Tragedy vs. Nihilism

There was a thread earlier this morning for anons who wanted to post webms of gruesome deaths from film. I submitted the title character's suicide from "Lilya 4-ever", primarily to defy that gruesome deaths have to be gory, and secondarily to question if the film-maker crossed the line (and for what purpose)

Synopsis:
Lilya is a young girl growing up in the ruins of a post-Soviet commie bloc. Her mother leaves her for an American man, promising to send for her later but never intending to. She cries pitifully, begging her mother not to leave. Lilya is moved into a tenement and befriends a boy named Volodya, whose only respite from his own shit existence is huffing paint and glue

Eventually, she turns to prostitution, which results in her being gang raped by literal Nikes-wearing gopniks who make fun of her. Every man in this movie is evil, because the director considers himself a feminist

The only good characters are Lilya and Volodya. But she leaves him to follow a handsome sex trafficker to Sweden, where the film takes on a considerably darker tone. Volodya is devastated and commits suicide by downing sleeping pills in a cold, dark hallway. If I still had a soul, this would probably be where I cried

Lilya is raped and beaten over and over again by her clients. Of course. It's around this time she also begins to imagine Volodya visiting her as an angel.

A battered child prostitute playing with her imaginary dead friend who committed suicide is sad and dark enough, I think, but the film-maker obviously disagreed because she attempts to flee multiple times, only to be beaten more viciously. Her pimp tells her that the police will arrest her and send her to Estonia where his men will kill her

She imagines she's on a rooftop with Volodya. She's contemplating jumping off the edge, but Volodya urges her to live life and tells her that committing suicide will mean that all the people who mistreated her win.

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This is where anyone with a conscience has to step in and ask, "Does the film have to get any darker?" Can she not vow to live, defying her pimp by going to the police anyway? That would convey strong message while still retaining the underlining tragedy of the story. Instead, she's raped again. The last rape of this film is brutal. She's actually screaming at the top of her lungs. As someone who's watched ogrish and gore videos since he was 10, it was tough for me to watch without feeling a lump in my stomach. Abuse of cute girls is something I have only become more sensitive to over time and with age. I had to question at this point if the director is a sadistic pedophile, something I still don't have an answer for.


The film takes yet another dark turn, as she runs from the police and commits suicide by jumping off a bridge, all while her memory of Volodya urges her not to do it. I think Volodya is kind of like her subconscious or something, which adds yet another layer of depression to the story because it shows you that she still wants to live. She dies for nothing, of course, because the feminist government of Sweden would have given her asylum and a mansion to live in.

As she's transported to the hospital in an ambulance, the EMT by her side says she has five minutes left before her brain dies. Another dark turn: she imagines she's back in Russia and that she refuses to go with the sex trafficker to Sweden. There's a montage of her being nice to all of her neighbors. She's frantically doing what she hoped she had done. It's revealed that Volodya (still an angel) is in the ambulance with her, and his hands take hold of the respirator. The camera pans out to reveal that he's holding her in their old apartment in Russia. They both run to the rooftop to play basketball in their angel wings.

Films often create tension followed by relief. Where's the relief here? The dying brain of a battered child prostitute is imagining that she's an angel, and her version of heaven is the rooftop of a commie bloc. It's so mawkishly sentimental that in any other movie it would make me laugh, but the sheer abuse one's put through while watching this movie surely prevent any feelings of happiness. Certain negative things tend to stick with me, and the ending of this movie certainly will for some time. If Lilya 4-ever had a taste, it would be "shit".

I was surprised to learn that the director is a Christian, or at least was. The ending leaves the existence of heaven up to the viewer, however. And how should we interpret the ending? Is it actually heaven, or is it 5 minutes of a young girl's damaged bring clinging to the life she hasn't lived? The preceding horror is all we need to know to understand how the director intoned the ending–As bleak as possible. Exactly 5 minutes pass before the credits begin to roll.

Now I will conclude my blogpost by posing a question: where is the line drawn between beautiful tragedy and hopeless nihilism?

I referenced Roger Ebert's essay called "Evil in film: To what end?" where he criticized a movie from 2005 named Chaos for its nihilistic violence. The user who replied to my post said that the film's ending was warranted by the fact that sex trafficking is real and that it hurts real people. Here's what Roger Ebert said in refutation of this defense:
>But there is a larger question here. In a time of dismay and dread, is it admirable for filmmakers to depict pure evil? Have 9/11, suicide bombers, serial killers and kidnappings created a world in which the response of the artist must be nihilistic and hopeless? At the end of your film, after the other characters have been killed in sadistic and gruesome ways, the only survivor is the one who is evil incarnate, and we hear his cold laughter under a screen that has gone dark

>I believe art can certainly be nihilistic and express hopelessness; the powerful movie "Open Water," about two scuba divers left behind by a tourist boat, is an example. I believe evil can win in fiction, as it often does in real life. But I prefer that the artist express an attitude toward that evil. It is not enough to record it; what do you think and feel about it? Your attitude is as detached as your hero's. If "Chaos" has a message, it is that evil reigns and will triumph. I don't believe so.

Roger Ebert gave Lilya 4-ever a positive review. He also gave Blue Velvet a negative review for its depiction of violence against women. The line he draws is quite blurry
>What I miss in your film is any sense of hope. Sometimes it is all that keeps us going. The message of futility and despair in "Chaos" is unrelieved, and while I do not require a "happy ending," I do appreciate some kind of catharsis. As the Greeks understood tragedy, it exists not to bury us in death and dismay, but to help us to deal with it, to accept it as a part of life, to learn about our own humanity from it. That is why the Greek tragedies were poems: The language ennobled the material.

Regardless of Ebert's wavering and often contrarian opinions, there was no hope whatsoever in the ending of Lilya 4-ever. It was an illusion that glamourized suicide in much the same way that 13 Reasons Why does. Volodya's message to her, that suicide is a mistake, was not only unheeded but directly challenged by the film itself. There are three ways that the movie could have preserved the threat of prostitution but still offered hope: 1. she goes to the police, demonstrating that in ultra-feminist Sweden, justice prevails; 2. she commits suicide, but, in doing so, she reveals the sex trafficking ring in her pimp's apartment complex; 3. she becomes a self-employed loli dominatrix.

Number 2 is probably the most common for films such as this, but I still think that number 1 is superior in this case because of the immense amount of suffering the main character was put through. Is one child suicide not tragic enough? The ending the director chose is not only genre-defyingly bleak but inferior in a narrative sense. It defeats the purpose of exposing child prostitution, because it offers no solution. That's why it isn't a proper tragedy but a (quite literal) nihilistic wankpiece by a sadistic pedo. In the end, Lilya's dreams are unfulfilled, her life unlived and her story untold. Her captors and tormentors are never brought to justice and she and Volodya are forgotten. Movies like these should be forgotten too.

>inb4 this blogpost is forgotten
It was cathartic for me to write. Now I'm going to enjoy summer by not re-watching depressing movies on a whim.

>Every man in this movie is evil
>The only good characters are Lilya and Volodya

She's a girl and he's a boy.

>Every man in this movie is evil
well, they're slavs

but hes not evil is he. he later literally becomes an angel in her mind. Either go with he is the opposite of evil (given your depiction of him, he was not) or he was truly evil and you cant trust lilya. She probably made the rapes up anyways and jumped off because she was lonely on friday night

Perhaps there's a language barrier here. "Man" can refer to both adult males and males in general, but it's mostly used to refer to adult males. If a boy is called a man, he's usually called a "young man".

>She probably made the rapes up anyways and jumped off because she was lonely on friday night
Mostly accurate, but women don't commit suicide in real life either, so it's wrong for that too.

I think movies often need to be understood in terms of the psychological needs of the people they were intended for. Heroes journey type movies are for young men, to raise their consciousness about developing their agency in the world. Romantic movies are for women, to remind them of the transformational power a relationship can have on two people.

This movie was likely created for the modern defective feminist woman. The only value those harpies are able to extract from this life is their victimhood. They revel in their victimhood, and any challenge to that is a personal affront to them. There is no beauty, no redemption, no nature, nothing but their own special suffering. This movie allows them to take that deranged fantasy to completion. Adding a redemptive aspect to the movie would only work against the goal of the movie, to create the perfect fantasy of suffering for these deranged, joyless degenerates to indulge.

Are you me on a proxy? We share many similar ideas. As you can see, I identified sadomasochistic undertones multiple times.

The girls actresses play in rape-snuff porn never escape either, because that would only undermine the boners of the viewers and of the director.

On that note, this film is very similar to the erotic novel Lila Says, even sharing a similar title. At the end of the novel, Lila is raped by her boyfriend and his friends and falls to her death.

The woman who wrote this story pretended it was dropped off at her front door by a mysterious young boy, presumably "Lila's" boyfriend. Women's unquenchable thirst for drama is incredibly disturbing.

It's a truth very few bitches will admit, but women like experiencing violence. Being hit with a tidal wave of masculine energy is incredibly erotic. Choice and agency is an enormous burden, to feel it taken away is a powerful experience. That doesn't mean all women want to be raped exactly, rape is just the far end of taking away someone's agency. All the women who prattle on about rape culture though, are at war with themselves. Their social, conscious self says, rape is bad and evil. Strong men are evil. They've been programmed to think that. But deep down they desperately crave that masculine energy. They need it. That's why feminists secretly love Islam. Islam, for all it's problems, still proudly holds the torch of masculine power. Liberal whites have let that torch go out, and the weak, effeminate, safe, nerf gun little basedboys could never satisfy that itch a woman has deep inside of her to be dominated.

As we have let women start to define the social hierarchy, it has become corrupted. Now being a victim is a high status proposition. So being a rape victim is kind of a powerful fantasy for women. You get dominated by powerful male energy, and your social status goes way up. That's tempting.

>DUDE SOVIET BAD
Cringe

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Now we disagree entirely. There isn't commensurate evidence to characterize women's sadomasochism as yearning for dominant men. In fact, this story centers entirely around the suffering of a woman, which at least one man (the director) gets off to. Since men and women are observing the same stimuli and presumably experiencing the same sense of dread, we must conclude that this sense of dread is the goal of stories like Lilya 4-ever, not a dominance kink. Sadistic enjoyment is actually masochistic in origin. And because women love themselves in the 3rd person, their masochism is actually sadism. Does that make sense?

Uncle Adi called them untermensch for a reason.

>gets btfo by untermensh
>kills himself
Based

Can confirm, am slav. This is how it is

>team up with the world's strongest militaries to fight one man and his japanese and italian friends (and some arabs)
>throw millions of men to their deaths until they eventually overpower him with sheer numbers
>make up bullshit about gas chambers
btfo so hard

>movie depicts the characters of men who are more likely to buy underage pussy from slav pimps (ie dirtbags) as to what they most likely are IRL if you are into getting prostitutes from shady slav pimps (ie a dirtbag)
>"OMG HOW COME THE NOBLE JOHN WHO GETS UNDERAGE PUSSY FROM SHADY SLAVS IS PORTRAYED AS BEING EVIL WHAAAA MUH FEMINAZIS RUINING EVERYTHING WHAAA"

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everytime i watch a slav/russian girl in porn, i get hungry for mcdonalds, now

cool thread

Why do you watch these movies in the first place, OP?

Too long, didn't read.

You can leave my thread now. You aren't contributing anything with your communist faggotry.

I suppose I'm like women in that I like feeling sad. Both of my parents were bi-polar depressives (diagnosed). I likely inherited my mental illness from them.

But this movie was a bit too much. I've seen a few others like it and thought the same of them as well.

>You aren't contributing anything with your communist faggotry
your wall of text couldn't hide the fact you're a literal anti sjw neckbeard HURR DURR HOW COME MEN WHO BUY UNDERAGE PROSTITUTES ARE BEING PORTRAYED AS EVIL?? HURR DURR MUH FEMINISHUM MUH EESS JAY DUBYAS ARE RUINING EVERYTHING

cope harder incel

This man has a point

>throw millions of men to their deaths
Well they were men defending their country, were they supposed to just surrender and get starved by nazis? Fucking lol, the state of nazi apologists

Get out and take your discord friend with you. My point isn't that men who purchase prostitutes are unfairly maligned. You have to be a literal arm-flailing retard to believe it is.

>Eventually, she turns to prostitution, which results in her being gang raped by literal Nikes-wearing gopniks who make fun of her. Every man in this movie is evil, because the director considers himself a feminist

so in your neckbeard mind, getting raped by a bunch of gopniks = ALL MEN ARE EBIL ACCORDING TO THE SJW DIRECTOR...

again, re-read your faux deep diarrhea and realize how much of a fucking idiot you are and how you can;t hide the fact you're just a dumb frogposter

No, retard. All men in the movie are evil because they are. There isn't a single man with redeeming qualities in the entire film.

But you said the mom abandoned her daughter, how does that fit into the feminist angle

perverse nihilism is the lowest form of filmmaking

the man who took her mother was alrightz

I don't know. You should ask the director himself. He IDENTIFIES as a feminist.

Thanks, user. Glad there are other moral people here. Seeing cute girls being abused gets my blood boiling, as does the glorification of suicide.

>You should ask the director himself. He IDENTIFIES as a feminist.
why does this trigger you so much?
yes the movie is nihilist but so are 90% of 'art house' slav/eastern yuropean movies

the fuck does his feminism has to do with anything? he is telling the story from the girls point of view. ofc most of the men she meets will be scum, they're either pimps or johns. where you expecting John Matrix to break in through the wall and save the day? she is an underage prostitute in a foreign country. Her story is the same story as million of other women around the world. There is nothing unique or "feminist" about it

I understand and agree up to a point that sometimes slav nihilism in movies is a fucking drag (see: Leviathan) but your literal virtue signalling is making it hard for me to take you seriously

Agreed.

>where is the line drawn between beautiful tragedy and hopeless nihilism?

Beautiful tragedy happens for a reason and its ultimate message is something that makes the viewer feel better: the sacrifice was worth it, the legacy will live on, the character becomes more and better even if they fail, etc.

Hopeless nihilism is violence and suffering for its own sake. There is no reason for it, no message, no nothing, it just kinda happens then kinda ends or not. It is a self-fellatio for evil.

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First of all, this isn't a Slavic movie. This is a film by a Swedish director.

His feminism is relevant because it informs the story he created. Feminism is often obsessed with negativity and dread, something that would become quite apparent to you had you actually watched this film. But you started foaming out the mouth the second you read the word "feminist"

I'm not virtue-signaling. I'm trying to find people I share commonality with. I often feel alienated for not liking depressing shit like this. Believe it or not, I'm a pretty tough guy with a lot of masculine hobbies. Seeing cute girls getting tortured and abused is something I can not and will not ever be able to handle.

>Beautiful tragedy happens for a reason and its ultimate message is something that makes the viewer feel better: the sacrifice was worth it, the legacy will live on, the character becomes more and better even if they fail, etc.
To deflect another one of this rabid shitlib's criticisms, I don't even think she had to survive her horrific ordeal for the story to be redeeming. There just needed to be a third character to prosecute these scumfucks after she committed suicide. Perhaps a social worker or, better yet, a priest (which would add a Christian tone to the supposedly Christian director's story).

That would probably still be incredibly depressing but it would offer a glimmer of hope at the end of a very bleak story.

ITT TL;DR

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i wasnt agreeing with any of the shit u posted btw

Nice write-up, user

idk anything about all these terms and all but that ending seems very well fitting for the film and the times we live in
it's the sort of "subvert your traditional expectations" type of ending very common today and i wouldn't blame it for it, after all we all are a product of our times and making something truly new is very difficult and when done very few will know about it, only in the future people will look back and see that it was ahead of its time