When it comes to the topic of "common wealth", Americans have been tossing about for a hundred years. What is it like now? The play "White Lotus Resort" is really a good interpretation. On the surface, this play acts as a murder case, but it is not at all suspenseful or bloody. In fact, it presents us with a story of human nature in a closed space similar to "no one alive".
This play has obvious political metaphors, because the people in the story are of different classes, and almost all classes in American society are included.
And the classic thing about it is that these people cover different classes, and in the end, they all truly present the situation of this class and how these classes are torn apart from each other.
01
the rich
The tourists in this play are the ruling class.
1. Newlyweds represent the old money of American society.
Ma Baonan's (newly married husband's) mother's charitable and socializing activities indicate that they have already completed the primitive accumulation of capital, mainly relying on circles and prestige to maintain their wealth and social status. The smell of "struggle" has long been removed from them. Ma Baonan has never discussed work from beginning to end, and their family dislikes work. The idea of Rachel, the bride who still wants to work, cannot be said to be unsupportive, but completely incomprehensible. .
The most important thing is that the whole process Ma Baonan is immune to the demands of the new wife, and his attention is all on defending his rights with the hotel manager. This dedication to defending power is really "admirable"!
2. The family of female executives is the new money of the United States
The female executives are the new money in the United States, and they look like they are mirroring Facebook's Sandberg. She speaks broken Chinese (Americans think it is shameful for these Internet giants to cooperate with China), keeps tearing down and rebuilding the house (symbolizing the subversion of the Internet), and is full of road confidence and theories about her struggle history confidence. She blames Rachel for not understanding that her struggle is ability, and her husband for not supporting her efforts and efforts.
Their family started with struggle, and they still have some verbal understanding of the bottom of the society. The safe was stolen, and they didn't make a fuss (compared to Ma Bao Nan who had nothing to do with him but took the initiative to complain), and the female executive was still busy with work (she was the only one in the whole play who still worked in a hotel People - Rachel ended up giving up that job).
But this verbal understanding was finally broken down by real thoughts. The father at home said: Do we give up everything we have just because someone is suffering? Would you like to donate all your money to charity? He believes that human nature, no one is willing to give up privilege. It may be because they are still Internet upstarts, and they are not too interested in charity. When they get to the stage of Ma Baonan's family, they will know how those big philanthropists in the United States use charity to protect their class.
3. The crazy woman and her old official boyfriend, this is the embodiment of the American rentier class
A crazy woman is never worried about money. You can see that she is crazy and incompetent, but she neither cares about politics nor money, because she does not know how much money she has, and it will never be spent anyway. Such people have lost the last care for society, they only care about personal feeling and emotion. She only remembers how her native family persecuted it, and how many men couldn't stand her...
There are many such people in German society today. They are sitting on the money they can't spend for hundreds of years, never participate in politics, never show their faces and talk about struggle, and they can move assets around the world with a few phone calls, harvesting the world's wealth. And they themselves are like many protagonists in Hollywood hero films, lost, confused, and unable to find the meaning of life...
Of course, the story has a clear theme for both of them: death. No matter how much money you have, you can't escape death in the end. In the face of death, everyone is equal.
This is America's high ruling class, surrounded by people who are inheriting wealth and power and who hope to squeeze into these classes by various means (inheritance, marriage, struggle).
02
Heir, marginal rich, middle class
1. Bride Rachel
She is a part-time reporter who wants to get into a wealthy family through marriage. She is beautiful and has some verbal professionalism. But she finally found out that she didn't belong to this circle, she didn't want to be a vase, and she has been struggling with whether she should leave the family. But in the end, she didn't leave, or reconciled with her husband, so why not make a vase? After all, it is the ruling class. On the night when the black technician stopped giving her advice, she finally "realized".
2. The daughter of an executive woman
Daughter of an executive woman: She wants freedom, affection and companionship. But she couldn't step beyond her own class. She is different from her best friend. Her best friend has Bai Zuo belief. She has no belief. She is only rebellious and opposes her parents. There is nothing else. She symbolizes the white left of American society, a hippie, just like Forrest Gump's girlfriend, she actually has no real faith, but is rebellious and rebellious, and finally got hurt all over, and finally returned to her own class.
The female executives exposed the hypocrisy of these people in one sentence: You can be so kind to strangers, why can't you be kind to your family? Yes, this is the hypocrisy of the White Left. At first glance, it seems to be concerned with the bottom of the society, emphasizing unity and harmony, but in fact, this set of ideas is all used to defend the interests of their own class. The executive family has never been to a black technician, and they don’t have much contact with the lower-level people. As long as they are living people, they are not interested, and they are full of their own high and those abstract truths.
3. Little girlfriend
She should be Hispanic, and she should belong to the ruled class, but she has a high degree of education, a very strong network, and studies colonialism. She symbolizes the intellectual grassroots of American society (teachers, lawyers, doctors...). American intellectuals fear power, believe in white leftism, oppose racism, colonialism and all kinds of oppression, and many people are indeed fighting for this. But in the end? What she exported was ideals, and it was the little natives who paid the bill. They were weak and compromised like all instigators without guns, and sent others to be cannon fodder. Intellectuals are destined to be only vassals of the power class. When they fall to the people, they find that the gun is not in their hands. When they fall to the power, they find themselves poor and white, and they worry that the power class will plunder their most precious things. This kind of swaying identity, weakness and compromise has always been the case, and it will not change in the future.
4. The husband of a female executive
This is a man who is not very present at home, full of tea party ideas, looks down on the poor, looks down on LGBT, thinks that what is right now is the most reasonable, white people have the right not to express their attitudes (that is, as long as I don't openly say that I am racist) , I'm not racist). He symbolizes the conservative forces in the American South.
Don't look at them fighting with Bai Zuo, but they can hold together at critical moments. The most typical example is the Diane and Kurt couples in "The Pride". It seems that they have different views, but in the face of the great right and wrong of privilege and interests, they can still hold together in the end. They are Taoists in this class. Although they have no old money and have been abandoned by the new era of the Internet, they are always the ruling class and can always find their sense of existence at critical moments.
5. little boy
He's an environmentalist and a symbol of America's next generation of white people. They were lost and could not find their way. As executive moms say: White boys his age are socially isolated. Now the ruling class has found his place, only he does not know where to go.
He was ostracized by his LGBT sister, controlled by the Internet upstarts (public opinion bombarded white people), and he could only indulge in games and sleep on the beach. Later, his mobile phone was washed away by the sea (symbolizing leaving the Internet), and he finally saw the beauty of the world and found a way to integrate with the natives (join the fleet). Perhaps this is also a kind of sustenance of the main creative team to the next generation in the United States: life has to go on, if it is really not good, just integrate it. After all, conquering the world by boat is the foundation of the American ancestors' national career.
The employees in the entire hotel are all the ruled classes in American society.
03
the governed
The main line of the whole play is that the guests who are the masters have all kinds of anxiety, emotional problems, entanglements and fears, and they all get the help of the hotel staff, but in the end, all the hotel staff are injured.
1. Manager
A senior wage earner thinks he has the privilege, but in fact he will be crushed to death by the rich in minutes. He's a real LGBT+ addict, not one of those rhetorically benevolent lefties. No one really sympathized with him and had identified with him. The only way he can change his fate is to steal something from his guests, make something bad, and cause trouble. Whenever there is a chance to use the privilege, he will not let it go. Steal the contents of the little girl friend's bag and make a bad deal for the mother and the boy...
These little tricks of his could not escape the repression of power in the end, and finally took his life, only in exchange for a cold glance from Ma Baonan in the waiting room. What's even more funny is that he has no sympathy for people one level below him, he admits to exploiting his subordinate little boy, he is indifferent when the little native is caught, he is full of disgust for the fat girl who gave birth to a child in his office, the only thing he can tell Emotional black technician, he actually just used it. Let's have no sympathy for him at all.
The sorrow of the working class is all written on his actions.
2. Black Technician
It symbolizes the "Black Lives Matter" class of American society. They have craftsmanship, simplicity, and a desire to change. She was a server throughout the whole process, showing sincerity and sincerity. But in the end the mad woman's words were too incisive: I don't want our concerns to be impure because of money.
The mad woman's words were not pure, and all the hopes of the black technician were shattered. She finally understood: there is a thick barrier between classes, and in the mind of a mad woman, she will always be just a servant. When I need you, I give you hope and say to invest; when I don't need you, "I don't like our relationship is not pure".
I think those participants who died in the Civil War, the two world wars, and "Black Lives Matter" probably experienced this bitterness in the end.
3. Little natives
This is the bottom layer of American society: the natives. Their land was robbed by white people, and people had to be forced to work for white people, selling their time and emotions to serve these "snatchers".
He thought he had got true love and thought that his little best friend was really helping him (they thought that Latinos should be in the same class as them), but in fact they were fighting alone, they were just talking, and in the end the little best friend was hiding. , reconciled with the executive family, and you?
4. The fat girl who gave birth
This is the epitome of the underclass white poor in America. Reminds us of the fat girl in Deadly Woman II. They have no education, everything is mediocre, and they don't know who the father of the child is when they are pregnant. No one sympathized with them because they were white. And no one is willing to help them, because they are regarded as poor people who don't know how to work hard and don't know how to make progress.
There are more people like this in Europe in the welfare society. After all, the United States still believes that people who don’t work can’t eat. In Europe, these white people receive benefits that they can’t starve to death. They eat potato chips, watch movies and have sex every day. The pants ran away, leaving the woman to give birth to the child, and then she grew up in poverty and became a criminal...
This play tells us one of the cruelest reality: American society has been completely fragmented.
The ruling class cured all kinds of pain, anxiety and despair, and finally reunited; while the ruling class was caught, killed, abandoned and disliked.
There are only naked things left between the classes that do not concern themselves, passing by each other's world in a hurry, leaving a mess on the ground.
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