Something that Metropolis, Sleep Dealer, and the second episode of Black Mirror‘s first season (Fifteen Million Merits) all have something in common: the rise of machinery that end up working against the common person, and how they all live in a society that doesn’t value them individually.
This is referenced in Causes of Alienation in this excerpt: “Under capitalism not only does the wage earner lose possession of the product of his labor, but these products can function in a hostile and injurious manner against him… [they] become a source of tyranny against the worker when the worker serves as an appendage of the machine and is forced to adapt the cadence of his life and work to the operation of the machine” (Mandel & Novak, 1979). Metropolis shows this with the workers in the underground city – they work ten hour work days and have little time to do much else except sleep. They’ve become slaves to the machine and are threatened by the thought that terrible things will happen if they don’t do their job (for example, when Georgi is relieved of his duty of taking care of the clock when Freder arrives to do it for him). These workers all are used for their labor and are seen as useful for nothing more – this is a concept known as alienation.
In Sleep Dealer, the concept of alienation is explored with by the titular sleep dealers. It’s explained in the film that the name is derived from the workers who remotely connect to robots across the world to do manual labor – and that they collapse often when working long enough. The film’s protagonist, Memo, begins to lose himself over the course of the movie as he works more and more, doing plenty of overnight shifts to earn money to support his family. By that point, he’d become little more than another cog in the machine.
In Fifteen Million Merits, the protagonist, Bing, is bound by the rules of his society as he does the same routine every day: wake up, eat, exercise, and not much more. The rules of this society (as in why they’re there, what the purpose of their being there is) isn’t explored much in this standalone episode, but even with a small glimpse we’re able to see that the people in this place have little control over what happens. They’re forced to watch advertisements they don’t care to see (which happens in real life too, but for the most part we don’t have to pay just to skip them), the implication that everything they do is watched or surveyed, and the fact that it seems there isn’t much they can really do with their lives there. They’re stuck in the machine. Causes of Alienation has this line: “Work is just a means to attain a goal. And that goal is to get money, some income to be able to buy the consumer goods necessary to satisfy your needs” (Mandel & Novak, 1979). This is true in Fifteen Million Merits as all the people in this society do is exercise to earn money (merits) and spend those credits on small things, and one of the more expensive items is just a pass into a talent show (which winning, from what we’ve seen, doesn’t seem to be much better than living as normal).
All of these films explore similar concepts: workers in a society that don’t care about their personal being in order to create some kind of product – commodity form. Fifteen Million Merits especially explores the concept of “commodity fetishism,” or value of items being their worth instead of what they actually are or what they’re used for. The talent show entry ticket can only be bought by months of hard work and spending as little as possible – otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to achieve on its own. And all that work that can amount to either devastating results or absolutely nothing isn’t worth much at all, but as it’s decided by those at the top of that social pyramid to be next to priceless, everyone strives to reach for it.
In the end, in the societies shown by these films, none of the individual workers matter – instead, it’s only about how useful they are and what they’re able to produce.
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“Black Mirror.” Lyn, Euros, director. Fifteen Million Merits, season 1, episode 2.
Lang, Fritz, director. Metropolis. Ufa, 1926.
Novack, George, and Ernest Mandel. The Marxist Theory of Alienation Three Essays. Pathfinder Press, 1979.
Rivera, Alex, director. Sleep Dealer. Maya Entertainment, 2008.
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