💐🌸Spring Day Theory 🌸💐
Omelas
A plotless work by Ursula K. Le Guin based solely on description and allowing the reader his own interpretation of morality and philosophy. The only chronological event in the piece is the first day of summer in a euphoric utopian city named Omelas, an extended metaphor for youth, with a vibrant festival atmosphere which we see in the teaser within the Omelas motel in bright rich colours as they all live communally just like the people within the text.
The reader is intended to remain unsure about the reasoning behind this ambiguous world which is left completely up to interpretation, confirmed by the writer in their own words: “Omelas sounds in my words like a city in a fairytale, long ago and far away. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined as your own fancy bids.”
The central point which makes the story real is its single atrocity, the suffering of one child in filth, darkness, and perpetual misery.
Once old enough to know the weight of this suffering, a group of young and old individuals walk away silently seen in one of the scenes as each member walks together into a new environment, evident due to the drained hue of the cinematography as it becomes more wintery, seen too in the opening shot in which the members have frosty blue tinged lips juxtaposing the background of bright childhood sights like the merry go round reading “you never walk alone” as well as the beach which show a stylized divide between them and their surroundings.
Jimin’s scenes are most notable with the most enduring being his connection to the sea, a theme which sets forth a contradictory metaphor as old as classical literature itself, of the ocean as a serene, beautiful yet dangerous and hostile environment. This idea is supported by Jimin holding another persons shoes in his hands, typically the first thing to wash up after a death by drowning at sea.
It is arguable that Jimin later walking alone in an apparent wilderness is symbolic of the book endings ambiguity and potential as a blank canvas on which the personal meaning from the readers imagination can be applied. Once again the writer confirms this: “The place they go is even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. It is possible it does not exist.”
This could hint that the characters have no further plot line, they are without a continuing story arc, supported by the imagery within the teaser of each member repeating his own theme as oppose to developing.
The notion of the scapegoat is central to the understanding of the text, the writer being heavily influenced by psychomyths alluded to by Dostoyevsky and William James. In a nutshell that no matter the happiness we felt in a society that hinged on the suffering of one, our happiness would be so monstrous to us that we would be forced to leave it by our own conscience.
No Vacancy
About 7 friends on a road trip staying at a motel, encountering a seemingly helpful group and being trapped, waking up to a gruesome and bloody terror they must work together to escape and survive.
There is a huge possibility that the other group is a mirror image of the 7 friends whose own actions put them in danger, causing them to have to work together to overcome the consequences, it can also be used to explain some of the dark and bloody themes seen in Wings, Epilogue and I Need U era.
Owl Service
A supernatural fantasy written by Alan Garner set in modern Wales and based on a mythical Welsh woman named Blodeuwedd who was created by flowers for a man cursed to take no human wife. She betrays the husband for another man and is turned into an owl as punishment, a future theme eerily hinted at in the sign at the bus shelter (which oddly has no exit roads) at the destination aptly named ‘Affair’.
In Garners tale 3 teenagers find themselves re-enacting this story, whose bird imagery relates directly to Taehyung’s portrayal in Wings and the mythology and classical themes set forth in the previous era.
Conclusion
It is imperative we ask ourselves the forbidden question, what if none of this is real? What if what we are seeing is just a narrative device created to obscure the real story? What facts would this leave us with?
Well…
The central fact is the reflected suffering of a young person – escaping into his books and movies to distract himself from the truth, a truth so all-encompassing that it bleeds through into every single thing he reads and watches. An individual who was well versed in classicism and philosophy, of high intelligence to keep noticing these themes and applying parts of his own life to generate meaning.
The ‘hyung’ Tae calls for yet never gets through to after the fact, doomed to repeat and suffer that which he cannot change, the events of his youth refracted in what he reads, so many variations of books and films all mixed together and all in English, overlapping and still somehow alien from each other, yet in each he sees his friends as well as himself as the protagonists, that child would be the central theme, the scapegoat, the utopia, the one individual which knits it all together.
The view of this one man would perceive all the events, know the suffering of each character as only an omniscient narrator would, how else would he know both the suffering and the joy simultaneously unless the characters were all a part of him, each one a strength and a weakness.
With this view, only the events during I Need U could have been real, the rest simply memories, reflections and glimpses into his imagination as he goes about his life, revisiting a now distant, traumatic yet halcyon past.
Written by Laura Cathrine. 🎀
