Traditional science fiction films can usually be classified as spectacle films of a curiosity nature. The core is still a traditional story, but with a coat of sci-fi. It sells the imagination and the wonders of the future world to the audience, which broadens the audience’s horizons, such as This is true for "Avatar" and "Star Wars". Or perhaps stuff a bit of spiritual chicken soup under the coat of science fiction. For example, the recent hit "Interstellar" is a father-daughter emotional card.
"Black Mirror" is different. In addition to partially showing the wonders of science fiction, it is more of a moral panic for the audience. Compared with traditional science fiction films, it is more similar to moral allegory films. For all the literary and artistic works with moral allegory, the author has consciously or unconsciously assumed the mission and consciousness of educating the public, using perfunctory stories to persuade and alert the world, in order to achieve the purpose of common customs.
This kind of moral allegory literary works has existed since ancient times and is very common, especially in ancient Chinese vernacular novels.
For example, Feng Menglong's "San Yan": "Jing Shi Tong Yan," "Awakening the World Heng Yan" and "Yu Shi Ming Yan", the title has expressed the attitude openly.
For example, in "Jin Ping Mei", Ximen Qing's "drinking and wealthy" in the book is not lacking, and his hands and eyes are open to the sky to dominate one party, but in the end he still ends up ruining his family. Especially in the last forty chapters, the author Lan Ling Xiaoxiaosheng's writing is particularly long and sad, and its moral allegory and admonishment are very obvious.
Not to mention the "Dream of Red Mansions", an ancient novel. The book is full of prosperity and wealth, such as Rongguo Mansion and Ningguo Mansion. It is prosperous and extravagant. In the end, it is also "Exhausted birds thrown into the forest, and the white land is really clean." "A Dream of Red Mansions" has a vigilant charm of the world, which is similar to "Jin Ping Mei".
"Black Mirror" expresses moral satire in a way that is not as vivid and straightforward as in vernacular novels. It is more hidden, but more cruel. It is bloody and cruel. When we explore the source of the charm of the "Black Mirror" story, on the one hand, it is certainly the magnificent imagination of the directors, and more importantly, it caused moral panic to the audience. The director deliberately magnified and exaggerated the opposition between technology and people, and deliberately created an unequal misalignment between technology and philosophy. It is this dislocation that makes us feel moral panic.
Humor is also a dislocation, it is a dislocation of dual logic. "Laughter is a feeling that suddenly transforms from a tense expectation into nothingness," Kant said. People use the one-fold logic to arouse expectations, and when the smooth transition to the two-fold logic makes the expectation fall, it makes people laugh dumbly. This is humor. The dislocation in the premise of the screenwriter of "Black Mirror" is not a "humorous" dual logic dislocation, but a distortion and dislocation under the single logic. Under one layer of logic, the directors deliberately exaggerated the development of high technology and devalued the evolution of humanistic philosophy, causing the dislocation of technology and humanities.
This dislocation gives people the feeling of horror and cruelty. Just like a person’s legs are parallel, if one leg becomes longer and the other is sawed short, we will see a deformed freak. A person's face is different in size on both sides, and the difference is obvious, and we will find him extremely ugly. Both ugliness and deformity originate from the fears at the bottom of the human mind.
Similarly, science and technology have developed to the end of imagination, and moral laws have stagnated or even regressed. The sharp contrast between the two is frightening. Just like when we were watching elephants in a circus, we left a lingering shock in our hearts for a long time. So the big setting of the "Black Mirror" series is actually: pull black text, magnify technology, and create a freak to scare you to death.
In "Black Mirror: Christmas Special", there are two basic settings, both of which are the first black technology to be implemented without moral and legal permission: first, consciousness extraction, which avoids the "subject" problem of copy consciousness. The second is the use of smart eyes, which circumvents the laws and regulations on the use of smart eyes by humans. Only by deliberately ignoring these two issues, ignoring the limitations of morality and law, and allowing black technology to grow freely, can the tension and strong contrast of the story make the audience shudder, and then trigger the audience's thinking to express the moral allegory of the director.
Of course, the fear that "Black Mirror" caused to the audience and the shudder of watching the freaks in the circus are essentially the same kind of panic. In this sense, the story told by "Black Mirror" is another kind of freak for us to hunt, a kind of freak that does not happen in a normal society.
Finally, I had to pay tribute to the editor of "Black Mirror". Not only did you come up with superb settings, but you also told the story to a climax and an endless aftertaste. It’s not difficult to be creative, but how to tell a good story. In this regard, "Black Mirror" provides us with a perfect example. Can you sell ideas with stories?
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