Story 1. The National Anthem
This is an incident involving political terror. It tells how the Prime Minister, the media, and the public respond to the kidnapping of the popular princess. The most gimmicky part of the story is the offer by the kidnappers in exchange for the princess: the prime minister must have sex with a pig, and it will be broadcast live on the Internet and TV.
At the beginning of the incident, the Prime Minister could not accept this condition at all and asked to block the news, but the video had been transmitted to YouTube and the public had begun to spread it; the media could not accept the news at first, and foreign media had already reported it first, so they also decided to Broadcast; the public initially thought it was a joke, but various media reports confirmed this fact. After seeing the kidnapper cut off a finger of the princess, everyone's reaction took a turn: public opinion, the royal family, and the prime minister's assistant team all turned to hope that the prime minister could fulfill the kidnapper's request. Only the Prime Minister's wife begged him not to do this.
In the final chapter, the Prime Minister is pressured to end up having sex with a pig. One year after the incident, the Prime Minister has gained more public support for the incident. The princess walked out of the shadows, the public forgot about the incident, only the prime minister's wife could not avoid this injury, and there was a permanent estrangement between him and the prime minister. There are several details in the incident procedure, such as: the media that used beauty to collude with officials; the Prime Minister was constantly reminded by aides that sexual intercourse too long or too short would affect his image; the princess released by Enron walked on the street without being noticed, because everyone Watching the Prime Minister and pigs having sex in front of the TV... These are all satires of the unscrupulous media, politicians who do everything to maintain their public image, and the public who only care about show and insensitivity.
The kidnapper in the play is set as an artist, and the whole kidnapping is his "performance art". The kidnappers took advantage of the prime minister's daily show-online TV media to force the prime minister to stage a brand-new farce, thereby ironically ignoring the real world and only knowing the political leaders and the public staring at the screen. The president yelled, "Fuck Internet!" when he learned the video had gone viral on YouTube. Just imagine, if this incident happened in China, it must have been reviewed by the network administrator before the video was posted on the website. So the kidnappers tore up the votes, and the rulers still have nothing to do with them, because they can harmonize all the sensitive keywords in the online community and seal the mouth of public opinion. Therefore, in China, it is only the public's turn to say "Fuck Internet!".
In this story, you can see the advantages and disadvantages of the "mirror" of online media in politics. The "mirror" of the Celestial Dynasty can only let the public see its harmonious appearance. In this virtual story, the British Prime Minister has sex with a pig, making the crowd cry from hilarity to sympathy. In reality, the Chinese government is using online media to rape the public every day, so that the public has become numb and even "brainwashed". I always believe that the government should face up to the advantages and disadvantages of online media, and should not take such a decision to avoid it. Because in the news media and public opinion, noise is not terrible, farce will always be forgotten, and silence is the real sadness.
Story 2, 15 Million Merits
This story designs a virtual future world where everyone has to ride a bicycle every day to make money, every day is the same life, the only chance to change is to participate in the draft. The protagonist Bing spends all his money, but makes his beloved girl Abi a chicken. In the end, Bing also became a pawn that he once spurned with death.
The act of "consumption" is described everywhere in the story. Whether it is image equipment, game programs, ignoring advertisements, etc., all need to be "consumed" to complete. The people in the story ride bicycles day in and day out, all for "consumption". Unwilling to be ordinary people, Abi and Bing, who appeared on the draft stage, eventually became victims of "consumption". The story is foreshadowing: whether it is now or in the future, human "consumption" and "consumption" will always exist. Only through the stimulation of consumption can human's sensual desires be satisfied, thus continuing to step on the wheel. And these exactly the same people actually exist in a larger wheel, a matrix similar to "The Matrix", and can never escape the fate of the guinea pig running in the cage.
In the story, the fat man with poor performance on bicycles is rated as inferior by the rules, and becomes the person who is insulted by entertainment programs, the cleaner who picks up garbage, and even the person who interrupts his sexual fantasies. The fat people in these virtual worlds, like the people with the lowest status in modern society, will also be discriminated against and abused in public. The workers in the story who are constantly riding bicycles, like the class called "diaosi" in today's society, work continuously every day, and can only enjoy short-term freedom at night. A higher level than these "diaosi" are entertainment program producers, because they have mastered the daily visual world of "diaosi", forcing viewers to watch through entertainment programs, pornographic videos, etc., to earn money for clicks or skips. Among them, the characters of the fat man are all dressed in yellow work clothes and have no avatars; the characters who ride bicycles are all dressed in gray sportswear, and can set their own avatars; and only the program producers are dressed in real appearances. .
The three groups of people are clearly divided into three categories. Cyclists provide energy for the entire operating system, fat people who have lost their qualifications to ride bicycles do the lowest jobs to serve cyclists, and entertainment program producers provide spiritual needs for cyclists. However, I think, although not mentioned in this story, there must be a higher class ruler, similar to the character of the "Architect" in "The Matrix", to control operation of the entire system.
So, in my opinion, this story is not just a satire on social talent shows these days, but a satire on this class division. When through the draft, the protagonist Bing moved to a larger room and achieved a class change, but still did not escape the fate of daily operations. Bing has also become the Abi that he never wanted to be - the murder weapon that he was going to stab him to death yesterday, and it has become a prop for daily show today.
Story 3, The Entire History of You
This story assumes that all human beings are implanted with memory chips behind their ears, which can be recalled and viewed at any time. The protagonist Liam Foxwell went from suspecting his wife's derailment to confirming his thoughts, and finally dug out the chip with a knife and chose to be a person with no memory.
Jonas is a friend of his wife Ffion. When all the friends suggested to replay Liam's interview screen, Jonas helped him out of the embarrassment. So Liam starts to pay attention to Jonas, and suspects that there is a special relationship between his wife and Jonas just because he observes that Jonas' bad jokes make his wife laugh. At this point in the story, the movie viewer, like a third-party nanny forced by Liam to make observation choices, believes that Liam is a severe obsessive-compulsive disorder or a delusional disorder patient. He made these neurotic conjectures because of the interview. Confusion caused by unhappiness.
But when the story introduces the viewer to the above assumption, the wife in the story actually admits that she had an affair with Jonas. And the story intensified, it turned out that the wife also maintained a relationship with Jonas after marriage. Even Liam began to suspect that the child was not his own flesh and blood. The whole story first describes Liam as a lunatic who loves crazy imaginations and has all kinds of terrifying fantasies, and then exposes the correctness of his guesses one by one. Using such a contrastive writing method makes people see the cruelty of reality - seemingly virtuous De's wife turned out to have been cheating for a long time.
In the story, there are many descriptions of using memories to find happiness: for example, Jonas tells that he relives his passion for sex through memory replay; Liam and his wife reach a climax by replaying the memory of having sex in the past; Liam, who is separated from his wife, uses memory to feel the past warm, wait. But in the end, Liam, like one of the supporting actresses in the story, took out the memory chip to ease his pain. Here, Liam's action of taking out the wafer with blood dripping with a knife not only expresses the pain of Liam's destruction of his wife's trust, but also satirizes the influence of technology media on individuals. The "memory replay" function in the story makes the protagonists have no privacy at all. Liam understands everything clearly, but eventually regrets it. When technology turned all memories into data, organized and categorized, but human emotions could never be controlled by computers, so Liam was in pain, and finally made the choice to remove the memory.
But, I think: since Jonas in the show can delete some of his own memory, why can't Liam choose to delete his part of his painful memory? So, I feel like this is a loophole in this script.
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