Life of Pi and Back to 1942, miseries and redemption

Many viewers like "Life of Pi", a movie directed by Chinese Hollywood director Ang Lee, but do not like "Back to 1942", another movie by Chinese director Feng Xiaogang, because faith saved cruel reality in the former while the cruel reality smashed all beliefs in the latter.

The two movies were shown almost at the same time and both of them told a story about hunger, disaster, survival, human nature and faith. However, they are very different in narrative style and value orientation.

In the movie "Life of Pi", Young Pi told two seemingly unrelated stories, which are actually one story. Survivals zebra, female orangutan, hyena, tiger, and Pi in the first story are the corresponding characters of the second story, which are vegetarian sailor, Pi's mother, chef, and Pi. The hyena killed the zebra and female orangutan, and then was killed by the tiger in the first story; and the chef killed the sailor and Pi's mother, and finally was killed by Pi in the second story. It is obvious that the animal-animal relationship is a metaphor for the real relations between characters in Pi's consciousness. The tiger is the embodiment of brutish nature of Pi, which was ignited by his mother's death. Since then, Pi had to learn to face everything alone and get along with his own brutish nature.

Obviously, it is by no means a fantastic story that occurred on the sea, but may expose a dog-eat-dog world. However, the second story did not touch the more cruel side, which was retained in the first story as a metaphor. The mysterious floating island where the story happened provides a lot of implications, including lotuses, ropes symbolizing farewell, acid lake, teeth, and the island looks like a woman lying on the sea. All seems to indicate that Pi ate his mother and other dead bodies, thereby awakening.

The movie "Back to 1942" also told people's miseries and faith in the great famine period, but the faith cannot solve the survival crisis. People have lost the bottom line of civilization in order to survive and lived an ignoble, low-down and desperate life. In an existential perspective, the movie made death approach people and deprive them of all values, which includes human dignity and overall national interest.

In terms of story structures, "Life of Pi" is more complete than "Back to 1942" in the way that it not only describes the experience of hardship but also gives the answer for overcoming it. Pi has superior memory and can memorize many digits of the circumference ratio, but he cannot remember how he parted from his mother. From a psychological point of view, this is a type of selective amnesia and mental self-deception. If not by such forgetfulness and not for the use of metaphor to describe the reality as the animal world, one might have been devastated by such cruelty. How can we overcome the cruel reality? Perhaps the answer given by the "Life of Pi" is that we should rely on redemption, forgetfulness, self-deception, faith, and even such a poetic way of narration.

"Back to 1942", on the other hand, does not give any answer. The movie makes people feel gloomy, depressed, and even despaired. From such a manner of expression, we should see that the current Chinese society still seems not ready to walk out of the suffering of the past and do not know how to get rid of its shadows. At the moment, we do not even have any plausible answer for the past or the future. "Back to 1942" is in a sense also a metaphor, and also a kind of redemption.

For an individual, it is easy to realize self-redemption through experiencing a disaster; but for a large society, perhaps "Life of Pi" represents the ultimate solution. However, such choice is also cruel because this means forgetfulness is already taking place while a nation has not yet looked squarely at the sufferings of the past and is still sharing a boat with the fierce tiger. Should a society forget about the past without going through struggles and redemptions of the soul? Should we be such a society? Can we have an easy conscience in doing so? People's attitudes towards "Back to 1942" have exposed the entanglement of an era.