of who you really are;Ready, ready to call you home.
A symphony of bestiality, humanity and divinity
If you can understand the narrative style of this trinity, you can understand why "Dog God" was filmed like this.
It is essentially a symphony of bestiality, humanity and divinity, with a long, dark and oppressive top note, a gentle, bright and ordinary middle note, and a high-pitched, detached and romantic back note.
But because divinity is out of ordinary people's cognition, it can only tell you a story, and this story must have two extreme qualities at the same time, it needs to get out of the triple realm, and the final ending must fall to a height beyond conventional thinking.
Only in this way can we interpret the "divinity" sufficiently.
Not all people have divinity, and most people can only comprehend animal nature and human nature.
People's understanding of divinity is relatively simple, believing that divinity must be the most beautiful and good, which is a very flat criterion for judging, even if it is divinity, it is also in the stage of continuous reconciliation of the two poles, and the growth of one and the other.
But divinity must transcend the criteria of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, light and darkness, because it is beyond all of this in the first place, and it is only because it needs to be re-remembered and re-experienced.
Therefore, divinity is originally from nothing and back to nothing, and it is still nothingness in essence.
Just as from darkness to dawn to daylight, the four seasons flow in chronological order, and the corresponding elements grow or dissipate invisibly.