Years & Years: Spicy political satire and prophecy, the magical reality we live in

Produced by NGOCN

Author | Cement

Edit丨Lou noodles

This article contains a lot of spoilers, please read with caution

In the series of novels "Harry Potter", Tom Riddle renamed himself "Voldemort", but few people dare to call this name directly, and not many people remember that he was originally called "Tom Riddle" . People are more inclined to call him "Mysterious Man", and he has become a man who can't even mention his name.

In the past month or so, many viewers in mainland China are also watching a British drama whose name cannot even be mentioned. This British drama is jointly produced by BBC and HBO. The English name is Years and Years. This 6-episode British drama follows the joys and sorrows of the Lyons family over the next 15 years.

After the first episode of the show was broadcast, there was an entry on Douban briefly, with a score of 9.5 at that time. But before the second episode aired, the entry was deleted by Douban. After that, netizens rebuilt the entries of the show many times, and few of them lived for 24 hours.

There are almost no subtitle groups in China who dare to produce Chinese subtitles for the show. The only Dreamer subtitle group that insisted on producing Chinese subtitles for the play has also exploded its Weibo account. To this day, the field "Years and Years" has also been "completely blocked" on multiple social platforms including Weibo and WeChat. In Baidu Netdisk, files with this field in their names cannot even generate shared links. Compared with "Voldemort", "Years and Years" is even better.

What kind of British drama is it that only aired the first episode on the BBC, and then implemented a comprehensive ban within the wall? The answer may be hidden in this lens:

The image of leaders has been relatively comprehensively protected in mainland China. Considering the intensification and tightening of the space for speech in recent years, this kind of "humiliation" of the top leaders will inevitably touch their inverse scales.

In the play, China built an artificial island in the South China Sea called "Hongsha". The island is essentially a military base and was built to expand China's military influence in the South China Sea. This "reality" also goes against the narrative of the Chinese government . In its discourse, the United States is the driving force behind the militarization of the South China Sea. The original intention of China's construction of islands and reefs is to "perfect civil service functions."

In the first episode, the U.S.-China trade war continues until 2024. Under the influence of multiple factors, US President Trump ordered the launch of nuclear missiles on Hongsha Island in the last days of his term (the play predicted that Trump would be re-elected). The above shot shows that after the nuclear missile exploded on Hongsha Island, people in the British refugee camp fanatically held up the puppets of the leaders of the two countries. This episode is the climax of the first episode, and probably the one that attracts Chinese audiences the most.

This is one of the kind of predictions the show has for the future society. In the next 15 years, the international situation and the political situation of various countries will continue to deteriorate. In the second episode, the show predicts that both Xi Jinping and Putin will become life-long supreme leaders, and the current US Vice President Mike Pence is elected US President, but Trump is manipulating Pence behind the scenes (at least, the character Daniel in the show). think so).

Another type of predictions of the future society from Years and Years is how the development of science and technology will further change our lives.

In the near future, the development of Internet technology will accelerate the alienation of interpersonal relationships. Teenage Lee stares at the screen for a long time or wears VR glasses, and the connection with his mother Rosie becomes less and more rebellious, with criminal and violent tendencies; the parents of the family also talk through Family Link, the time and space of offline communication Turning to online; due to the convenience of network communication, people generally work from home, but the work efficiency is very low. The government has to propose the concept of "town time", calling on people to return to the office to work and restore the 955 work and rest habits.

The most daring imagination among them is "Transhuman" . Bethany "came out" to her parents in the first episode, calling herself Trans, and her parents mistook her as Transgender, but her self-identification was actually Transhuman. According to her self-report in the play, she was also "born with the wrong body", in fact she should be a machine. "My lungs are so full of air, it's going in and out like a bellows, and it feels so stupid." The more machines inside her, the more comfortable she feels. Her ultimate goal is to upload her consciousness to the web.

As a science fiction concept, consciousness uploading and body transformation are not new. The creation of the show is to use "Trans" to reconstruct it, and then propose the identity of "Transhuman". This idea enriches our imagination of the "Trans" movement, and also makes the science fiction and political concept of "cyborg" more possible.

Later, after Bethany participated in a government project and transformed his body, he was faced with the decision of whether to use his technology to participate in the exposure of government scandals. Once she is involved and leaves her "illegal" record, her transformation may be withdrawn, which means the wires in her body will be pulled out. What role should technology play in our lives? Can technologists hold a political stance of "technology neutrality"? Who owns the technology, private, state-owned or a public resource shared by everyone? These are the techno-ethical dilemmas embedded in Bethany's dilemma, which the show also dabbles in.

As mentioned above, Years and Years envisions and discusses a wide range of areas. But for those viewers who were "into the pit" in the first episode, when they saw the second and third episodes, they could clearly feel the shrinking of the narrative pattern.

In the first episode, the United States launched a nuclear missile on Hongsha Island, which made people feel that the end of the world has come, but in the play, only "China made concessions" and "the United States was sanctioned" took over this incident. In the second episode, everyone was still watching Edith being interviewed on TV in their respective homes, and everything was fine. Viewers, especially Chinese viewers who are looking forward to seeing more follow-ups, may be very disappointed by this.

Audiences who have such expectations for Years and Years may have misunderstood the positioning of the show. To illustrate this better, let's go back to the first scene of the first episode. In that scene, the Lyons family watched a live broadcast of the same current affairs roundtable in their respective rooms, while discussing on their smartphones how Vivienne Rook was rude on the show.

Years and Years is indeed a political miniseries, but its tone doesn't stray from the realm of family drama. Viewers see through the eyes of the Lyons family how their environment is rapidly deteriorating at a palpable rate, and what role they will play in this torrent.

In this scene, different family members have different reactions to Vivienne, alluding to different value positions, all of which are real in reality and the reactions that Americans have had to Trump.

Another scene in the play is more intuitive about the political opinions of Lyons' family members. In the third episode of the UK general election, some family members went to the polling station to vote together, and all those who participated in the offline vote were captured. The audience can know who they voted for, and can compare their vote with their previous words and deeds Connect to understand. Brother Stephen voted for the Labour Party, his wife Celeste voted for the Conservative Party, grandmother Muriel voted for the Four Star Party (the Four Star Party was founded by Vivienne Rook, she is also the leader of the party), and the fourth sister Rosie voted for the Four Star Party, The second sister, Edith, drew a slash directly on the ballot. No one voted. Daniel voted for the Conservative Party.

The author extracted Stephen and tried to analyze him. Stephen is a very classic middle-class straight man. His job content is financial investment consulting. Because of work needs, he is very concerned about current affairs news. He thinks highly of himself and thinks that other people are not as smart as him. When many people could no longer afford the high cost of living in London, he was able to take root in London until the systemic financial crisis and the massive bankruptcy of the bank. He lost millions of pounds and returned to his grandmother's house in Manchester. In the third episode, he has several jobs in order to make a living, all year round, and his salary can only barely cover his daily expenses. It was in this state that he voted for Labour, and he thought he was definitely not the kind of "fool" who would vote for the Four Star Party.

In the fifth episode, in order to get a higher salary, he was willing to be used as a "monkey" by his former classmates and was able to enter a think tank to work. The think tank later won the bid for Vivienne's (now prime minister) secret tender for "Old Places", and Stephen learned what the "Old Places" really were - concentration camps used by the government to house "excess populations". Previously, Stephen had been haunted by the death of his younger brother Daniel, who insisted that Daniel was killed by his ex-fiancé Viktor. With this idea in mind, Stephen avenged his personal revenge and took advantage of his position to transfer Viktor to the "place of the past" and sentenced Viktor to death. In just a few years, he has completely become a fellow traveller of the Four Star Party.

The way the show launched "The Places of the Past" is quite wonderful. One seemingly isolated incident after another, more or less contributed to the emergence of this concentration camp. Refugees, illegal immigrants, and even Britons made homeless by climate change and environmental pollution may be sent to the "places of the past", "disappeared" and removed from society.

At the beginning of the first episode, Vivienne, who had not yet become the prime minister at the time, expressed in the show that he did not care about the conflict between Israel and Palestine at all, and only cared about whether the garbage in his home could be collected on time. He won the applause of the audience and was already It laid the first foreshadowing for the "place of the past": we don't care about what happened to the people, we only care about our market life.

In the second episode, Vivienne launched Blink (translated as "flash") during the constituency by-election, an electromagnetic pulse-like device that can force all electronic devices offline. She claims to legalize "flash" and distribute it to schools and teachers so that all minors can't browse porn online. This kind of "protection" for minors was used in Episode VI to block the signal of "the place of the past", so that the people in the concentration camp could not seek help from outside.

The general elections in episodes 3 and 4, where the Four Star Party dramatically and legitimately gained the ruling party status, was the most crucial step in building the "place of the past" (as mentioned above, Vivienne is the party leader, which makes her the prime minister ). After that, the large-scale and prolonged rainfall caused many people to become homeless, and a large number of people were resettled and moved, which provided an excellent smoke bomb for the government to run the "place of the past", and the refugees would "disappear" during the resettlement process. ” and transported to a concentration camp. In the sixth episode, the infectious disease "monkey flu" became widespread, and many infected people were sent to the "place of the past" to infect the refugees in the concentration camp. The "work efficiency" of the concentration camp was greatly improved. So far, all seemingly unrelated isolated incidents have been linked together to give birth to the terrifying monster of "the place of the past".

So is there really no one at all trying to stop this from happening in the process? Of course there are. It goes without saying that the second sister Edith is a seasoned activist, and the line of Daniel and Viktor is arranged in the play to illustrate the fate of those who fought alone in the torrent of the times.

Daniel is an officer in the Housing and Construction Department of Manchester City Hall, who builds and arranges temporary shelters for refugees. He met Viktor from Ukraine in the refugee camp. In 2024 in the play, the living conditions of homosexuals are still very bad. Viktor was reported by his parents in his home country. At this time, Ukraine had been occupied by Russia, or, in other words, "became part of Russian territory", and Russia's anti-gay laws were applied in Ukraine. Reported Viktor was electrocuted.

Daniel falls in love with Viktor in a refugee camp, and Daniel does everything he can to live with him. The United Kingdom sent Viktor back to Ukraine, and Daniel planned a plan to smuggle Viktor into Spain, hoping that the Spanish left-wing government could provide Viktor with asylum. After the plan was successful, Spain's left-wing government fell. The far-left government came to power and Viktor was again at risk of being deported. Daniel decided to take a risk, hoping to smuggle Viktor back to England. However, things backfired, and Daniel eventually died in the English Channel.

Those who work for everyone have frozen to death in the wind and snow, not to mention that Daniel doesn't really want to help "everyone", he just wants to live with his lover. And we let this happen, we let good people die in vain, we let the "places of the past" silently slaughter innocent people. As Gran said in the opening dinner table speech of Episode 6, "It's all your fault."

However, the ending of the show is quite romantic. In Episode 6, the Lyons decided to stop being silent. Edith plans to lead the crowd to rescue Viktor, blow up the signal shielding tower in the "Place of the Past", and take out the mobile phone to broadcast the real situation of the "Place of the Past".

Bethany and a few other "cross-machine" programmers used their technology to make sure Edith's footage would be seen by everyone in the country. Rosie lost her patience and drove through the curfew gate. Stephen got lost, and sent the police the internal documents he had been collecting all along. What's more, the Lyons family is only part of a larger operation, and there are many more who have done something similar to bring "the place of the past" to the public.

In the end, the Four Star government fell and Prime Minister Vivienne Rook was arrested and jailed. Although Gran also predicted that when a clown fell, the next clown was on his way, but it was still a victory. As long as we don't stand idly by, as long as we see the truth, then we can win.

In Years and Years, there are many easy-to-understand insinuations, as well as relatively complex metaphors. Vivienne Rook, who was born as a businessman and speaks wild words, is obviously insinuating US President Trump. Many of her mantras are imitating Trump step by step, such as "fake news" and "lonely Britain has never been so great".

But the author thinks that her clothes and the name "Four Star Party" are also worth pondering. She named the party "Four Stars" in honor of her controversial utterance of the word "Fuck" on live TV. "Fuck" becomes "****" if it can't be said, and that's where the four stars come from. She believes that the Four Star Party is striving towards "Five Stars", and "Five Stars" as a political symbol, the author believes that domestic audiences should be familiar with it. On top of that, she only wore red when she became Prime Minister, and when Stephen told her that the power outage was because Russia was attacking the UK network, she replied "don't be silly". These clues are enough to form a convincing metaphorical chain.

Of course, Years and Years doesn't need these metaphors and can totally creep us out. Many of the "prophecies" mentioned in it are already our reality and daily life. This drama faces this era, and we who watch this drama should also have the courage to break the silence and defend the freedom from fear. No one can stay out of it, and that's what Years and Years taught us.

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