Fifteen Million Merits
There is a saying in English in this section, “you can't see the forest because of the trees”, you are in the problem, but you can't realize what the problem is. The episode begins with Bing sleeping in a room surrounded by digital screens. A rooster appears on the screen and starts crowing. This scene is a small representation of us who have moved away from real life and stuck to artificial life. When the character wakes up, digital sensors recognize that he has woken up and show him the amount of digital credits. Everything he does has a financial reward, they even pay a loan for toothpaste.
Suddenly an erotic advertisement, which we call spam, appears in the mirror and you are given only 2 options, either watch it or turn off the view. If he chooses to close, he must pay off the loan. So you're paying the price for something you're not watching, which is one of the most damaging parts of the dystopian world.
Then the main character enters an area where there are bicycles, this part is where there are workers employed to generate electricity. They get a loan by riding bicycles here and use this loan in their lives. People spend their lives watching the screens that surround them. How many screens are there in your workplace, doesn't your life go by looking at them? People even choose their food from digital media. When you choose an apple, another spam ad appears on the screen because those who like apples also like bananas. An example of the ads we encounter in our daily lives.
The apple metaphor . When the girl gives the apple to the man, she says that the only real thing here must be the apple. The first sin arising from this adam and Eve story includes the meanings of passion and ambition. The story of the expulsion from heaven is used here as the first occasion of the exit from hell. Even apple means love and sexuality in secular art. The woman here is none other than Aphrodite. Aphrodite is a goddess identified with the apple and there are a lot of statues of her in this way. Aphrodite is referred to as Venus in Roman mythology, even her full name is venus verticordia, in the sense of changing hearts. It shows that we have given up on human virtues at this point.
After the work is over, Bing, who has no other options, spends time playing games in his room, and here he comes across an advertisement for a talent contest. Participating in this competition and winning is the only way to get out of this environment. But there is a striking situation in the same scene. George Orwell takes us back to his 1984 novel. There is also this big brother who watches everyone and everything in this series. The moment the man is not looking at the screen, the system detects it and sends a warning. The imposed video is a sex scene. If the man does not watch this, he will lose the right.
One day Bing meets Abi in the toilet, the only thing that seems real to him here is her singing, and his first job is to rescue this woman he is in love with from that environment. For this reason, he offers Abi to participate in a talent contest and tells her, “Let something real happen now,” while giving her her own credit. At that time, all the bicycle flippers on the stage are displayed as if they were a factory. This is an indication of how artificial this mass exploitation is.
While the jury of the competition is being introduced in the series, the series defines the steps of class distinction with this jury representing the upper class. The upper class who live in luxury, the middle class who live a monotonous life, and the lower class who do not use bicycles because they are overweight and are given a cleaning task. Contestants have to drink a narcotic liquid before going on stage. This liquid, which forces you to be trusting, is a symbol that shows the grievances of other classes who are indifferent to the commands of the upper class. - The names of the jury describe the qualities of those who decide people's fate : Charity : charity, Hope: hope, Wraith: there is a ghost. Your woman's next life will move along the path promised by the ghost. Although the jury likes the woman, she gives him another option due to the fact that there are too many contestants in the song category. Wraith has a porn streaming channel. He wants her to work here. The woman becomes indifferent to this offer under the influence of drugs and accepts. The guy will object, but they will take him away from there. There is a patriarchal situation in all classes that the array parses. Women are shown as sex objects of men. There is even a female figure in the juries who sees life from a male-oriented center.
A sad scene of the episode : While the man is in his room, a porn ad appears as spam, this time there is a woman he is in love with on the channel. He doesn't want to see her, he can't skip the ad because he doesn't have enough credits left to pass the ad, and he wants to break the screen by having a crisis there because the screen contains a sensor that is sensitive to her looking at it. In order to get rid of the ads that appear in your life,you need to take it to the level of consciousness. If you don't, those ads will continue to appear in your world. It is the outward expression of the internal trauma of us people in the crisis that the man is experiencing. Later, the man wants to save the girl from that world, so he collects credits by pedaling day and night, and eventually participates in the competition. On stage, he threatens the jury to kill himself and expresses all his true thoughts.
Jury fed these statements to the middle class as if they were just a show, and Hope gave Bing a false hope. This time jury Hope offers him to do a program on his own channel. Surprisingly, he accepts this. And Bing gave up his honor, his love, his revolution in the name of money and false hope.So the character went against the system, but he didn't insist on it. Just like us, we keep saying that the capitalist system is very bad, but none of us are doing anything, we are all waiting for someone to come out and destroy this system. We also see that Bing does not drink a drug drink before going on stage, so he is free to choose, but he submits to the force.
There's no natural forest in the last scene, it's a screen.It's just bigger and the ads don't appear.So Bing's house room has grown up, but even worse, the character is working as a helper to this system this time, so while he used to be a slave to the system, now he is both a slave to the system and helps the system grow.How is it that cyclists watch this guy while riding a bike and they give it their right(to what they say), but they don't do anything like us either.They just take the gas and keep pedaling like us after the video ends.A vicious cycle in which everyone uses each other as pawns, showing that even personal love is easily sacrificed for the sake of interests , our self-alienation is not because we are avatars in games, but because we are the avatar.
