And I Don't Even Need A Hedgehog

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

How perfect are our defenses! It's just some kind of salvation: from the external world, from the internal world, and so on, in trifles.

And this story led me to this idea. The first viewing of the sensational film "Volchek" by Vasily Sigarev somewhat puzzled me. In the wake of the last credits of the film, all the memories of its content escaped somewhere. Consciousness obligingly and quickly put things in order, there is nothing, they say, here to break the established peace with such difficulty. Naturally, this caused me a snide laugh from a specialist, for example, this: "Well - well, what if I repeat it?"

They repeated, and this time Ego was not so quick. The fear of attack looked at me from the moment the narrow hole of the column appeared on the screen and the unkind child's eye in it. Then everything went smoothly and on the rise: fear, pain, horror, and again - repression. The rescuer arrived this time closer to the end of the picture and did his job. In my head, only an extremely stable smack of hopelessness, static and repetitive movement remained: like spinning a top or seemingly endless, some words of the heroes. What are the conclusions here? We watch the third time.

And now, finally, I look in order to form at least some personal opinion. After some thought, this is what happened.

There are no main characters in this story, and there is no story at all. It seems to me that the aspiring director and spectacular actress showed us completely very autobiographical personal experiences of a very disturbed child. We are able to see the family life of internal objects, as Melanie Klein would say. And not only the internal ones, but also the dead ones. This is confirmed by many points. For example, who ever heard the name of a girl or mother? And the name of the city? Also: 9 times we see the events reflected in the mirror, and not the heroes themselves, 3 times the girl's face in the frame replaces the mother's face and vice versa. I have a fantasy that this is an inner mother and an inner girl, the main parts of the same personality. And a bunch of dead internal dads led by a grandmother. Then the question arises, was there a hedgehog. Who is he, what does he represent? I suggest remembering how it all started. The lamp, the flick of the switch, pursues the baby, as confirmation of the mother's periodic liveliness, her appearance, as a "light in the window". And then she got tired of waiting, her mother died, and with her the little girl inside, like a faint shadow of identification. They were one, no matter what. Therefore, attacking her mother's lovers with a stone, she was not defending her, but her own liveliness, her existence. We can see this in animals, which, in a situation of mortal danger, can pounce on an enemy significantly superior in strength and size.

Well, now, as soon as this terrible metamorphosis of the living and the dead occurs, a mother appears and brings a box with a hedgehog. In the inner world, it seems, there is a cognitive dissonance: a dead mother brought a living hedgehog to her dead daughter, inflicting another unbearable trauma on the girl, rocking the dead silence. A live hedgehog reminded of a live mother, and it hurts, oh, how painful. He ruined everything, and the girl restores the peace of the inner world, abandoning the living mother, as well as the living hedgehog, making them both dead again. Did it help? It seems that it is not enough. The strangled creature, as before, does not fit inside, because possesses existence, unlike his new mistress, because, in fact, the girl simply does not exist and there have never been other people in the world. Here, the desire to destroy it completely and irrevocably is quite understandable, because only after this does it become possible to contain it. Add here the story of the wolf cub told by the mother, the tender friendship with the dead boy, a bunch of bitten sweets from the graves in the cemetery, and the picture will become quite complete.

Thus, the director's decision showed us in all its glory the process of identification with a mother, a dead mother in her case, which is most necessary for every little girl, which entailed a series of deaths of internal objects.

Well, this is still about the smallest girl, albeit gloomy, but this is not the end. Without considering what is happening with my mother, this story looks somewhat one-sided and not over, but more on that next time.