The last century was a landmark era for anyone who thought about freedom. Because people were not used to rebelling against the established system, but rather to perfecting it or obeying it.
However, when liberal thinking became prevalent, rebellion became mainstream, and confrontation and complete overthrow of the established order became more widespread. Unfortunately, this force of reform subsided and eventually disappeared after the end of the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Thus, when the Soviet Union collapsed, it appeared to be a victory for one of the two opposing Cold War nations, but it was a complete defeat for all of human society.
Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, human society, in theory, was deprived of an opportunity to try. In the following decades, Western capitalism began to flourish unchecked on a global scale, and eventually became the dominant ideology and value system of modern society.
Under such a value system, people tend to make small-scale adjustments or no adjustments at all to the existing system, rather than making large-scale changes. This is a complete failure for human society as a whole, and also highlights how valuable it is to have the courage to rebel against liberal ideas in today’s global conservatism.
The film we present to you today speaks to one such form of resistance. The film “Fortress of Chastity” is a Spanish film from 1973. It is a film that was born in the last century, at a time when free thought was prevalent, and in a certain sense it also shows us a good figuration of the idea of free thought.
From an objective point of view, the film is very neat, so neat that it can basically serve as a kind of textbook version of the rebellion against the authority of the old system. Fortress of Virtue is about a man who seeks a kind of authority for himself in the name of utopia, living with his family of five in an old house, and instilling in them the idea that he, as a father and husband, is an authority.
At the same time, as an authoritative presence as well as a symbol, she says and does everything she does and says everything she does. They lived in such a highly charged atmosphere for eighteen years, so much so that their oldest daughter and second son began to come of age.
So, as the children began to explore the adult world, the utopia that had been created was disillusioned. The growing children begin to assault the power of their father, who is in control of everything, and eventually win.
It is a very neat and naked rebellion against the old system and emphasizes the awakening of the people. This film, born in the 1970s, came as no surprise at the time, but today it is only funny when we look at this act with a realistic eye.
Part of the core of the film is the confrontation between material and spiritual pursuits. The father, who has all the power, is naturally in charge of the daily life of the people in the fortress, including the source and distribution of food.
Since the father is the only contact between the fortress and the outside world, the people in the fortress can only get information about the outside world through the father, and no one else can get information about the outside world. Therefore, the personality of the father, who controls the distribution of the necessities of life, represents the personality of all the people in the fortress, and his goodness or badness directly determines whether the lives of the people in the fortress are not disconnected from the outside world.
However, it is unrealistic to keep people sane all the time. Therefore, when the father’s emotions fluctuate in the film, it is natural that the people in the fortress are affected in the opposite way. This influence ultimately determines their status of survival.
When the power to breathe or to live or die is in the hands of someone else, you have no freedom at all. What freedom is, naturally, is a harsh rejection of what you can refuse. And yet everything in the fortress is a counter-utopia in the name of utopia.
The father’s power was initially used to cut off the outside world, but gradually evolved to suppress the normal desires of his maturing children. When this repression became irreconcilable, conflicts were born. Yet the father continues to look to his own repressive power to maintain this morbid equilibrium. However, in the tide of time, this careful balance is always at risk of being disrupted.
When the dynamic equilibrium that Father had maintained for so long was broken, the entire fortress, as an edifice of accumulated power, would eventually be destroyed by the shifting forces of the outside world. The speed of destruction is unpredictably fast. And it is beyond the reach of the Father. Therefore, we see in the end that when the fortress was “breached” the father was despondent, and so were the people who had lived in the fortress for so many years.
The father did not expect that the building he had worked so hard to build for more than ten years would be easily knocked down, and the people who had lived in the building for more than ten years did not expect that this seemingly solid and magnificent building would finally be disillusioned in a way they had not expected.
The film is a rare satire of the ownership of free thought, although the dialogue is extremely neat. Once we get used to The V-V-Verse and The Joker, we come back to this film and realize that it is a far more profound film than those films.
Not many people have seen it, yet those who have will undoubtedly give it good reviews. After all, power can only suppress the body, but the true soul cannot be imprisoned.
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