When you get home from work and are ready to lie flat, you see a WeChat prompt from the leader.
Just before preparing to slip away, the colleagues in the department were holding a dinner party, and as soon as they got together, they took a hard time taking a vacation.
Obviously, when I see all the people and things related to the unit, I feel disgusted, and I also want all kinds of enthusiastic likes, comments and groupings in the circle of friends.
The man had left the workstation, but the work was still glued to the body and brought back.
It seems that for many people, the so-called "off work" is to continue to work in a different way, and when you try to hold the boundaries between the two, you will always lose.
So, what if there is such an option:
With just one surgery, going to and from work will be divided into two personalities
The two do not know each other and cannot exchange information.
All you know is that you're going to work, and every morning when you walk into the company elevator, the memories outside are all gone. After work, everything in the company was erased.
This is the basic setting of Apple TV+ new drama "Departure", if it is you, are you willing to accept it?
In fact, when I clicked on the first two episodes of "Departure", I did not expect that it would actually reveal the potential of some kind of divine drama.
You seem to be watching an episode of "Black Mirror", the cold streamlined architecture in the picture, the BGM that whizzes into the ear, the kind of tough, high-concept, fast and accurate cold horror feeling.
What is even more surprising is that the director of this drama is actually Ben Stiller.
That's right, it's the comedian Ben Stiller that we're familiar with, who directs thrillers, tech, and workplace dramas that he can't play with his eight shots.
But just as tragedy is comedy from a distance, such an attempt seems both counterproductive and logical.
It also made us more curious about this new drama.
The first episode goes straight to the point at the beginning, with a comatose woman lying in the middle of an empty desk.
She slowly awoke, and in the midst of great alert, looked at the small megaphone in front of her and asked her five questions.
"Who are you?"
"Which state in the United States were you born in?"
"Name a state in the United States at will."
"What is Mr. Egan's favorite breakfast?"
"What color are your mother's eyes?"
She was horrified to find that she didn't want to get up, who am I? Do you have family or friends? What are you doing here? I don't know.
Strangely enough, she only answered one of the five questions, but got a perfect score.
On closer reflection, the only thing she answered was an objective common sense question about the name of the U.S. state, and the remaining subjective question about herself was unknown.
That's why she got the perfect score, a woman named Holly who is undergoing her induction check to confirm the results of the memory separation surgery.
This is also a prerequisite for entering the macro technology department of Lumont Company, after joining, all employees who undergo surgery will have memory limited by space.
There will be no external memory in the company building, and when you leave the building, everything you go to work will be forgotten, even if you don't know a colleague you have just met face to face.
That is to say, for the employees in the building, it is the ultimate 996 of unlimited flow, and for the after-work self, it is the Nth power of vacation.
In the male protagonist Mark's body, the role of this operation is even more significant.
Unable to get out of the pain of bereavement, real life is a gray and cold color.
Every morning he would arrive at the company's parking lot in tears, but don't worry, as soon as he entered the elevator on the separation floor of the building, he seemed to have changed into a person, and his steps had changed from heavy and sluggish to extremely brisk.
For Mark, the separation surgery seemed like his only exit from the pain, but everything changed from the onboarding of new employees.
With Petty, the head of the department, suddenly disappearing and the reason for his departure unclear, Mark was forced to be promoted and replaced as director.
And the female employee Wholly, who experienced the thrilling induction ceremony at the beginning, is the direct subordinate who came to fill the vacancy in the department.
In the small department to which Mark belonged, there were only four people in the full count.
The offices here are huge, but the desks are only a little bit in the middle, and they are arranged like snakes.
Like this smooth and orderly building, Mark and his department should have continued like a beautiful backwater.
But there was a rift between the two worlds at the same time.
When going to work, the new employee Holly did not cooperate with various kinds, one moment making a fuss about leaving, and the other asking a bunch of questions about the content of the work.
After work, a strange man follows him every day, claiming that his name is Petty, that he is Mark's colleague and his best friend, and that he has some secrets to tell Mark.
In this way, Departure rationalizes an extreme setting and makes everything look orderly, but just like Mark, you will always feel weird.
Mark's Lumont company, under the banner of "balancing work and life", is vigorously promoting and implementing its separation surgery.
You will find that with this setting, the workplace that was originally mixed with daily life is completely highlighted, pumped into a pure vacuum, and the "emperor's new clothes" are completely stripped away.
Its purpose is so blunt as ever that it is naked.
In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor, who wakes up and finds himself a beetle, first confirms the alarm clock, fearing that he will be late for the bus.
Similarly, in the urban onion news, the most common occurrence is that elementary school students are stuck in a gap so-and-so, waiting for firefighters to rescue them, while worrying that their homework is not finished.
Why do people go to work, who invented going to work, and what is the meaning of going to work? Will it eventually lead to the stability of a small group of people, or, to the extreme, to glorify Pavlov's dog as a corporate employee?
The Lumont company in the play is of course fictional, but its internal logic is essentially the same as reality.
In this department, there is the same team building, the same need to welcome new employees.
On the first day of Herly's arrival, in order to greet her, the colleagues in the department played a small game of "self-introduction".
She didn't know what to say and discovered the game's deadliest bug — employees were erased from their memories and knew nothing about themselves.
But the rule is that whoever says the most will behave well.
Therefore, all Mark et al. can say is everything related to the company. As a result, in the process of playing games, this working personality has become more and more "three-dimensional".
Its fundamental purpose is actually to let the company's values take advantage of the void and re-establish a so-called "self-awareness", so that these employees gradually forget the attributes of the tool and mistakenly think that they are a complete "person".
The same routine has variations in reality, and the onboarding process of many companies is not to first give yourself a small nickname specifically used in the company.
Of course, in other words, they become so-called improving team cohesion.
The same is true of the Lumont company in the play, on the first day of Herly's employment, she first took a group photo of the team in a harmonious way, and everyone smiled with eight teeth, framed in the photo frame, and placed on everyone's desk.
But the time was turned back a few minutes, and the group photo of the previous colleague had just been taken down by Mark, and even the death or death of the colleague was unknown, so he immediately hugged the new employee.
This is the iron workplace, the flow of employees.
In addition to these familiar routines, in the first two episodes, the show's most clever baggage comes from a small speaker.
Its first appearance is the "extraterrestrial voice" that asks Herly at the beginning.
At this moment, the unknown voice filled with great panic, leaving her in chaos.
The second time, it appeared in Mark's office interview, and the so-called "directors" attended through a small speaker, leaving Mark like a thorn in the back.
The purpose of this small speaker is also very simple, it makes the leader become ubiquitous and pervasive.
Like Bentham's circular prison, as long as a monitoring tower is placed in the center of the circle, then every prisoner will think that he is being targeted, thus achieving convenient "self-imprisonment".
And the most ironic thing is that as Mark is promoted to supervisor, the "voice" that opens the film to Ask Hurley's question also reveals the mystery, it is Mark.
Thus, there is such a scene, Mark, who has just been monitored by the "speaker", sits behind another speaker and monitors Holly.
This also means that there is no need for superiors, let alone external interference.
With just one speaker, the department can complete a tightly clamped incarceration system on its own.
Each employee will eventually be smoothly inserted into the system like Mark, becoming a section in an endless cycle.
However, this "departure" only reduces all of the above to the problems of "employee vs boss" system exploitation, work alienation and so on.
Well, it is still far from the so-called divine drama, and this so-called memory separation surgery is far from simple.
In the film, when the new employee Huli strongly asked to leave, her superiors took her to the safety exit, and then watched her constantly push open the door to try to get out, and was bounced back.
It's not a high-tech device that hits the wall, but it means that every time after work, she chooses to come back again.
This is the scariest part of memory dissociation, the person who really traps you, the one who enslaves you, maybe it's you.
For the master personality, he knows nothing about the experience of going to work, whether it is to escape pain like Mark or to enjoy the comfort of permanent leave.
Again and again, these personalities will choose to return to the company and never resign.
It was precisely because of this that Lumont's resignation requirements were one and only one, that is, they must agree with the external personality.
So, this is essentially a "I kill me" context, and it is "I" who traps himself in the perpetual cycle of going to work.
It is precisely by grasping this point that this "Departure" has a place to dig deeper, and also allows this high-concept technology company to have a real "dystopian" temperament.
The two personalities in the play, one uses work to escape reality, and the other relies on fantasizing about leaving work to live an obscene life.
They achieved "happiness" through surgery, just as the human beings in Brave New World were limited from the embryonic beginning, and eventually constituted a world of national happiness.
And John, the only savage man in the world who demanded freedom, was, in the eyes of others, "demanding the right to suffer."
This is also the paradox faced by people such as Mark, who suffer from the pain of bereavement without surgery.
And out of the company building, you may find yourself a complete loser.
So, the bitterness of freedom or the sweetness of ignorance, which one do you choose? Do you really know what you want?
It is also in this sense that the theme that "Leaving" tries to pull out may not be as simple as simple work alienation.
Rather, all inventions such as science and technology, economics, politics, etc. have developed to the end, and there may be only one problem they face, that is, human beings are still far from clearly understanding themselves.
Of course, having said so much, this drama has only just started broadcasting, whether it can become another divine drama is still unknown, interested friends can quickly catch up!