The screenwriter of "Black Mirror" Charlie Brooker once explained the title of "Black Mirror" to The Guardian: "If technology is a medicine-it does feel like medicine-then what are its side effects? One area-between pleasure and discomfort-is the positioning of my new play "Black Mirror". The title "Black Mirror" is what you can find on every wall, every table, and every palm---- The cold, flood-
lit screens on TVs, monitors, and smartphones." ///Spoiler alert ///SPOILER ALERT///
The Black Mirror in this episode may not be the best story in the series, but it is still a solid and ingenious good story. "White Christmas" is divided into five paragraphs. The prologue is fully prepared and suspenseful. The story begins with the singing of "I wish it could be Christmas everyday". In a certain cabin, the worried and taciturn Joe played by Rafe Spall and the strong, confident and talkative Matt played by Jon Hamm started a conversation between them that was not smooth, and in the conversation, "This is a job, not a jail." And "This is not an interrogation" and other dialogues like the opening song will make you realize at the end of the story. In the first part, the story of Matt helping Diaosi seize her but indirectly killed Diaosi further established Matt’s image, and more importantly, introduced the future implantable device Z-eye to the audience and one of its most critical functions. --shield. In the second part, Chaplin’s granddaughter Oona Chaplin (yes, the actor of Robb Stark’s wife in "Game of Thrones") starred as Greta. This part shows the second key technique in the story-through the name The cookie device is implanted for a week and then taken out to simulate and replicate a person's brain with code. At the end of the story, Joe's sympathy for the encounter with the code in the cookie also led to Matt's evaluation of "a good man who did bad things." In the third part, Joe finally begins to tell his own story, and his story is... Simply put, this is a story about being a dad... Fortunately, at the end, the ending of the story is quite successful, and the two technologies have brought two The tragic fate of the protagonist, the climax of the story, the explosion of emotions, and the singing of "I hope every day is Christmas", everything is just right. In this way, the Christmas atmosphere of the audience was successfully destroyed...
Looking back at these five paragraphs, in addition to the prologue and the end, the first part tells a story about Gao Fushuai who used technology to help Dio Si counterattack (in the end, it didn’t succeed) that was so clean that he could almost complete the story. The third part is still the story. Complete but somewhat clichéd and dog-blooded (especially car accidents, which are Korean drama-level turning settings... why not say it is cancer...), and the second part, which is almost purely functional, is really a bit blunt. , It feels almost the same as inserting an advertisement (maybe not as effective as broadcasting an advertisement: Smartelligence, we use a cookie to copy your brain, torturing it into a brain damage, and then it is willing to do everything!), and Greta, a character who is out of the main line of the plot, is really superfluous...
But regardless of the story, just looking at the irony and metaphors in "White Christmas", even in the "Black Mirror" series, it is quite ambitious.
Contrary to what many people understand, the "Black Mirror" series has so far, not to mention the "National Anthem" in the first season and the "Waldo Moment" in the second season, which are political fables with almost no science fiction elements. It is a collection that sets the background in the near future, and its core is not the hidden worry about the future, but the interpretation of the present. "Fifteen Million Points" will not make you believe that one day people will really have to run on a treadmill in exchange for points, but you will remember the various talent shows and entertainment that you may have been watching the night before. . "White Bear" will not make you worry that people will one day build a morbid theme park like the one in the show, but you will realize the distortion of justice that is happening all the time in the Internet age. Although the technology in "All Your History" and "I'll Be Back" is more realistic, the alienation of people by technology in the story also does not happen in the future, but at the moment when you shoot videos and browse social networks. This is also the reason why the "Black Mirror" series is so successful. It doesn't tell you that "human beings may become stupid in the future." Compared with the small fresh film and television works wrapped in many science fiction coats, the reflection on science and technology that it focuses on is invaluable.
The same is true for "White Christmas". The shielding function of Z-eye is not so much a prediction of the future evolution trend of the development of Google Glass and other devices from "wearable" to "implantable", it is more about social networking with people. The exaggeration and concreteization of the alienation of the way (of course at the same time also hacked Google Glass...), you can recall whether you have long been used to blocking Weibo and those ugly friends who send selfies every day in Weibo, and yourself When you quarreled with your girlfriend the last time, did you guys blackmail each other through various communication and social tools... Oh, you don’t have a girlfriend yet? Have you read all kinds of pick-up tutorials on the Internet, instead of asking questions before dating, do you want to find a master like Matt to share your vision with you and help you strike up a conversation in a bar in real time?
On the other hand, the technology of thinking replication is on another level that makes people reflect. First, the cookie container in the play looks like Amazon Echo, and secondly, Greta’s copy is in Rossini’s opera music The Thieving Magpie (you should think of Kubrick’s "A Clockwork Orange" when you hear this music, and maybe even like me By the way, I think of the physical and mental discomfort when I watched "A Clockwork Orange" for the first time) The scene of awakening Greta is simply a satire on the concepts of smart home, Internet of Things and so on in recent years. As for the technology itself, it can involve a whole section of the history of science fiction/technology, which can be traced back to "brain in a tank" thought experiments (epistemology, skepticism, solipsism), and can be traced back to the end of the last century. Temporary cyberpunk culture ("Nerve Wanderer", "Ghost in the Shell", "The Matrix")-how do you know that you are a living person with healthy limbs and not a tank full of nutrients A brain that receives various neuroelectric signals or a piece of code in a highly realistic virtual reality? A question that arises from "White Christmas" is, if you are a brain or a piece of code, what kind of ethics apply to you? Human cloning is considered to be against ethics, and robots have Asimov's three laws, so can cloned minds/robots without entities, because they are more "unlike" humans, can be used to enslaves/treat/torture confessions?
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that I don’t know if this is considered a Christmas gift for the loyal fans of "Black Mirror". In "White Christmas", Charlie Brooker buried various connections with the episodes of the previous two seasons: and One of the people who watched by Matt watching the Diao Si pick up girl was I_AM_WALDO ("Waldo Moment"), and the other was Pie Ape ("15 Million Points"). When Joe watched TV and switched channels, he appeared Hot Shot ( "15 Million Points") and Tonight For One Week Only ("Waldo Moments"). When watching UKN ("National Anthem") reports on the train accident, the bottom of the screen appeared "MP Liam Monroe declared that Twitter account was hacked" ("Waldo Moment") and "Victoria Skillane Appeal Dismissed" ("White Bear"). In addition, Beth used the same pregnancy test stick as Martha used in "Getting Back", and she also sang "One The song Anyone Who Knows What Love Is sung by Abi in "Fifteen Million Points".
Finally, everyone, Merry Christmas.
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