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  • A characteristic emotion on seeing a favourite novel turned into a film is puzzlement. We

  • may not hate the actor playing a particular role, we might even find them rather beautiful,

  • it's just that they tend not to be as we imagined they should be. We never thought

  • that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Ishiguro's Stevens or Jane Austen's Marianne Dashwood

  • or Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby would look like quitelike that!

  • When we originally read the novel, we didn't necessarily even imagine what they would look

  • like. Their identity was free of the tyrannical requirement for a face. We were liberated

  • to 'see' them in their unbounded entirety, because we did not have to visualise them

  • concretely. Their appearances were fluid and, where necessary, hazy, so as better to allow

  • their multiplicity to take form. By not having to look a certain way, they could be far more

  • than just one thing. The discomfort we feel at the cinema reflects,

  • on a small scale, the pain we are likely to experience with far greater force closer to

  • home: in the bathroom mirror, in relation to ourselves. Here too we are prone to looking

  • at the face in front of us and thinkingeven if we do not hate how we look, though we probably

  • dothat our features are in multiple ways extremely unfaithful to how it feels to be

  • us. As with a character in a novel, we know ourselves in the comforting darkness of the

  • inner mind where we don't place strict boundaries or blunt conclusions on who we might be. We

  • give ourselves latitude. We know we have a thousand moods, that we are a bewildering

  • mixture of the kind and the selfish, the immoral and the good, the confused and the clear-eyed.

  • We know that we harbour infinite possibilities; that we are at once artists, ploughmen, accountants,

  • babies, presidents, lunatics, men, boys, girls, women, dolphins, okapis, jellyfish and ballerinas.

  • Pretty much any life form that has ever bubbled up and breathed on the earth has some echo

  • inside us. How perplexing, therefore, to have to look in the mirror and be obtusely presented

  • with just one particular person, with one predominant expression, one rather serious

  • nose, one set of sensible ears and one pair of cautious lips.

  • This perplexing feeling first descends in adolescence. If we are frequently to be found

  • dazed on the sofa at that age, or snappy towards our parents or melancholic in a shapeless

  • black tunic, it is hardly a surprise given that we have recentlyand probably for

  • the first timebecome properly aware of how our bodies must look to othersand

  • what a cage we are condemned to inhabit, having once blithely assumed that we might be as

  • free of definition as a cloud or an ellipsis. Our face in the mirror may come as no less

  • of a surprise for us than would, for a reader, the arrival of a random Hollywood star in

  • the space of a fictional persona. Someone is playing usand we're really not sure

  • we like who has been cast.

  • We're sometimes given advice on how to cope at this point. We must learn to love what has happened to us and

  • who, equipped with this new body, we have turned out to be. We should consider ourselves

  • with enthusiasm and gratitudeand to interpret our bodies as a gift of nature. We are, whatever

  • we feel, beautiful. We should give ourselves a hug.

  • The advice is well-meaning and in its place apt. But there might be another, starker philosophy

  • to try out too.

  • We might look at the face in the mirror and pull an incensed mutinous smile as if to say: that really is not me

  • and never will be. Rather than attempting to overcome our initial discomfiture, we might

  • hold on to it and make a cult of it, founding a major part of our identity on a gutsy and

  • insolent refusal to take on board the so-called 'gift of nature' we can't stand. Following

  • Kingsley Amis in his truculent description of his body as an 'idiot' to whom he was

  • chained, we might consider our appearance as a banal and ridiculous actor to whom a

  • malevolent casting agent had mysterious decided to shackle usand to whom we owe no particular

  • favours or loyalty. We might think of our body as a taxi the universe has rudely shoved

  • us into, not a vehicle we have carefully had the opportunity to chooseand to deserve.

  • Out of such insubordination can come a liberating lightness. No longer do we have to worry whether

  • or not we are our own faces; we'll know for sure we absolutely aren't. We'll hint

  • to the world that there are armies of people, beings funnier and sadder, cleverer and simpler,

  • more masculine and more feminine, struggling to get out. At the same time, we'll be able

  • to bring our knowledge of the radical disconnection between outer form and inner character to

  • bear on our views of others. We'll cease taking their appearance as any sort of truth.

  • We'll know that they are likely to feel as let down by their bodies as we do. We'll

  • come to 'see' beauty where no one else has learnt to spot it, because we'll be

  • looking with new, and more penetrating sorts of eyes. And most importantly, we'll feel

  • compassion, for ourselves and others, for the blatant injustice of the facial lottery

  • that we have all been compelled to play.

A characteristic emotion on seeing a favourite novel turned into a film is puzzlement. We

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B2 中高級

我不是我的身體! (I Am NOT My Body!)

  • 13 0
    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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