I have never believed in the equality of men and women, just as I don’t believe there is such a thing as equality in the world. I recognize all the rights that women do have, but I don’t think that God is the same for men as He is for women. When a girl grows into a woman, it only takes one bone-crushing penetration; when a boy grows, it takes countless penetrations – countless failures and countless attempts until he understands that the world is out of his control. For example, your own penis, you never know when it will betray you once. When boys grow up, they are always a lot more cruel than girls.
One of the most interesting conversations in “Classroom Crush” is about sex and your helpless penis. When the other children are beyond longing to grow up after taking control of women, three times a day. The male protagonist, who is tortured by women every night at this time, can’t help but tease a sentence:
“Only rabbits do it three times a day, and rabbits don’t need condoms”.
Classroom Love” is about the cruelty of youth, but the cruelty is not youth, but the process of growing up in adolescence itself. Just as when you wake up one morning and discover for the first time that life is lonely and thirsty, you feel the nakedness of life itself and the evil in it, life is no longer an amusement park but a dangerous and bloody colosseum.
Bo Wedberg’s “Classroom Love” does not score well in IMDB. The pain of growing up and the torment of sexual desire in adolescence, I can remember movies like Tonadore’s “The Legend of Sicily” and Iwai Shunji’s “All About Lily Chou-Chou”, and the Oedipus complex and taboo that Bo Wedberg hopes for is not necessarily more appealing than this year’s “The Reader”.
But the film did touch me. And that touch is the fall of the boy’s heroic dream. It’s what the film says, you’re not a rabbit, you can’t be three times a day.
Since ancient times, the penis has been used as a symbol, such as the primitive society penis became a totem, a symbol of reproduction and prosperity. David Slade’s film “Hard Candy”, made in 2006, is a bitter satire of the male subconscious: the hero is tortured and castrated by a 13 or 14 year old girl. （The story of the hero being tortured and castrated by a 13 or 14 year old girl (though not cut). It is the embarrassment of almost all men to have the power and not be able to do anything about it, to be in control but not in control.
The point about castrating men, as mentioned in “Hard Candy,” is in fact dramatized. Arranging an impossibly hostile situation, the man loses all ability to act and is reduced to a lamb to the slaughter – while the little loli, who is supposed to be the lamb, is the opposite, with a playful expression. And in reality, as Wang Xiaobo said inside the “Golden Age”: life is a slow castration process. When you understand this, castration has already begun.
The opening of “Farewell to the Classroom” is a passage from “On Mating”. It means that ejaculation starts at the age of fourteen, which is the time when the hero grows up in the story. A fourteen year old boy’s brain is all about breasts and vagina. In The Legend of Sicily, it says it all: He needs a woman. This is where the desire is.
When God wants to destroy a man, he gives him supreme power; when life wants to destroy an innocence, then just give him a woman. Another name for “Classroom Love” is Classroom Love, and Sting’s first woman is his teacher. A woman who has reached the age of thirty. If Sting leans down on his knees and attempts to explore the warmth and scent of Viola’s body above the chair, then Sting is encouraged to explore the mystery from the bottom up, unbuttoning her skirt – the liberation of desire.
Bo Wedberg is known for his countless symbolic metaphorical shots in the film, so Viola’s dark blue dress and unbuttoned twenty buttons inside this bridge are undoubtedly an attempt to break free from the taboo: Sting hopes to find the tenderness of life in the warmth of a woman, while Viola looks forward to the touch of a teenager to bring her “fresh air”.
“In 1943 Sweden, the constraints of tradition and the fear of war make Viola disgusted by the deadness of life. Although she looked forward to relief, she was bound by her womanly nature. She can tolerate students deserting her classroom, but she would never dare to make her incestuous affair with Sting public.
Sting is the only straw she holds on to in the stagnant waters of her life. The air is hopeless, but Viola is willing enough to take it, and Viola starts the film from the reserved elegance of a mentor to the desperation of the end, as the director abandons the characterization created by arias and gentle lighting in favor of unending selfish greed and filthy lust, a kind of goddess to woman transformation.
Sting’s desire is fulfilled, and gradually understands the horror and ugliness that lies behind this desire.
This is perhaps better illustrated by my experience at the age of fourteen. When I was fourteen years old and boarding at school, every morning the school radio would play a song by Li Na, the lyrics of which were: Before the young monk went down the mountain, the old monk told him that the woman under the mountain was a tiger. This song sounds vulgar, but I think every man should listen to it once. At least it is also a warning bell.
The characterization of Frank, a middle-aged man, is one of the big highlights of the film. The film’s narrative is long and drawn out, with long-winded teasing and veiled innuendo, almost as if the first thirty minutes of the film were an extremely boring Japanese AV, and Frank’s plot is a major twist in the film, allowing many viewers who had almost given up to regain interest.
Frank is the first “breath of fresh air” for Viola, as mentioned earlier. But this air in Romero said “the boss of Europa”, but also inevitably become dead. The key is that he has a beautiful and watery wife. So Frank is completely a comic clown image. From his name to his profession, none of them is a slightly sad joke.
This is a boy who is tormented by life and growing up. He survived the battle of life with nothing more than a childish heart. For example, he hid the wine inside the hall’s hanging clock, boasting of a remarkable invention. It is not difficult to glimpse a glimpse of innocence in the heart of an old man through that jocular invention – poor and inevitably reduced to a laughing stock.
Such tricks are useless in the cruelty of life.
He is the loser among men: incompetent, cowardly, disillusioned, numb. Faced with Sting’s cuckold grease and life’s repeated blows, he takes evasive action. Frank prefers Beethoven’s later years. According to Romero’s “Three Biographies of Giants,” Beethoven is in the chief of heroes. And here Bo Wedberg is more or less ironic: faced with pain and unable to scream, Beethoven is nothing more than Frank suckling at the teat of hope. He is comforted, but never given the courage to fight.
In the film, Frank, like Viola, is Sting’s initiation teacher, and although Sting won’t admit it, he does show Sting the pain of becoming a man later in life. Viola is a ladder, and Frank is the place to which the ladder leads.
Frank’s image also builds up the “cruelty of adolescence” that “Classroom Love” aims to describe. This cruelty is stamped on each boy’s vision of the future: this is what you expect. As Sting said in the previous article: You’re not a fucking rabbit. It is also imprinted in the vision of another boy.
The opposite of Frank is Sting’s brother, Sig. He is Sting’s hero.
All people need heroes. In fact, Beethoven is only the hero of the loser. And for Sting’s tender little souls, their hero is a real man. An ideal man.
Sting’s brother is such an ideal hero.
Every boy has such a hero. (Superman was still sleeping inside some boy’s head in 1943.) Compared to Beethoven, who was mentally strong, Sting’s hero only had to be physically strong. The director did not write much about Sting’s brother, but he already represents a real hero: he is first a sailor, second is brave, that is, to solve a powerful opponent, but also can handle a woman.
Sigge and Beethoven are both heroes, but there is a fundamental difference in the image. While Beethoven is a consolation for the pain of the loser, Seeger is a model for the struggle of a young mind. What he offers to Sting is a purpose, a character that Sting feels he should be.
If the cruelty of growing up in “All About Lily Chou-Chou” lies in the shattering of dreams, then Sting’s tragedy begins with the fall of a hero; Sting’s brother ultimately fails to overcome the vagaries of fate and dies in the war. It’s like a failed Superman, falling in front of a child.
This is the reality that no one can challenge and win in it.
The cover of “Classroom Love” shows Viola in a dark blue dress with twenty buttons half open and half closed, desire beckoning in it. But what Sting unravels is not desire, but the truth of growing up, and if there really is a so-called cruelty in it, then it is indeed so clichéd: reality unfolds and the hero dies.
Then we start to grow up.
The film by Bo Wedberg, in fact, is read more as a power struggle between the sexes, with Viola representing the powerful and Frank the man, the underdog in the war between men and women, and Sting’s final rebellion and departure representing the man who begins to take charge of his life.
If Sting learns anything in this war, it’s that he learns what all men learn: control. the scene where Sting and Viola make love in the teaching equipment room, in which the director uses a brainless mannequin as a metaphor for Sting’s penis thinking. As the hero dies, Sting gradually begins to think about the meaning of life in the radical changes of growing up and tries to resist. He begins to leave Viola to pursue his love; and kicks away the authority of the female teacher’s podium, exposing Viola’s ugliness to others.
He begins to take control of his own life, whether or not he becomes a Frank-like tragedy, but he does have to begin his journey to become a man. In the face of life’s teasing, we may not be able to control everything, but I can at least control my own penis.
And feminists criticize this because, after all, lust is what they want, representing the inferiority of men’s nature, and is the handle by which they feel they can master all of them.
