It’s no surprise that Ang Lee’s film is more than a superficial story about the shipwrecked life of an Indian teenager, and despite its title, it presents a wonderful representation.
The main character in the film and the Bengal tiger on the same boat fight wits and courage, after many difficulties and obstacles at the same time, but also saw a variety of fantasy scenes and things in the sea, such as the strange cannibal island.
But beneath the surface of this fantasy, in the clear view of the sea, the film really shows the cruelty and darkness of humanity, and tells the story of a journey to eat people.
After being rescued, the main character Pai told two stories to the shipping company staff who came to investigate the cause of the shipwreck. The first story is what the film shows on the surface, telling the story of an Indian teenager and a tiger on the sea life drift journey; But when the accident investigator wasn’t convinced, he told a second story, one far more brutal, that suggested a homicide had taken place.
In the protagonist’s mouth, the zebra with a broken leg is a Buddhist sailor, the hyena is the cook, the orangutan is his mother, plus himself, there are four people on board; There were no other animals except a mouse.
The cook uses the flesh of a dead sailor to fish, kills his mother and throws her body into the sea, where he is eventually killed by the rampage protagonist.
But here’s the odd thing: since the cook fished with the flesh of his hands, killed his mother and dumped her body, why is the film showing hyenas killing zebras and eating meat, and then killing orangutans a short time later?
When the main character tells the first story that “the orangutan came on a floating banana,” one of the accident investigators immediately retorts that “bananas don’t float.” However, the protagonist still says in the second story that “Mother came in a floating banana”.
Questions from accident investigators
These inconsistencies and contradictions with reality are the implication of the film to us, indicating that this second story is still false.
So what’s true?
To understand the third true story hidden in the film, we have to start with the shipwreck.
After waking up from sleep, the protagonist went to the cabin to see that the storm was getting bigger and bigger, and the wind and waves caused him to fall several times on the surface of the ship; So he hurried back to the cabin, only to see that the cabin has been flooded by the sea, he looked for a circle failed to find his family, and then the film cuts to the main character on the deck of the scene.
There is a problem here: his family cannot be drowned in the sea even in their sleep, and even if the drowned protagonist goes back to look for the body, it is unlikely that the body is not seen, so his family must still be alive.
So there are three possibilities:
1. The protagonist finds his family and joins them on deck.
2, the protagonist is not found in the cabin, but met on the deck.
3. The protagonist is not found in the cabin, nor met on the deck.
If this is the case, then the representatives of the various animals may be true as the protagonist says, but it is not clear whether the plot is false.
Instead of discussing this case, let’s guess at the more likely 1 and 2.
In the case of 1 and 2, things change, and the representatives of each animal are different.
First of all, the zebra is a Buddhist sailor, which should be correct, because a lie has to be true, and there are hints in the film to prove it.
The other three animals, hyena, orangutan and tiger, represent the father, mother and himself respectively.
Why is this correspondence?
Needless to say, if you have seen the film, you will know that the tiger represents the instinctive or animalistic side of the protagonist.
Why hyenas are fathers and not cooks, we have to start with the boring beginning.
In its boring opening sequence, the film reveals a few important things:
1, the father is not religious, is a rational scientistist, meat.
2. My mother’s belief in Hinduism shows that science helps people understand the outside, and religion helps people understand the inside.
3, not much to his brother, only occasionally ridicule a few words about his brother’s belief in multiple religions.
4, the girlfriend explained that the lotus pose in the dance represents the lotus in the forest, and sent the protagonist a hand rope; The protagonist says he can’t remember when he said goodbye to his girlfriend.
The protagonist’s statement
In the case of 1 and 2, these important points of information can be regarded as foreshadows and hints of a third true story.
The real situation should be:
The father gets into the lifeboat first, followed by the main character as the youngest son, and the mother and brother, but after the main character jumps into the boat, the Buddhist sailor suddenly jumps from a higher place, the rope of the lifeboat breaks and falls into the sea. The mother and brother do not make it into the boat, and the sailor breaks his leg.
The scene in the film where the zebra jumps from a higher place
After daybreak, the mother, presumably with the help of her brother’s sacrifice, floated by something near their lifeboat and was rescued.
Why did you say your brother was dead?
Because in the film, after the orangutan gets on board, the protagonist asks: “Where are your children?”
The orangutan turned his head to look far out to sea, indicating that the elder brother could not be with the mother, should be in order to save the mother to sacrifice himself; Or get separated from his mother and eventually die, because the main character is the only one who survives the shipwreck.
The orangutan turned his head to look out over the water
Since then, the people have gathered, and what happens behind them is a replay of the scenes shown in the film where animals kill each other.
One of them is enough to make us think extremely frightening, that is: the tiger represents the main character, so the tiger ate the zebra, the orangutan, killed the hyena and ate it to survive.
Then the real story might be:
The father was so hungry that he killed the sailor with the broken leg and ate his flesh; The mother could not see the past and the father had a dispute, the father was angry and killed the mother, the protagonist killed his father.
And it is these human flesh that keeps the protagonist alive.
This is undoubtedly cruel and dark, but also the protagonist is unwilling to face.
Another thing the main character probably doesn’t want to face is that he himself kills someone for food. Unlike when he killed his father for his mother in a fit of rage, this time he killed simply for survival, for food.
This man is the mouse in the film. This mouse is unusual, through the protagonist’s experience and behavior in the cannibal island later, this mouse may be his girlfriend, he can not remember the scene of saying goodbye to his girlfriend may be that they did not say goodbye at all, the girlfriend is on the boat, after the boat disaster also in the lifeboat. The girlfriend was scared to the side when there was a fight in the lifeboat.
This conjecture has other implications besides the “can’t remember the goodbye scene” implication. That’s cannibal Island.
The protagonist comes to the cannibal island and finds that the roots on the ground can be eaten, there are many dense meerkats on the island, and there are pools of fresh water during the day and acid at night.
He tied the rope that his girlfriend gave him to the roots of the island, and at night found a lotus flower on the branch overhead with a faint white light, and there was a tooth inside. The discovery frightened him, so he gathered food and left at dawn.
The cannibal island is seen from a distance in the shape of a lying woman.
No doubt, the island is about the girlfriend. Most likely it represents the body of his girlfriend.
The roots represent flesh and blood, the meerkats represent maggots, the fresh water and acid represent the protagonist’s consciousness and consciousness of the corpse’s rotting fluid, the hand rope is tied to the girlfriend’s bone, the teeth in the lotus are the girlfriend’s teeth, collecting food indicates that the rotting meat is collected, leaving means that the white bones are thrown into the sea, so the film will show the human outline of the cannibalistic island in the sea.
Besides, how did the rat die? It’s thrown into the mouth of a tiger and swallowed.
What did the rat do before he died? He steals the food that the protagonist leaks, and then escapes to the protagonist when threatened by the tiger.
Some people on the Internet said that the mouse fled to the protagonist’s behavior is to seek protection from the protagonist, hoping that he will wake up. However, it was finally thrown into the tiger’s mouth by the protagonist himself.
The rat that escapes to the main character
Why do cannibal islands exist? Why do meerkats on man-eating islands represent maggots?
Because the protagonist woke up and found that he personally killed people, but also for food, in order to survive and kill his lover, the heart is sad and guilty, do not want to eat his girlfriend’s meat, so it was put for a long time. The discovery of the cannibal island occurred when the protagonist was about to starve to death, which means that the protagonist finally ate it.
In this way, the protagonist in the film constantly get supplies, such as cans in front of the flying fish, perhaps related to the dead body; Whenever he decides to eat human flesh, he is given a supply in the film.
Finally, the protagonist drifts to the mainland coast, the tiger leaves without looking back, and burs into the dense forest, representing the dark side of human nature in the civilized world, or the instinct and animal nature are suppressed by reason, the tiger will not look back at him, because they are one and the same person.
In the film, the Bengal tiger that accompanies the main character on the river dives into the dense forest
Based on the author’s second viewing memory about a month ago, some opinions on the Internet and some of the author’s own understanding, this article discusses two possibilities for the development of the story from the shipwreck, mainly analyzes the most likely “third true story”, including the hints in the film and various reasonable conjectures.
