Chapter 30 "The Obsolete Czech" - So there is such a magical makeup technique

In the writing world of mystery novels, there is one thing that everyone wants to do but can't always do well, that is, how to reasonably transform a person into another person, especially, how to combine a person with another person. Specific people get mixed up—Brock’s Tanner series did it easily. He is really an interesting writer of novels. In his hands, many difficult things will become as simple as broken bamboo. To turn this person into that person, of course, there must be a processing process, and usually some material assistance is required. This processing process and material requirements are generally called makeup, or disguise, cross-dressing, and disguise. , human skin masks and so on and so on.Today, in our real life, it is almost universal that people do not want to kill people or perform any special tasks. People hope that they will not be seen as they were originally created by God or their parents. The common need, therefore, has long since become a gigantic industrial system, inventing all kinds of ingenious and expensive effective or deceitful items, and it is rapidly becoming the most important thing in the life of most people every day and every hour. ——That’s right, our real life, as the ancient philosophers have reminded us again, is indeed a place full of treachery and injustice, and one of the most representative places where such tricks are carried out is the ubiquitous department store Corporations, every department store has at least half the space, equipment and staff, trying to lure and assist us to become another person, Lin Chiling, Bae Yong Joon, or Michael Jordan, or Hal in the movie.

The existence of such a vast and unrelenting industrial system means that at the cutting edge of their specialization, people have acquired an incredible skill in transforming this person into another person.For example, if you know a thing or two about make-up special effects in the film industry today, or at least you've seen movies like "Devil's Quest" or shows like "TV Champion Makeup King", you're a bit suspicious and neurotic. Some people can really start to suspect that their wives or husbands must have been stolen. I don’t know why they did this. I only know that this person has been here for most of my life. Is there anything else I don’t know about this person?However, in the past two years, he has become more and more strange, weird, and sneaky. This must be someone else pretending to be, isn't it?

However, we are also the same, when we open a novel and turn around to escape into the world of reasoning and fiction, we can’t stand the old-fashioned and clumsy trick arrangement of the writer as before, and we still bear in mind the saying that “no two snowflakes are exactly alike” We ignore the real-life progression of the matter, the old-fashioned dictum; we're even willing to admit that there is such a thing as twins, the general assembly line of genetically strong but uncreative parents. Every child is born exactly the same, there are half-parents or half-fathers, especially in this era of old customs, and there are no two unrelated people from different places who can fucking look like real ones.But those of us who are stubborn readers of mystery novels just refuse to accept that the key tricks and puzzle solving of a mystery novel can make this person be that person overnight, instead of using it as a synonym for failure or ugly or farce, Just like John Woo's.

But if it is not used as the key to the trick to reveal the mystery, but as the design premise of the trick, I think it is generally considered to be much better (does this just prove that we are not opposed to the fact that people can look like ?).For example, Agatha Christie's book "The Ominous Banquet" presupposes two respectable women who can be exactly the same, one is a superstar who is all over the world but wants to get rid of her husband, and the other is a talented woman. Began a TV parody actress.The novel begins with an overt TV parody in which the latter wears a blond wig to play the former, that is, the first five pages of the novel let the reader know about it, seal the deal, and wait quietly under such unusual conditions, How an almost fatalistic tragedy of murder is conjured up, how it is cold-bloodedly framed and put into practice on this rare chance basis.When the novel was made into a movie, both characters starred Faye Dunaway, the great star of our day - an example we'll leave here for a moment, and we'll probably use it later.

Here, between the real life, which is becoming more and more false and the real life, and the world of mystery novels, we can clearly see a crack that is unfair to mystery novelists alone.God can make this person look like that person through His mighty hands, and plastic surgeons or cosmetic counter ladies can also make this person look like that person through professional skills, but reasoning writers can’t write. It’s not absolutely forbidden, but We are very harsh and critical of him.Is this just like Borges said, mystery novels create us speculative readers, and at the same time call out the most suspicious elements in our nature, so when we face a mystery novel, we are always far more than Are we less trusting of people when we act as normal citizens of society?Or do we intuit that there is something unsettling in it, and it has not been really relieved by the superficial magical makeup that appeals to the visual single sense?

In this book "The Obsolete Czechs", Tanner once again set foot on the dog-toothed land of racial conflict in the eastern half of Europe as a secret commissioner for the first time, revisiting his unique luxury journey of nine days and eight countries.What's even more ridiculous is that what he's going to produce this time is not a silent, cute pile of gold, but a Nazi remnant that everyone can't help but hate; and there is only one left A dilapidated old man with a big mouth that repeats like a tape recorder and is still alive. He has basically lost the ability to move or even walk. Therefore, Tanner's huge problem is extremely absurd, how to make him change from being able to speak to being unable to speak , Inability to act becomes able to act, helping him across the rough and broken half of Europe like helping an old lady across the street.

Of course, Tanner still has to rely on the relay assistance of the small dissident groups he has collected to walk on the European escape route that is far more like a tiger’s mouth than the main road. Therefore, a new layer of difficulty is added: how do you ask These people risked their lives to help such a bastard surnamed Wang who they slaughtered every now and then and delivered to their door today? The absurd situation of human beings is the mother of laughter, but also of wit and creativity. During the journey, we also saw Tanner's most exquisite and ever-changing makeup technique again-he was still the great or damn Ivan Tanner from America, and his appearance had not changed, but he just could Like a chameleon, you become a person who fully integrates into different races, political beliefs, and the temperature and luster of unique dreams. Every person who loves and hates clearly does not allow others to use knives and guns at any time, and feels insecure and distrusts strangers. Groups, they can regard him as their own, their closest brother who lives and dies within ten minutes of being strangers. This is Ivan Tanner, oh no, it should be Lawrence Bullock. Amazing stunt performance.

Ivan Tanner's magical cosmetics, just like the famous words of Charlemagne we quoted in the last introduction, are the "language" of "you have another language, and you have another soul", A whitening cream that is applied to the soul, a mask or human skin mask that is applied to the soul. Looking back, how did the two almost identical women in Agatha Christie's "The Ominous Banquet" get caught?Where is it negligent and not painted?The answer happened at the banquet in the book where everyone was watching, which was not only the key to the execution of the murder plan, but also the banquet where the murderer leaked the truth and was called "ominous" by Christie, and the key thing was the language—the banquet Amidst the gossip, an ominous word Paris accidentally appeared. The actress pretending to be a superstar has enough education to know that this is Troy's troublesome prince Par Reese, who talked with eloquence throughout the whole process, responded correctly; while the big star who dropped out and was keen on fashion, it is logical that he only knows Paris, France, the flower capital of the world.Yes, the soul forgets that makeup is needed to fool people. From the point of view of the soul, these are two people who look very different and completely alike.

From this ominous murder story created by Agatha Christie, we can see clearly that vision is not the only sense of human beings, although it is the earliest, fastest, most direct and most eye-catching; It is a person like a unique snowflake, and it is not just a face and figure in appearance.Stupid writers of mystery novels are actually very much like those young ghosts who claim to chase their unique self every day, but also fall into fashion, and even invest all their time resources, mental resources, and economic resources on the surface layer.You want to have different personalities, the most unique and most different places are not here; if you want to be another person you want to be, the places that he should imitate most and the most difficult to imitate are not here.

The numerous failed reasoning works have brought such experiences and lessons. Today, writers who still can’t help but want to play this old game of “A is like B” generally know where to focus and deal with it, except for the field of science fiction. Except for the 100% copying of the body and memory, two different people are two different people. You can only imitate and deceive the part that the person being fooled knows or cares about, such as appearance, voice, fingerprints, handwriting , passwords, tokens, a certain secret or a certain memory of the past, etc.; at the same time, it is no longer possible for the imitation game to deceive all people with different understandings and levels of familiarity. The point is that you have to do your best to avoid those who can tell the truth from the parts you haven't imitated, and the imitation game has become a kind of tense game against time, as if carrying a ticking time bomb.More importantly, you have to honestly admit that there must be someone or some people in this world that you can never fool, just because they have a comprehensive and complete understanding of the object you imitate, and it has become a kind of intuition that does not require thinking and time. You can't cheat and hide, so you can only choose to get rid of them. Therefore, this imitation murder game must develop into multiple murders, kill the person you have planned, and then clean up those one by one after the after-sales service. The unlucky ghost who has seen through or is bound to see through your mask.

In fact, "The Ominous Banquet" obviously came about in this way. The young actor Donald Rose, who accidentally caught a glimpse of Paris's divergent meaning during the banquet, had an extra knife on the back of his head as expected. Let's go back to language and soul, back to Ivan Tanner's amazing makeup show. The key to why Tanner's transformation show is so smooth is that Bullock cleverly set the stage of the show so suitable for him. All the audiences he wants to fool, although they have different ideas, are all thousands of miles away. They don't know what kind of appearance he should be, and in fact they don't care what kind of appearance he looks at all. They decide whether a person is a friend or an enemy, a bit like the fan that Alibaba faced. The door of the stubborn cave where gold and silver treasures are hidden, it only listens to a certain spell, "Which way do you open the window?" "Open the window to the south." Shaking hands and hugging are really good comrades and good brothers. If you make a mistake, you can go to hell. As we said before, on the basis of our joint recognition that people can look alike and that people do have enough skills to change their appearance, we still can't stand the traditional transformation show of the old mystery novels, and there is another reason is "time".Changing appearance, whether it is temporary makeup or permanent plastic surgery, cannot be done like, for example, in the novels of Ranpo Edogawa, the father of Japanese reasoning, where the human mask is layered layer by layer in an instant. Torn apart, one moment is the hunchbacked and thin old woman who predicted death, another moment is the tall and strong middle-aged male protagonist who has been murdered, and the next moment is back to the detective himself, who is as wise as a God of God. The detailed transformation process was omitted, and I also experienced that there was not enough time to undress and dress, so I could only sneer at it as a farce. Ivan Tanner's instant transformation also requires this time process, and it may be more difficult, longer and harder.But we do know that Tanner has time, and he has more time than anyone else, and that's because he can't sleep and spends his long days alone in New York, doing nothing but helping lucky college students who would rather spend money than study Except for writing reports or being a test shooter, at other times, from the perspective of imitation and transformation, he is doing this homework all the time. The main body is language learning. He can learn any ghost language, but it also includes learning along with this language. The reading, thinking, information gathering, and writing that come with it, so to speak, even the process of his being hired to write the report, are also included in his pre-work for this imitation transformation. In addition, Ivan Tanner donates generously from time to time. The purposeless (utilitarian) donation that was originally like throwing money into the sea will also become a major key to his transformation show in the future. In other words, the reason why Tanner completed such a wonderful miracle of transformation lies in the fact that he changed the part of the soul rather than the body. This change is more time-consuming and difficult, but it can be done in advance; Can only have one form, bound by the simplest and most unwieldy laws of physics, just like we can't be here and there at the same time (that's why mystery novels love to play alibi so much) .But people can have many soul shapes at the same time, and what's even better is that it may enter and exit in an instant or even appear in different time and space at the same time, from the remote Sahara to the Cro-Magnon hunter-gatherer world that no longer exists in ancient times Of course, some religious believers and some mystics may have their own different opinions and beliefs about the moving abilities of the human soul, but what is mentioned here is not at all supernatural powers beyond common sense. Inside, the illusion and freedom of the soul just come from people's ordinary learning, understanding, empathy and sympathy. This is something that anyone can do at any time. It should be reminded that the small groups of dissidents who admit Tanner through their familiar languages ​​are not like the teachers who change the test papers of the National British Examination or the officials of the Immigration Bureau who test your language ability and fail to decide whether to grant your naturalization That is to say, the language that supports Tanner's magical transformation show is not just at the level of his ability to listen, speak, read, and write, but also that he can use the language after quickly gaining an initial trust advantage. Listen and express without hindrance, what to express?Expressing his unconventional understanding and empathy for his group was not improvised on the spot, but accumulated in his idle New York bachelor pad.Therefore, Tanner's transformation show has a very important core feature that is not easy to detect, that is "sincerity". He is performing and fooling people, but he is also sincere, or he is just shaking his head It is precisely because he is sincere that he is such a good liar, and his performance can be so realistic and without flaws, and he can be so summoned. Therefore, Tanner's unique language transformation show is a whimsical and wonderful design of adult fairy tales, and it can also be a rich metaphor that connects us normal people and the metaphor of the world of normal experience, not because we are not burdened with secret missions, not Born and died in those special countries full of dangers, it is impossible to feel and gain further enlightenment.We live among the crowd, we come into contact with the same people with different appearances, memories, thoughts and opinions every day, every ordinary person is unique at the same time, we also continue to listen and express, our soul Constantly coming in and out, shuttling and changing all the time, the situation between us and Ivan Tanner is actually not fundamentally different, it’s just not so exaggerated, so magnified to the point of being ridiculously convex It’s just to the point where, if you think about it carefully, isn’t it like this? Some novel writers have gone through careful thinking and design, while others have grasped it directly by feeling and almost intuitively.We didn't ask Bullock himself, and we don't know how he came here, but in any case, in a secret mission adventure story like Tanner, he chose language, which is generally not easily regarded as a weapon, as Tanner It is the most important secret weapon in the history of spy novels, rather than the multifunctional mobile phone, key ring, pen or even the cool BMW sports car handed to him by Bond, the "seven" agent. I don’t know how to think of the most fairy-like fantasy, elegant and independent like an antelope’s horns; at the same time, it’s also the most realistic, most accurate fit for human historical experience, and the most reasonable, if What we have proved from the history of struggles and ethnic conflicts that have been in full swing for the past two hundred years, and the history of ethnic conflicts that are in full swing at this moment - it is both whimsical and realistic. In the world of Go, we call this kind of thing "both sides play". A chess player's unbelievable dream. Regarding the relationship between language and the history of racial struggle, there are too many documents, historical materials and arguments for human beings. Books are easy to get and buy, like Hobsbawm's "Nation and Nationalism" or Anderson's "Imagined Communities" ", are all wonderful and good-looking classics that have long been translated into Chinese and are available at Eslite Bookstores at any time.Here, we simply say that in the history of hundreds of years of continuous racial subdivision and continuous conflict, language has indeed transcended blood, geography, religious beliefs, culture and living customs, etc., which used to define and unite races. Things, become the new core. This change did not come from any new theoretical discovery, but was driven by actual practice.In fact, if we say that serious academic speculation is of any help in this process of change, it can only be said to debunk and destroy all academic arguments.We know that the definition of ethnicity or race has never been supported by any biological theory, and the division with a real biological basis only goes to the human species, which is different from chimpanzees, baboons and other primate brothers and sisters them.So instead of encouraging subdivision and fighting and killing each other, biology supports the old-fashioned morality that everyone is a universal family and that everyone will find a common old mother in East Africa millions of years ago.Today, some differences in human appearance are nothing more than the evolutionary results of migration under harsh natural selection and fine-tuning to adapt to different living environments and their precious evidence; as for the definition of unnatural and man-made culture, we simply use Hobsbawm to collect and investigate In terms of conclusions, it is that ethnicity and race cannot be defined, and with every bit of scientific research progress, we discover that the long list of ethnic elements and definitions listed in our textbooks in the past, None of them can withstand a little serious questioning, and none of them can explain what really happened in human history. Under such a chaotic and chaotic situation, people are forced to two ends like cutting the Red Sea. People who are rigorous and abide by the basic academic norms become more cautious, and their words become more complicated and ambiguous; as for those romantic people , those who hope for practical actions and even call for revolution, simply abandon all these and replace them with the simplest words, the so-called "beliefs" that least need the support of experience or theory, the most extreme of which are quickly being accepted by people in this way all over the world. Eagerly embraced is the so-called "voluntarism."How to define (or should we say condense) a nation?It's very simple, you believe that you are who you are, it doesn't matter if you have different blood, it doesn't matter if you look different, religious beliefs, cultural upbringing, lifestyles and habits are all not a problem, the only important thing is whether everyone has a common will, a common goal and Consistent action; that is to say, the nation is no longer some kind of existing inheritance, but a creation looking forward to the future, it is not subject to any constraints, and has obtained complete freedom of action. The two sentences in Renan's speech have thus become classic quotes that people have repeatedly quoted: "A nation is the result of misreading history every day." As a result, language, one of the elements under the definition of a traditional nation, leapt from a parallel item to a core or even the only position.It still effectively connects the past and history, so as to maintain the necessary emotion of a common historical destiny, but it is far more flexible, fluid and elastic than blood relationship, appearance, and culture, and can be based on today's realistic needs as Renan said. It reinterprets or deliberately misinterprets history, and when necessary, it can also create "history"; at the same time, it seems to be far more open-minded than blood, appearance, and culture. My various moral doubts are also convenient for changing the identification standards at any time in the reality of the relationship between friends and enemies and the ever-changing war. However, who is in the best interest to be flexible, elastic, and have a wide and almost omnipotent room for interpretation?It is always in the best interests of a few people who hold power and interpret power. This is the deceitful nature of language that has always been and has been criticized by people, and it is easy to become the face of a tool of power. Therefore, this wave is still (claimed) to fight for itself The national movement for freedom and equal status, including what we see and hear every day in Taiwan, always has a disturbing smell of centralization. It is not just the concentration of power necessary at the special moment of the revolutionary battle to facilitate the unified will to issue orders, but its fundamental Constitution, its philosophical foundation, and even its every action and every word are all imprinted with centralization. Once it accidentally wins, what it brings out is usually not democracy, freedom and equality. Under such circumstances, this wave of national movements is prone to a certain paradoxical picture in theory, but it is not uncommon because it is so common—in this fighting team that is supposed to be the most xenophobic and bristly like a hedgehog , we always see a few people with completely different appearances among them, and we can tell at a glance that they are people from distant countries (especially the United States) who are not my race. Next time you see this, be sure to give him a nice hello, and there's a good chance he's Ivan Tanner, the hilarious, sincere, compassionate liar.