Western Perspectives on A Film From the East: Not one Less

This reading of Not One Less (Yí ge dou bù néng shao), originally written for a presentation at a psychoanalytic conference in China, is based on the assumption that movies are modern myths, and that myths, fairy tales, and narratives in general are metaphorical attempts to understand and explain the perceived realities of our own selves, our origins, our future, our world. It is often through these creative metaphors that we reach for that which is as yet imperfectly understood and attempt to expand our knowledge of the wishes, conflicts, and fears that underlie human dreams and human actions.

This is not a falsifiable assumption. It can only be granted as reasonable or rejected. But the list of those who have granted it is impressive. Already in 1725, Giambattista Vico was claiming that myths were civil histories expressed in poetical form, and that analysis of their poetic wisdom gave us clues on how men coped with the realities of daily living (Bergin & Fisch, 1984). Since the writings of Freud (, 1908, 1919), Propp (1928), Lévi-Strauss (1949, 1958), Lacan (, 1979), and Metz (1975), this list has been growing at an exponential rate.

Myth allows us access to collective and universal beliefs. According to Lévi-Strauss (1958), in every culture, myth is a way of imposing patterns on experience, patterns and shapes that make our daily life easier to process and easier to grasp. Myth represents a way of repetitively working out contradictions that refuse to go away and that otherwise might never be expressed. For both Lévi-Strauss (1949, 1958) and Lacan (1976, 1979), the contradictions inherent in the relationships between the contingent and the universal can be expressed only in