01
There is no sharp opposition from a macro perspective, no ideological explicit criticism, and no deliberate sentimentality in the perceptual field, but I don’t think anyone will deny that "Sorry, We Missed You" is a very real and very real movie. Heavy realistic movie.
The protagonist of the story is an unemployed worker, and as the pillar of the family of four, he must support this crumbling family with a world that can breathe. Just when he was worried about not having a stable job, he found a way to work under a new economic model, that is, to become a franchise driver of a courier station. This seems to mean that he has the opportunity to dominate his own destiny, and he is willing to use his own Labor to change the fate of himself and his family almost collapsed. As a result, he had a plan, he had a dream, but the reality is often not a flat road, but a dangerous quicksand. For those who are stuck in it, the more struggling, the more embarrassed, and at this time, the human Greatness and human tragic are always the same, because no one will give up struggling even in an embarrassing future.
He will work hard, but he can't change the future.
02
Is this an opportunity? Still a lie?
Ricky accepted the invitation of the person in charge of the express site. According to the latter's words, he did not work for the site, but became a partner of the site. In short, he has an opportunity. As long as he buys or rents a truck for transportation, he can become a node between the network and users. This is the last process between virtual and reality, and it is also an information network. The last fortress to keep human workers.
In a practical sense, the crowdsourcing model of the Internet provides a stable but unstable job opportunity for the unemployed like Ricky. The stability is because this artificial demand will not be disruptive in the existing technical conditions. The change and the instability is because the workers involved have not received relatively complete labor security. They are not hired workers in the traditional sense, because there is no exact company that provides them with an employment contract with a clear relationship. To a certain extent, they are free people under the Internet economy, and the prerequisite for maintaining this freedom is work. This is a set of mutual causal relationships, and the density of work determines the extent of freedom. However, once this logical relationship is widely recognized, then freedom is no longer a universal concept premised on the personality of the self-subject, but a narrow understanding based on a certain quantitative standard.
They provide opportunities, but they also instill lies.
Ricky found a paid job, but compared with the traditional labor-management relationship, some of the responsibilities, obligations and regulations that originally belonged to the enterprise to workers have been subtly stripped away under the framework of such a new economic model. Formally speaking, Ricky, who is at the bottom of the society, is indeed the master who works for him. He has the right to choose not to work, but that also means that he will lose the only source of life, so he becomes a vassal of this model. , He had to accept work requirements that exceeded the legal working hours, and he had to accept a work system without legal leave.
For the platform that controls channels and resources, Ricky is the owner of the individual and a slave under this economic model. He strives for survival and freedom, but when the opportunity to struggle is completely monopolized by others, survival It is a kind of charity, freedom is a luxury, and an overly beautiful future is no longer an imaginable vision, but a carefully woven lie.
03
Planned route, precise exploitation
"Sorry, We Missed You" is a film focused on the lower-level individuals. It has never exposed the contradictions between opposing classes as openly as "Parasites". The narrative aside from the macro perspective is only to focus on certain types of groups. The sorrows and joys of the Ricky family are small people under the background of the times. They are eager to change, but they have no choice.
On the first day when Ricky joined him, he was bundled with not only strict site regulations, but also a scanner for sending express mail. It is a terminal that connects the Internet and individuals. It is very considerate and intelligent. Ricky plans the delivery route, it does not require the delivery staff to think too much. There is no doubt that this is the result of the information technology revolution, but to a certain extent, it is also due to the "aggression" of technology.
You can say that this movie is quite simple, because the elements that make up its story are not much beyond reality, but you can hardly deny the director's ambition to dig into the core of the story.
Ricky is an unemployed worker, and what set off this wave of unemployment is not an accident of a certain era, but an inevitable trend under the technological revolution and the basic contradictions of capitalism . Complicated social labor is gradually separated by programs and machines. From individual workshops to assembly lines, and then to the current intelligent production, people lose their dependence on labor in the next step of technological evolution, but at the same time gradually lose their participation in labor. chance.
As a courier, Ricky's job opportunities are the blind spots of the program that technology has not yet solved, but it is difficult to say whether this is a great fortune or a greater misfortune. As a person with individual consciousness, he is placed in a certain algorithm and program. For the background system, he is an appendage of the express scanner. Any behavior that deviates from the requirements of the scanner will be regarded as a mistake. In most cases, it is a supervisor who can't make mistakes, and its intelligence is enough to allow him to plan every process of Ricky's work. There is no room for relaxation and no room for game.
It has to be said that this is a kind of exploitation with extreme precision, and more importantly, it hides the exploiter behind a program with inanimate entities. This new type of odd-work economic model has therefore become an opposing class. The possible consequence of the buffer zone between the working class is that the resistance of the working class is gradually dispelled due to the destruction of subjective consciousness (Ricky was told that he was not a hired worker at the beginning of accepting the job), and their due rights also Then they were evaded or even abandoned, because under the intrusion of the intelligence wave, the opportunity to work has become a scarce resource.
Ricky has tried his best, but in reality, trying his best is far from enough.
04
A future with nowhere to escape, self-esteem that cannot be guarded
This movie has its blandness, but also its softness. One of the places that touched me the most was when he proposed to the site director that he wanted to take a holiday at Christmas to reunite with his family. Here, I see a husband who is compassionate to his wife and a father who loves his daughter.
"My daughter Lisa, she is 11 years old, but she suffers from insomnia."
Ricky failed too much. He had his plan. He wanted to change the future of the family through labor, but he had to be absent from the life and growth of his two children. He tried his best to provide a family for his family. Warm home, but the appearance of his hard work has become a burden in the child's growth process invisibly. For Lisa, her father was not a slave to earn money in servitude, so when her father was bitten by the client’s dog, he stubbornly wrote “You owe my dad a new pair of shorts” on the delivery slip. . At that moment, you can feel that Ricky is not a worker who has been stripped of consciousness by the machine, but an individual full of life and emotions. Through the perspective of his daughter, the audience truly feels his pain, his tenacity and his helplessness. .
However, for intelligent programs, emotion is a kind of unrecognized code. High-intensity work makes him have no time to take care of his personal and family life. He wants to use his actions to set an example for his son to strive to change the future. But the latter's hard work is just a futile effort. Of course you can say that this is his rebellion and sinking. But in the face of cruel reality, this is a view that has group identity.
Ricky’s family experience is a microcosm of the bottom group in this era. They are thinking about the future and clinging to the status quo. As the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, the ways to change their own destiny are shrinking, and they want to succeed. The cost will inevitably increase. It may be higher capital investment, or longer time cost, and more likely to be greater health consumption, and their ability to withstand risks is not due to the increase in cost investment. And increasing, even more fragile, rising debts, deepening contradictions, and deteriorating health can all become a burden that crushes hope.
When Ricky was robbed and beaten on the way to work, what followed was not a complete work injury determination, but a series of compensation lists, which were transformed into new debts and fell on Ricky’s shoulders. He had no chance. Rest, can only drag a heavy body back to work. The dignity of the individual is broken and crushed in such a cruel external environment.
Will the future really change? This movie does not give an answer, but all I can see is the despair of a middle-aged man.
"Sorry, we missed you" captures the inherent contradictions of the times in this society that is constantly moving towards higher efficiency and smarter. The Ricky family is just one aspect of this contradiction.
We certainly have reasons to praise the light of civilization brought about by the technological revolution, but we should not forget that this society still has an obligation to provide a future with self-worth and meaning to every subject with personality.
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