Shaoyi Wang Final paper MEDST240 Prof. Liebman The weight of life --- analysis on “21 Grams” We were sitting together in his couch when I first saw that title on the cover of DVD. --- “What is 21 grams” I asked. --- “I haven’t seen it yet, but they told me it was a weird movie.” --- “No, I mean what THING actually weights about 21 grams?” --- “Huh…” he moved his eyebrow a little bit, “I don’t really know.” he picked up the beer bottle, “maybe one shot?” --- “That’s it?” --- “Maybe a single pack of cigarettes?” --- “…” --- “Why ?” --- “It says on the preview that 21 grams is the weight of your soul.” “21 grams” is a movie about life and death, but it is not a movie just about life and death. The tiltle of the movie means the weight that a person will lost at the moment he dies. Therefore, 21 grams is the weight of one’s life, or we can consider it as the weight of one’s soul. This movie breaks up and represents specific pieces of a completed event by a series of interconnected elements in order to discuss the subject of people’s life and death. Is it people who make the life a state of chaos, or it is life itself? The narration sequence is not the novel point of “21 grams”, but one will hardly miss its attraction in this movie. I talked to one of my classmates on bus, and he wondered why I choose “21 grams” for my final peper. --- “I don’t even think I understood it at all after the first time I saw it.” he said so. It is true that the narration sequence of “21 grams” will make lots of audiences confused during the first-time screening. However, after watching it for couple of times, it is easy to pick up how “21 grams” were structured and arranged. Basically, the movie was devided into two parts by a car accident. The first scene after seeing the film title, “21 grams”, was Cristina’s happy family. We see her hunsband and two daughters dining in a small cafeteria pleasantly. Following this, we see Cristina talking about her experience with a small physiological group. Therefore, we get a sense of Cristina’s life before the accident from these two consciously continued scenes. Then, we see Jack talking to a young guy about belief. “Stealing ain’t worth it. Coming to church, reading the Bible and believing in Jesus, brother, that’s your ticket.” and “God even knows every single hair move on your head.” The way he talks and the contents he talks reveals his wishes of repentance and his new attitude towards life. Following Jack’s hope of his new life, we suddenly see a lot of birds flying up to the sky in dusk, and then we see Paul lying in what he called “the death’s waiting room ” with “those ridiculous tubes” all over his body. Hearing his voice-over, we realize he is living on the edge of life. Actually, the explaination over each single scene in “21 grams” was clear enough to everyone, and what may confuses people for the first-time screening is how and in what order these scenes are joined all together. Here, the motif and the transmission does take a great control of the movie’s rhythm. There are many of motifs in “21 grams”, either vivid or subtle, and all of them interconnect with each other to serve the movie as a whole. The first motif that I noticed was the light on ceiling. In the “death’s waiting room” scene, we first see a rectangle ceiling light; and in the beginning of the following scene, we see a round ceiling light. This is a basically visual motif, which is used to transfer smoothly from one location to another. However, not all of the motifs in “21 grams” are due to transmit between scenes. There are two major motifs in this movie, and the opening sequence is involved to one of them. In the opening sequence, we see a peaceful scene, in which Paul sat behind Cristina’s back, watched her sleeping quietly. At such moment, we do not know anything about these two characters, and we do not know anything about the possibility of the happenings. Later on, at almost the end of the movie, we see this scene again, but we see it in a different way. First, we are invited into the scene through Paul‘s movement. We see him reading the book, looking at the pictures and smoking. Then, we see a exactly same scene as the one we see at the beginning, but we do not consider that it still has the same meaning to us. With the knowledge from the expanded plots, we are able to pick up the disordered pieces and figure out what is the current situation. Such kind of motifs do not only responds to each other, but also reveals the actual position of audiences. Through the motif, we will be able to find out how deep we have already got into the movie and what else is missing. I discribe the second major motif as the fuse of plots. By the end of the movie, Cristina walked out of the motel, and she was not only walking out the motel, but also leading us to a series of explaination and responding. We see Paul sitting next to a wasted swimming pool and holding a gun; we see Paul lying on the ground with blood all over his body, and unlike what we see in former plots, we are told what made these happen by some extra information and a short period of linear narration. Here, I consider all these scenes as a string of motifs, which pick up some scattered scenes, sometimes even just some still images, and draw them into a linear sequence to give audiences some explaination about the story. Therefore, in “21 grams”, motifs are represented either individually or jointly in order to contribute to the narration. In “21 grams”, life and destiny seems to a chaos, and it is people who bring them all together. The arrangement of motif make audiences discover, but not simply watch the characters’ life. How does our life journey look like? B is for brown, and for the bitter past, too. In “21 grams”, different statures of life are color coded or texture coded (or we can consider it as visual motif also). Soon after the beginning of the movie, we are suddenly shown a scene in totally different color tone. We see Cristina sniffing drugs alone in bathroom, under a dim brown-tone ceiling light. Cristina had a bitter past, until one day she met her hunsand “who has been standing behind her for so long” and had two daughters with him. The family life really saves Cristina and gives her hope. However, after loosing them in the car accident, she backwards to her past and refuses to face the future. She picked up using drugs; she called her old-time friend Ana, although she did not say anything finally; she went to the club to see Ana and got drugs from her, like she used to. All these scenes were represented in the same tone as it was in the bathroom scene, and it was not just a matter of identification of time, such as dim light is the implication of night time. After the funeral of her family, Cristina talked to her father about how she felt about the death of family members. “I couldn’t believe how can you talk again… life does not just go on.” Everytime she suffered the nightmare from her past, her location would be dimmed in to the brown tone, and her mood would be dimmed into the depression. Therefore, in “21 grams”, the tone of the scenes indicate the characters’ mood and the conscious situation of plots. The other way that is used to support the narration in “21 grams” is the texture of the image. In the scene which Paul drove Cristina passing a working place to identify Jack’s face, we can tell that the images are in the film grain effect. The coarseness on the screen does not only indicate the environment that Jack is suffering, but also reveals the bitterness inside both of Paul and Cristina’s hearts. Sometimes, the visual effects can be the most direct and shock narration style in movies. I used to assume that “21 grams” is a movie without future, but the guy who compares the weight of his soul to a shot of beer said “21 grams” could be a movie which is about the negative attitude towards the relationship between people and their future. I have to say such comments open up my mind about the future contents in “21 grams”. I realize that if assuming the brown tone as the indication of the past and the ordinary lighting indicates the present, then, I suppose the only two scenes that indicate the future in “21 grams” are the flying-birds scenes. In the beginning of the movie, we see lots of birds flying up to the sky in dusk, and the camera pans a little bit in order to follow the birds. At the end of “21 grams”, we see a motif scene, in which shows the birds flying down in dusk. These two scenes are both shot in the same location at the same time. The only difference is to which way the birds fly. I consider them as a series of music notes or a piece of rhythm. When the birds went up, we “hear” some specific “plot music” that reveals the psychological stature of the characters, and while they flying down we “hear” and read something different, such as an ending or the transmigration. These two scenes in “21 grams” are just like a software I know, and I call it “Visual Music”. With such a tool, you can “watch” your music or edit them by the appearance of music wave. Here, in “21 grams”, the narration is the visual music score, while there are lots of scenes which contribute it as the visual music notes, no only by the objects’ movement, but also the colors and the textures of a scene. Since the life is a colorful, motive and three dimensional journey, then, how can we make it as flat as the screen in a movie. No one should ever hate Alfred Hitchcock, because we are all born to be “doubled”, but not by his influence. In the trip of life, nothing could be more interesting than human being, because they are so tricky and so complicated. A story could be told, but a person could never be, not even by himself. People always have “double identity”, or sometimes even “triple identity” about their personality. In “21 grams”, each protagonist has more than one identity about himself/herself, and Paul is the most typical one among all of them. He got a new heart from donation, therefore he got a new life. However, at the moment the doctor wonders about whether his body will include this new heart, he wonders about whether he is going to be included to his new life. People aways say that you NEED TO follow your heart, and Paul is someone who HAS TO follow his heart, or is he? No matter what, the “double identity” of Paul is “the old me with the tubes” and “the new me with a heart”. Cristina had a bitter past, and later on, her family became her everything. After loosing her everything, she backwards to her past and wants to stay away from her future. Therefore, to her, the “double identity” is about tense. Personally, I’m interested in Jack Jordan the most in “21 grams”, and I consider him as a “triple identity” character. According to his wife’s words, two years ago, he did not believe anything and now everything has to deal with God. From the beginning of the movie, Jack acted as a self-contradictory character all the way through the end. Like Cristina, Jack had a dark, maybe even worse, past also, and later, he believd in Jesus. The custom of Jack achieves the narration in the first quarter of the movie. He wore tatoos all over his body, and he talks like a rude street person, but he argues a lot about “Stealing ain’t worth it. Coming to church, reading the Bible and believing in Jesus, brother, that’s your ticket.” and “God even knows every single hair move on your head.” He hit his son twice, while saying “There’s no hitting in the house.” Jack is not a sharp person, and he is always self-contradictory. He wanted to be clean and accepted by the world, but he just did not know how. After he reported himself and went to the jail again, he started to doubt about God, about his belief and about himself. All these three characters suffers from the car accident, but Jack suffers the most. There are several scenes which shows Jack sobbing, and we do not hear he says anything. All these scenes indicate how much Jack suffer from the car accident. “You know what will happen if you hit a pregnant woman or an old man? The guilt will suck you done to the bone.” he said so to Nick and predict his feeling about the car accident. Moreover, through the motif which shows the different reactions toward the pray in church, we could find out his doubt about his belief. The wild past, the hope of God, and the doubt of belief structures the suffering inside Jack’s heart, and makes him a challenged character. Anyone can have that “double identity” in his/her inside, and do not blame the life. It is us who make ourselves double. --- “How may lives do we live? How many lives do we die? They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. How much fits into 21 grams? How much it lost? When do we lost 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained? Twenty one grams, the weight of a sack if five nickels, the weight of a humming bird, a chocolate bar. How much did 21 grams weight?” Watching the fade-out after the voice over of Sean Penn, who is actually one of my favourite actors, I realized that we just went through the last journey of Paul’s life. How amazing about life and death! A car accident, a heart, three characters, several journeys and that 21 grams.
--- “How much will your 21 grams weight?” he smiled quietly. --- “Maybe not too much.” I sighed, “may be too light that I can not even bear to think about it.”
Final paper
MEDST240
Prof. Liebman
The weight of life
--- analysis on “21 Grams”
We were sitting together in his couch when I first saw that title on the cover of DVD.
--- “What is 21 grams” I asked.
--- “I haven’t seen it yet, but they told me it was a weird movie.”
--- “No, I mean what THING actually weights about 21 grams?”
--- “Huh…” he moved his eyebrow a little bit, “I don’t really know.” he picked up the beer bottle, “maybe one shot?”
--- “That’s it?”
--- “Maybe a single pack of cigarettes?”
--- “…”
--- “Why ?”
--- “It says on the preview that 21 grams is the weight of your soul.”
“21 grams” is a movie about life and death, but it is not a movie just about life and death. The tiltle of the movie means the weight that a person will lost at the moment he dies. Therefore, 21 grams is the weight of one’s life, or we can consider it as the weight of one’s soul. This movie breaks up and represents specific pieces of a completed event by a series of interconnected elements in order to discuss the subject of people’s life and death.
Is it people who make the life a state of chaos, or it is life itself?
The narration sequence is not the novel point of “21 grams”, but one will hardly miss its attraction in this movie. I talked to one of my classmates on bus, and he wondered why I choose “21 grams” for my final peper.
--- “I don’t even think I understood it at all after the first time I saw it.” he said so.
It is true that the narration sequence of “21 grams” will make lots of audiences confused during the first-time screening. However, after watching it for couple of times, it is easy to pick up how “21 grams” were structured and arranged. Basically, the movie was devided into two parts by a car accident. The first scene after seeing the film title, “21 grams”, was Cristina’s happy family. We see her hunsband and two daughters dining in a small cafeteria pleasantly. Following this, we see Cristina talking about her experience with a small physiological group. Therefore, we get a sense of Cristina’s life before the accident from these two consciously continued scenes. Then, we see Jack talking to a young guy about belief. “Stealing ain’t worth it. Coming to church, reading the Bible and believing in Jesus, brother, that’s your ticket.” and “God even knows every single hair move on your head.” The way he talks and the contents he talks reveals his wishes of repentance and his new attitude towards life. Following Jack’s hope of his new life, we suddenly see a lot of birds flying up to the sky in dusk, and then we see Paul lying in what he called “the death’s waiting room ” with “those ridiculous tubes” all over his body. Hearing his voice-over, we realize he is living on the edge of life. Actually, the explaination over each single scene in “21 grams” was clear enough to everyone, and what may confuses people for the first-time screening is how and in what order these scenes are joined all together. Here, the motif and the transmission does take a great control of the movie’s rhythm. There are many of motifs in “21 grams”, either vivid or subtle, and all of them interconnect with each other to serve the movie as a whole. The first motif that I noticed was the light on ceiling. In the “death’s waiting room” scene, we first see a rectangle ceiling light; and in the beginning of the following scene, we see a round ceiling light. This is a basically visual motif, which is used to transfer smoothly from one location to another. However, not all of the motifs in “21 grams” are due to transmit between scenes. There are two major motifs in this movie, and the opening sequence is involved to one of them.
In the opening sequence, we see a peaceful scene, in which Paul sat behind Cristina’s back, watched her sleeping quietly. At such moment, we do not know anything about these two characters, and we do not know anything about the possibility of the happenings.
Later on, at almost the end of the movie, we see this scene again, but we see it in a different way. First, we are invited into the scene through Paul‘s movement. We see him reading the book, looking at the pictures and smoking. Then, we see a exactly same scene as the one we see at the beginning, but we do not consider that it still has the same meaning to us. With the knowledge from the expanded plots, we are able to pick up the disordered pieces and figure out what is the current situation. Such kind of motifs do not only responds to each other, but also reveals the actual position of audiences. Through the motif, we will be able to find out how deep we have already got into the movie and what else is missing.
I discribe the second major motif as the fuse of plots. By the end of the movie, Cristina walked out of the motel, and she was not only walking out the motel, but also leading us to a series of explaination and responding. We see Paul sitting next to a wasted swimming pool and holding a gun; we see Paul lying on the ground with blood all over his body, and unlike what we see in former plots, we are told what made these happen by some extra information and a short period of linear narration. Here, I consider all these scenes as a string of motifs, which pick up some scattered scenes, sometimes even just some still images, and draw them into a linear sequence to give audiences some explaination about the story. Therefore, in “21 grams”, motifs are represented either individually or jointly in order to contribute to the narration.
In “21 grams”, life and destiny seems to a chaos, and it is people who bring them all together. The arrangement of motif make audiences discover, but not simply watch the characters’ life.
How does our life journey look like?
B is for brown, and for the bitter past, too.
In “21 grams”, different statures of life are color coded or texture coded (or we can consider it as visual motif also). Soon after the beginning of the movie, we are suddenly shown a scene in totally different color tone. We see Cristina sniffing drugs alone in bathroom, under a dim brown-tone ceiling light. Cristina had a bitter past, until one day she met her hunsand “who has been standing behind her for so long” and had two daughters with him. The family life really saves Cristina and gives her hope. However, after loosing them in the car accident, she backwards to her past and refuses to face the future. She picked up using drugs; she called her old-time friend Ana, although she did not say anything finally; she went to the club to see Ana and got drugs from her, like she used to. All these scenes were represented in the same tone as it was in the bathroom scene, and it was not just a matter of identification of time, such as dim light is the implication of night time. After the funeral of her family, Cristina talked to her father about how she felt about the death of family members. “I couldn’t believe how can you talk again… life does not just go on.” Everytime she suffered the nightmare from her past, her location would be dimmed in to the brown tone, and her mood would be dimmed into the depression. Therefore, in “21 grams”, the tone of the scenes indicate the characters’ mood and the conscious situation of plots.
The other way that is used to support the narration in “21 grams” is the texture of the image. In the scene which Paul drove Cristina passing a working place to identify Jack’s face, we can tell that the images are in the film grain effect. The coarseness on the screen does not only indicate the environment that Jack is suffering, but also reveals the bitterness inside both of Paul and Cristina’s hearts. Sometimes, the visual effects can be the most direct and shock narration style in movies.
I used to assume that “21 grams” is a movie without future, but the guy who compares the weight of his soul to a shot of beer said “21 grams” could be a movie which is about the negative attitude towards the relationship between people and their future. I have to say such comments open up my mind about the future contents in “21 grams”. I realize that if assuming the brown tone as the indication of the past and the ordinary lighting indicates the present, then, I suppose the only two scenes that indicate the future in “21 grams” are the flying-birds scenes. In the beginning of the movie, we see lots of birds flying up to the sky in dusk, and the camera pans a little bit in order to follow the birds. At the end of “21 grams”, we see a motif scene, in which shows the birds flying down in dusk. These two scenes are both shot in the same location at the same time. The only difference is to which way the birds fly. I consider them as a series of music notes or a piece of rhythm. When the birds went up, we “hear” some specific “plot music” that reveals the psychological stature of the characters, and while they flying down we “hear” and read something different, such as an ending or the transmigration. These two scenes in “21 grams” are just like a software I know, and I call it “Visual Music”. With such a tool, you can “watch” your music or edit them by the appearance of music wave. Here, in “21 grams”, the narration is the visual music score, while there are lots of scenes which contribute it as the visual music notes, no only by the objects’ movement, but also the colors and the textures of a scene.
Since the life is a colorful, motive and three dimensional journey, then, how can we make it as flat as the screen in a movie.
No one should ever hate Alfred Hitchcock, because we are all born to be “doubled”, but not by his influence.
In the trip of life, nothing could be more interesting than human being, because they are so tricky and so complicated.
A story could be told, but a person could never be, not even by himself. People always have “double identity”, or sometimes even “triple identity” about their personality. In “21 grams”, each protagonist has more than one identity about himself/herself, and Paul is the most typical one among all of them. He got a new heart from donation, therefore he got a new life. However, at the moment the doctor wonders about whether his body will include this new heart, he wonders about whether he is going to be included to his new life. People aways say that you NEED TO follow your heart, and Paul is someone who HAS TO follow his heart, or is he? No matter what, the “double identity” of Paul is “the old me with the tubes” and “the new me with a heart”.
Cristina had a bitter past, and later on, her family became her everything. After loosing her everything, she backwards to her past and wants to stay away from her future. Therefore, to her, the “double identity” is about tense.
Personally, I’m interested in Jack Jordan the most in “21 grams”, and I consider him as a “triple identity” character. According to his wife’s words, two years ago, he did not believe anything and now everything has to deal with God. From the beginning of the movie, Jack acted as a self-contradictory character all the way through the end. Like Cristina, Jack had a dark, maybe even worse, past also, and later, he believd in Jesus. The custom of Jack achieves the narration in the first quarter of the movie. He wore tatoos all over his body, and he talks like a rude street person, but he argues a lot about “Stealing ain’t worth it. Coming to church, reading the Bible and believing in Jesus, brother, that’s your ticket.” and “God even knows every single hair move on your head.” He hit his son twice, while saying “There’s no hitting in the house.” Jack is not a sharp person, and he is always self-contradictory. He wanted to be clean and accepted by the world, but he just did not know how. After he reported himself and went to the jail again, he started to doubt about God, about his belief and about himself. All these three characters suffers from the car accident, but Jack suffers the most. There are several scenes which shows Jack sobbing, and we do not hear he says anything. All these scenes indicate how much Jack suffer from the car accident. “You know what will happen if you hit a pregnant woman or an old man? The guilt will suck you done to the bone.” he said so to Nick and predict his feeling about the car accident. Moreover, through the motif which shows the different reactions toward the pray in church, we could find out his doubt about his belief. The wild past, the hope of God, and the doubt of belief structures the suffering inside Jack’s heart, and makes him a challenged character.
Anyone can have that “double identity” in his/her inside, and do not blame the life. It is us who make ourselves double.
--- “How may lives do we live? How many lives do we die? They say we all lose 21 grams at the exact moment of our death. Everyone. How much fits into 21 grams? How much it lost? When do we lost 21 grams? How much goes with them? How much is gained? How much is gained? Twenty one grams, the weight of a sack if five nickels, the weight of a humming bird, a chocolate bar. How much did 21 grams weight?”
Watching the fade-out after the voice over of Sean Penn, who is actually one of my favourite actors, I realized that we just went through the last journey of Paul’s life. How amazing about life and death! A car accident, a heart, three characters, several journeys and that 21 grams.
--- “How much will your 21 grams weight?” he smiled quietly.
--- “Maybe not too much.” I sighed, “may be too light that I can not even bear to think about it.”