Den stygge stesøsteren

The Ugly Stepsister (B+) This movie really disgusted me, but it is still worth watching! I received an early screening but missed it, so I finally made up for it. I am very glad. The Ugly Stepsister reinterprets the story of Cinderella from the perspective of the stepsister. Not only is the angle novel, the theme is more profound, and the method is bold, with no lack of direct blood and body horror. It is indeed an ancient version of The Substance, with a strong sense of irony.

And this is also written and directed by a female screenwriter. I think only female directors can be so cruel to women. Nowadays, only female directors can torture women and satirize their perverted pursuit of beauty. Men really dare not shoot it, otherwise they will be scolded to death. Of course, female directors will never show the ugly faces of men in the film. The overall style of the film is very similar to "Something Substantial".

Although fairy tales such as Cinderella and Snow White are for children and have many fantasy plots, they actually contain some dark and scary elements, which are designed to make children feel afraid and alert to bad guys. However, if these scary elements are magnified and the true human nature in the story is further demonstrated, it is definitely the best material for horror movies. Cinderella has the help of a fairy godmother, but how can she become beautiful without a fairy godmother? The Ugly Stepsister can only achieve this through plastic surgery, makeup, wigs and extreme weight loss, which are the "fairy godmothers" in reality.

In fact, you already know from the trailer that there will be ancient plastic surgery and bloody scenes, but the film itself has more disgusting and torturous content. Even if you close your eyes and don't watch it, just hearing the screams of the heroine is terrifying. I can only say that if you are unlucky enough to see the scene, you don't have to eat dinner. It does have a weight loss effect. The ancient plastic surgery and weight loss plan in the film are astonishing. Compared with swallowing parasites to make yourself thinner, our current way of losing weight is really not extreme.

But the wonderful thing is that even if you know that these cruel methods happened in the past, are exaggerated and unrealistic, people's persistent pursuit of beauty has not changed, but the methods have become gentler. There are still many people like the heroine who look ordinary but are extremely eager to marry into the upper class. For example, the socialite training class that everyone knows is the modern version of this movie. Some people still use all kinds of means to become beautiful and marry rich people or celebrities, from plastic surgery to learning how to seduce men. No matter how well you package it, it is still a scam, and behind it still exposes the ugly heart and perverted obsession with beauty and wealth. So even if the film is exaggerated, it is very realistic, and it is clear at a glance what kind of people it satirizes.

The film no longer glorifies Cinderella, the prince, and everyone around them. Instead, it shows people that everyone is a slave to desire and is very selfish. Other people in this story are no better than The Ugly Stepsister. Cinderella is no longer a pure, kind, and unambitious virgin, but can't resist all kinds of temptations; the prince and the people around him are a group of perverts who are eyeing beautiful women, and evaluating women is basically like buying meat in the market. The mother of The Ugly Stepsister, Cinderella's stepmother, completely disregards her self-esteem and her daughter's life in order to please a man, and constantly tortures her daughter in various ways. The environment of all villains is more terrifying than the various bloody and disgusting scenes in the film.

The Ugly Stepsister herself, the heroine, is not a simple and kind person, but a jealous paranoid. But she is indeed a girl who has been brainwashed by the utilitarian society and her mother. Under social pressure and the scrutiny of others, she has completely lost her self-awareness and self-pursuit. She only wants to be beautiful and marry a prince. She is so obsessed that she even cuts off her toes for this. If it is said that the foot binding of ancient Chinese beauties was an act of self-mutilation to please men, then cutting off oneself directly has reached a new level. But think about it, even if it is not cut with a knife, women are often very cruel to themselves. What is the purpose? In fact, there are always people who are more beautiful than themselves. If you keep "changing" and "disguising" yourself because of comparison and jealousy, you will eventually become a walking corpse that you don't even recognize. Even if people in modern life no longer need to compete with princes for a ball, there are still many people who compare and envy on social networks all day long and begin to feel ashamed.

What I like about this film is that it really didn't make a big change to the original story, but just told more of The Ugly Stepsister. The main story of Cinderella was kept, and there was a grand ball. The protagonist changed from Cinderella to The Ugly Stepsister, which made people see the whole story from the perspective of the ugly duckling who wanted to become a white swan, which really made it more sad and cruel. The soundtrack was very good, and some of the music itself was screaming, which was very scary.

Overall, I feel that some of the scenes are really unbearable to watch, but the story itself has a profound meaning and is very ironic, and it also vividly shows the mentality of some people who will do anything and even torture themselves in order to marry into the upper class.

PS: At the end, the word "Slut" appeared on the big screen. I was shocked and thought the director was cursing, but later I found out that this word is the Swedish word for "The end". But it really hits the point. Once again, in this era, movies with connotations about women can only be made by women. It's ruthless and makes people applaud.

People say this is an anti-patriarchal work, but if its ideas come from patriarchy itself and people use them without making a clear distinction, how can it be anti-patriarchal?

   In my opinion, people think that this movie represents a queer thought that claims to be against patriarchy, but if you look closely, some scholars who founded queer theory are actually deeply influenced by male scholars of academic patriarchy. They are disciples and followers. Some of these male scholars are very negative and toxic, such as Sartre, Schopenhauer, Freud, and John Manny. We need to carefully distinguish the valuable parts of their perspectives from those influenced by academic patriarchy. Academic patriarchy refers to male academic achievements that completely ignore and harm women's interests based on male interests, just as academic patriarchy will distort some original feminist ideas so that they can no longer fully interpret their original intentions.

  Here we cannot describe the female followers and students of male scholars as academic patriarchy. Even if they have some similar details, we need to distinguish the details. This is the origin of our reconstruction of things based on logical thinking. For example, although Beauvoir's thoughts need to be taken care of by successors, she is not a male academic patriarchy that completely lacks a female perspective. She intersects with the female perspective. It's just that in my opinion, there are too many contents that require a lot of logical work to sort out, and she herself has never fully realized it. But her thoughts themselves still have certain parts that are different from men.

   We cannot say that these people are evil, we cannot eliminate them just because they question them, we cannot delete them, and we cannot remove the yes-men of academic patriarchy. Another option is that we must put a thought that is still chaotic and undeveloped into a logical system to understand it, which is what the later generations should do. Chaotic initial thoughts are not trained in logic, and some are anti-logical because they do not sort out the logic, so we need to use them with caution and only use them in specific areas. We need to take into account that when these ideas were first born, the thinking environment may have been closed, without the Internet and the current global vision.

   Theory should consider the era in which it was born, so as not to lose control. For example, transgender ideology was born in the 18th century or even earlier. At that time, the speed of fermentation, the speed of information dissemination, and the tolerance of different behaviors by people in different regions were different. It is no longer possible to describe a certain behavior as both advanced and radical and rebellious. It is no longer the world where women are prohibited from participating in sports competitions. In contrast, we must protect women's single-sex space. The neglect of women's single-sex space comes from the conservative thinking of the large rural areas in the 18th century. Those who easily deprive men of women's locker rooms and sports competitions in modern times have experienced the era of "women didn't have public locker rooms and sports competitions before, but they still survived." These white rural areas are making new trends, which are almost destroying modern civilization. How can people deny the importance of women's space? Have you read Woolf's "A Room of One's Own"? Without "protected, undisturbed, independent living space, spiritual space and economic source", independent thinking will not come out of thin air without material.

   Queer theory is closely related to Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir and Sartre cannot be ignored. Although queer theory has continuously abandoned the former to welcome the new, it has continuously maintained the new people in queer theory to transform the old people to show the radicalism of queer theory. Even transgender has reached the stage of body transformation, and even believes that body transformation and mind transformation are dual "Brave New World". This is like painting, music, and food taste. When the mainstream no longer activates satisfaction, people begin to explore those strange, noisy, and unfashionable elements. But if they are not reconstructed using logical structures-so we occasionally say that deconstruction is not good-these noisy elements cannot be made into works that can be appreciated. Beauvoir and Sartre found countless noisy elements and tried to transform them into meaningful things. However, the academic world is composed of people, and the abuse caused by greed without restrictions has caused thought to quickly promote these concepts at the stage of chaotic noisy elements. Because they need to be fast, people need them to be replaced faster, so people lack proper reconstruction. Some queer activists say that there is a phenomenon of "superficial resistance" in queerism. There are some queer "rights-flipping" film and television works such as "The Power", and there are countless musical works. However, no matter whether the audience or the media thinks it is conveying a kind of profundity, the audience describes its "profundity" as "if it does not conform to my wishes, then it must be my enemy." "Two Steps to Hell" is not profound at all. Perhaps it is just a curious movie, and the audience over-interprets it instead of evaluating it from a curious perspective; or perhaps this work may be the case, people's voices cannot be clearly conveyed through the overly high water level, which is why we are facing so many problems now-because people no longer question them with a logical system.

   In academia, people will even bully those who question their views, just like Hannah Arendt was attacked and excluded by the entire academic community because of her different ideas. When people only blamed the Third Reich from a moral perspective, she insisted on finding the root cause and asking questions to the root cause. She tried to think deeply rather than just rely on emotional judgment to build a logical system.

   The film does not reinterpret the noise element into something new - it just does not fit in with the mainstream. In reality, the audience imagines that they are against some kind of straw man enemy. This enemy must be mainstream, must love handsome men, must be overly plastic and competitive, just like the two stepsisters in the original Cinderella who have no lines except bullying. The stepsisters are still straw men who lack the complexity of human nature. The straw man has no subject, and people project its image according to their own wishes - people also mistakenly believe that bloody competition is complex human nature. People's inner anger seeks long-awaited release, and that anger seeks such a medium. In the movie, it seems that people who are not in the mainstream laugh at and bully those imaginary enemies, so people seem to have suddenly got a lot of enemies to defeat, because people need to bear the consequences of attacking their own people, and people hope to defeat the enemy without bearing the consequences. People need to rationalize their aggression, so they will create imaginary enemies. And no matter how many psychological projections the straw man has, no matter how many images the imaginary enemy has, why do they always appear in female images? People are imagining a female image and then bullying that female image - "If you're not like us, you must be the kind of person who always wants to look at handsome guys 🐣🐣; if you're not like us, you'll get disgusting things, like tapeworms." Believe me, if the movie intended to compare tapeworms to 🐣🐣 to criticize patriarchy, it would definitely not find that kind of handsome guy to play it, and it would definitely make you feel that it is criticizing in some way. Punishing women and giving candies to handsome men seems to continue to reward and encourage men. Even the male character who forced Cinderella to kiss did not have the slightest intention of being punished. The camera often controls the sight of the girl characters in the film to look at the male body, as if girls only have this one choice. This is like my impression of gender identity. They put all the choices in the world into pink and blue drawers with obsessive control. This is not any innovation or breaking patriarchy, let alone breaking stereotypes. Instead, stereotypes are deepened. Their pink drawer only has tight skirts, heavy makeup and super high heels, and their blue drawer only has big beards without chests.

   The movie features a lot of good-looking men, but there is no shortage of men and women in the world who abandon independent thinking for good-looking men, and the problem is not that people love beauty, but that people love it so much that they also have a natural filter for ugly men. This is not just a liking within a certain range, it seems to be a mysterious trust, thinking that he must have some unknown advantages, and it portrays the women who do not belong to its own camp in such a miserable situation, while the men in the film do not have to suffer at all, but are served or have the right to choose from thousands of women. Once again, the image of handsome guys portrays the unattainable status of men, and the girls can only abandon their property and find other ways out. How can this be considered anti-patriarchy when it is completely unnecessary and not related to reality and facts?

   But the movie is not without valuable things, such as the book that the protagonist can't put down. When the protagonist grows up in a world that only has love stories with men, and her world is like the Middle Ages with no choice, it seems that the reason can be sorted out from the narrative, and why she becomes a person who believes that she has only one path in life. However, multiple deviations have caused the overall tilt, and I don't even think that the movie interprets this part very well.

   This movie feels like someone is shouting "anti-patriarchy" while saying, "Not all men, not handsome men." This movie lacks deep reconstruction and is just a carnival on top of the excitement, as if people are celebrating victory before the real resistance has begun.

This is a somewhat bad fairy tale drama. Because of this, when I didn't feel good about it, I gave myself feedback: "Break away from the original fairy tale drama and think independently about what the plot wants to express." But until the end, I still couldn't get any thoughts or resonance from me. The stepsister in the film is an ugly girl who has always dreamed of pursuing a prince. (Although she is very bad, fat, and greedy, she still wants to pursue a prince. In this regard, I think she is definitely not sitting back and enjoying the fruits of her labor. There are still many efforts in training. Greediness expresses that this girl can't control her mouth from the beginning.) In this setting, she made many extreme changes and ate the tapeworm pills provided by the teacher. I think this is all realistic. In the end, the prince was still unfortunately snatched away by Cinderella. I can still have a little understanding of this. After all, doing anything to the extreme will not have a good result. But the opposite is that Cinderella is portrayed as a girl who covets the stepmother's family's wealth, likes the groom, and has an unspeakable affair with the groom, and has a very bad personality. Cinderella's mother also manipulates magic to let her daughter attend the ball (she eats tapeworms and is in the physics department, but you just use magic without saying anything, which is very buggy). What is the purpose of Cinderella becoming a princess in the end? The whole story has nothing to do with love, morality, hard work, and decent and villain. It presents a hearty reality, but it is also absurd. But in the end, I was relieved that the prince was not a good person, and the stepsister who pursued the prince and her sister walked out of the house. In this regard, at least the previous plot has a slightly warm ending.

It is also about serving as a beauty. A Certain Material is still confined to the traditional male-gathering framework, emphasizing the importance of women's youth and beauty, abusing women in disguise, and spreading anxiety. The ugly stepsister directly jumps out of this framework and fires at the phenomenon of "women trying their best to show their sexual value to cater to the male gaze". Many women in the story do not pursue power and wealth, but instead try to gain the love of those in power by improving their sexual value, so as to cling to power. The movie not only shows their pathetic and ridiculous attitudes vividly, but also clearly tells the audience that this road is a dead end (the prince is deconstructed into a villain who covets sex and treats women as containers of desire. Even if Cinderella successfully becomes a princess, her life afterwards can be imagined). By shaping the image of the little daughter, it also points out a clear path for women: strengthen yourself, make yourself able to survive independently and freely, get rid of the discipline and shackles of women, and live like a real person, instead of trying to reduce yourself to a sex symbol. Although this movie is also very bloody, it is much more open-minded than A Certain Material. Sadly, I saw some stubborn people in the comment sections of Douban, Bilibili, etc., still immersed in the narrative of female competition ("Why would he rather kill himself than his stepsister") and comment on women in terms of sexual value ("In fact, the younger sister is also very beautiful"). Some people even thought that this movie was an anti-fairy tale for the sake of being anti-fairy tale, and bloody for the sake of being bloody, so it really can be said that it was a waste of time to watch it.

I prefer "Ugly Stepsister" to "A Certain Material". Before I explain why, let me first talk about my opinion on the characters.

The first thing to talk about is Cinderella. Compared with the fairy tale setting, the screenwriter has made Cinderella more complicated. The most direct manifestation is the addition of the ex-boyfriend setting. Maybe because of this setting, the once pure Cinderella is gone, but I don’t think it actually deviates too much from the original setting. The original "kind" Cinderella is such a flat character. I would use "adaptation" to describe this new Cinderella. She knows what beauty gives her, and in order to adapt to this world, she will tell her lover that she will never fall in love with others, but she will openly strive for the prince's appreciation.

The main character is Elvira. She is the opposite of "adaptation" - "unadaptability". In my eyes, she is too innocent. In the play, the lady handed her a tapeworm egg and asked her to keep her inner self. But I find it ironic that the reason she fell in love with the prince was because of her inner self. She read poetry and fell in love with an imaginary prince. But she could only attract the prince's attention through the outer self that she had beaten out with pain.

Then there are the stepmother and the little sister. One is willing to bow her head in lust, and the other is a young woman who has the determination to run away. Even this decision is accompanied by care for other women. When she takes her sister away, in contrast, there is indeed a mother who cuts off her daughter's toes with a knife, numbing the pain but only magnifying her sexual desire for men.

Perhaps this last concern is why I like this film more than "Something Substantial". When watching the former, I became more and more speechless. I only saw the stupid mutual oppression between the two protagonists (which clearly showed that there was a better way)....... But in this film, except for the mother, I can empathize with every woman. Cinderella and Elvira, adapted and unadapted. The unadapted child was torn apart, and in the end, he was also amused by the destined scene. Her love was too simple, but fortunately, she also had a sister who was equally "unadapted" to accompany her.