No-Face in the Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away (2002) is able to produce the gold from his hands. He is a lonely monster looking for his place to belong to. By showing off his power of creating money, he attracts others to stay with him (but instead, he eats some people who are too greedy). At the begging, he was alone and no one recognized him (he was invisible), but once a person saw No-Face's power of making money, he became visible and popular dramatically. He eats more greedy person in the community. By eating more people, he becomes more aggressive and have more confidents on himself, which can be applied to all of us that we tend to have more confidences and sometimes be selfish by accident.
In the story, No-Face wants to have Sen, the main girl. He tries to get her by offering more golds from his hands. But Sen always refuses it by saying "what I want cannot be bought by money." In the monstrous capitalism world, people tend to forget this message.
Thus, although No-Face attracts enough people around him, at last, he is scared by those others and lose his place again. This story reminds me of money never give us any solutions. Loneliness cannot be treated by money forever. It is always a temporally solution.
In the lecture we learned that the relations with monster and greed. On one hand, the money monsters are greedy and can lose their ethical thinkings easily. On the other hand, those money monsters are sad and greedy to find their places to belong to.
I think it is interesting you bring up treating loneliness with money, because it made me think about how often there are stories of people that try to fill a void or something they are missing with anything they think might work. So while some want to fill that void with money or wealth, others might try to fill it with relationships or religion, or really anything I suppose. And it is reflected in Hollywood a lot or in books, where the main character is portrayed as obsessive over relationships or money, and the story is them learning how to get rid of the void instead of just find something to put there.
ReplyDeleteI guess it kinda extends all over really, you have a lot of movies and books where someone feels they are flawed and so go to an extreme to hide it or make up for it, such as Loki in the Avenger's movies learning he isn't an Asgardian, and then seeks to prove that he is fit to be one of them by declaring war on the frost giants, or to fit with your example a bit more Flynn Rider in Tangled, who originally was obsessed with money and was a thief, slowly realized that he cared about Rapunzel more, willing to give away the Tiara he stole just to protect the two of them.