For my blog post, I’m focusing on an episode of a television show which depicts this same sort of commercialization and incorporation of art: “Fifteen million merits”. The television show depicts a dystopian society where people ride bikes all day to earn money, which they spend on various forms of entertainment. The protagonist meets a girl and falls in love with her singing voice. He uses his entire life’s savings to purchase her a ticket to a spot on a futuristic equivalent to “America’s got talent”, hoping that she will get discovered and turned into a celebrity, and is distraught when she is offered, and accepts, a job making pornographic videos instead. Upset at the system, the man goes back to the bikes and earns enough merits for another audition on the same show. On live television, he draws out a sharpened shard of glass, and, threatening to commit suicide, demands that the audience listen to an impassioned rant against the system, urging the audience to reconsider their lives. The judge, apparently impressed, offers him a weekly television show. The last scene of the episode sees the protagonist, finishing a recording of a similarly passionate rant, places the shard of glass into an ornate case and goes back to an apparently luxurious life. Other workers, still working hard on their bikes, watch his video and receive an emotional fix.

The question which has always struck me when watching this episode is how? How did the system manage to so thoroughly support his message?

The more boring explanation is raw capitalism: the protagonist, however strong his convictions may have been, was always willing to ‘sell out’ for a good enough offer. But there is something about this interpretation that rings false: the man’s determination was consistently presented as real, not cynical: he was very willing to go through with suicide to get his message out there.

The other interpretation is more disturbing. The protagonist, even when recording a mass-distributed television show, did feel and express authentic emotions. It was the system itself that was so resilient that it was able to incorporate any emotion, including the emotion of revolution against the system, and, by working it into it’s framework, incorporate it any grow stronger.

 

(My apologies for the late blog post: I looked for an email, but I didn’t realize that it was posted on here when we didn’t get an email about it)