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This movie is about penises getting chopped off and the aftermath therein. It is the epitome of a psycho-sexual thriller and it has all the Freudian trappings: castration anxiety, Oedipal anxiety, incest, impotence, masochism, phallocentrism, rape ad nauseum.
The primary theme of the film is a phallocentric look at emasculation. However, this does not necessarily make it a misogynistic film. Indeed, through its phallocentrism it reveals maleness to be much more infantile (there's Freud again) than it may intuitively seem.
A father cares about his son's sexuality and his safety. However, he is emasculated by the act of his son's emasculation (by the Oedipal matriarch). The gun he uses to sympathize with his son is also a phallic symbol and the blood splatters he spares his son are the final orgasm. The Oedipal complex is in full effect here, even before it is revealed that once the son regains his sexuality he can only be made potent by the one who robbed him of it in the first place.
There is a woman in the film who represents the interloper into the family unit. Ironically, the interloper in the relationship between the father and son is not the mother, but the woman who represents the pure sexuality of the other. This also reveals to us a life lesson: We can't always love the one we screw, and we can't always screw the one we love. This is a tragic dichotomy that punctuates this Shakespearian tragedy of a film.
There is finally the Buddhist redemption from the Western, Freudian pathology. Elimination of suffering is to be found, not in the pursuit of pleasure or passion, but in indifference to both pleasure and pain. Masochism and hedonism are two sides of the same coin and reality is to be found, not in a Jungian choice between love or fear (or the Freudian sex or death), but in the middle path: indifference. To not care is to become enlightened.
score 9/10
daretostruggledaretowin 22 June 2015
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3263096/ |
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21-2-2021 00:05:07