There Will Be Blood, A Brighter Summer Day, Evangelion
Spoiler Alert!
This article is a comparison between There Will Be Blood, A Brighter Summer Day and Evangelion (Only TV and Old film this time). We should talk about why good things are good instead of why bad things are bad, because what really matters is the good, not the bad, or the ugly. And most of the time it’s not even bad or ugly, it’s just boring. This three films/anime are the best work I have watched and I want to know why I like them. Although these works come from different culture, they have a lot in common.
Before I start, I want to mention that a director is a lot like a science researcher. You can see consistency in their work, and directing films is like publishing papers, winning awards publishing on Nature. But I’ll talk about that in another article. For this reason, I will not talk about the Rebuild of Evangelion for now, although I have to say that I have rather complicated feelings about it.
I believe every good piece of media has the potential to become a genre. And when we talk about genres, we are actually talking about elements we see. So here is a list of elements that I see in this new genre. The table below is largely inspired by this meme:
| Elements | There Will Be Blood | A Brighter Summer Day | Evangelion |
|---|---|---|---|
| man vs. nature | the first scene where he digs | illness | shito |
| man vs. man | his colleagues and counter companies | those of his schoolmates who are richer, teacher | anybody around him really |
| man vs. society | villagers, church | school | class |
| man vs. god | his conflict with the church | Chinese people don’t actually believe in god | shito is kind of like nature-god |
| man vs. author (meta) | Daniel and Paul use their real name. “I’m finished” | Zhang Zhen uses his real name and real father | TV episode 25,26 |
| father-son conflict | $\checkmark$ | $\checkmark$ | $\checkmark$ |
| attitude towards human interraction | “I want to earn enough money I can get away from everyone” | “I’m like the world, it will never change” | Hedgehog’s dilemma |
| the music is odd | weird, vampire music | soft songs with brutal scenes | |
| the doom is inevitable | Captalism in early 20th century | family background, tri-state area | Dead Sea Scorlls |
| the doom started with the death of one of the protagonist’s closest friends | his son is dead to him | Honey | Kaworu |
| at the end the protagonist murdered someone | the degenerate godfather | his girlfriend | the entire humanity |
I am not systematically trained in films, and all my knowledge is from random places, so maybe there isn’t such a similarity, it’s just that all good stuff have these points in common. Although the 5 “vs.“s may be universal, the latter ones are not universal, I guess.
This article is currently unfinished, maybe these works have something in common in storyline, composition, etc. But I’ll need a rewatch to remind myself. And I will write about The Great Gatsby and No Longer Human someday.