Author: Little Grandpa
There is no sharp confrontation in the macro perspective, no ideological explicit criticism, and no deliberate sensationalism in the perceptual field, but I don't think anyone will deny that "Sorry, We Missed You" is a fairly real and very heavy reality movie.
The protagonist of the story is an unemployed worker, and as the pillar of a family of four, he must hold up a world of breath for this crumbling family. Just when he was worried about not having a stable job, he found a way to work in a new economic model, that is, to become a franchise driver at a courier station, which seemed to mean that he had the opportunity to dominate his own destiny, and he was willing to use his labor to change the fate of himself and his family that almost collapsed. So, he has a plan, he has a dream, but the reality is often not a flat road, but a dangerous quicksand, for those who are deeply involved, the more they struggle, the more they are embarrassed, and at this time, the greatness of man and the tragedy of man are always the same, because even if it is the future of the wolf, no one will give up the struggle.
He will work hard, but he will not change the future.
Ricky accepted the invitation of the head of the courier site, who, according to whom, instead of working for the site, became a partner at the site. In short, he has an opportunity, as long as he buys or rents a truck for transportation, he can become a node connecting the network and the user, which is the last process between the virtual and the real, and the last fortress of the information network to leave a human.
In a practical sense, this crowdsourcing model of the Internet provides an unemployed person like Ricky with a stable but unstable employment opportunity, stable because this labor demand will not be subversive in the existing technical conditions, and unstable because these workers involved in it do not receive relatively perfect labor security, they are not wage workers in the traditional sense, because there is no exact company to provide them with a clear employment contract. In a way, they are free people in the Internet economy, and the premise of maintaining this freedom is work, which is a set of mutual causal relationships, and the density of work determines the breadth of freedom. Once this logical relation is widely accepted, however, freedom ceases to be a universal concept premised on the personality of the self-agent, but a narrow understanding with reference to some quantitative criterion.
They offer opportunities, but they also instill lies.
Ricky found paid jobs, but some of the responsibilities, obligations, and regulations that had belonged to the company to workers were cleverly stripped away under the framework of such a new economic model. Formally, Ricky, who is at the bottom of society, is indeed the master of his own work, and he has the right to choose not to work, but that also means that he will lose the only source of life, so he becomes a vassal of this model, he has to accept the demand for work beyond the legal working hours, and he has to accept the work system without statutory leave.
For the platform party that controls the channels and resources, Ricky is the master of the individual and the slave of this economic model, he fights for survival and freedom, but when the opportunity to struggle is completely monopolized by the other, survival is a handout, freedom is a luxury, and a too good future is no longer an imaginable vision, but a carefully woven lie.
"Sorry, We Missed You" is a film that focuses on the individuals at the bottom, it has not explicitly expressed the contradictions between opposing classes as "Parasite", leaving aside the macro perspective of the narrative to focus only on the tragedies and joys of a certain group, the Ricky family is a small person in the context of the times, they are eager to change, but there is no choice.
On Ricky's first day on the job, it was not only a strict site rule that was bundled with him, but also a scanner for sending express mail, it was a terminal that connected the network to the individual, it was very thoughtful and smart, it planned the delivery route for Ricky, it did not require the delivery staff to think too much. There is no doubt that this is the result of the information technology revolution, but to some extent, it is also due to the "aggression" of technology.
You could say that the film is rather rustic, because the elements that make up its story don't go too far beyond reality, but it's hard to deny the director's ambition to dig into the core of the story.
Ricky is an unemployed worker, and this wave of unemployment is not set off by the occasional events of some era, but by the inevitable trend of the technological revolution and the basic contradictions of capitalism. Complex social labor is gradually split by procedures and machines, from individual workshops to assembly lines, and now intelligent production, people have gradually lost their dependence on labor under this technological evolution, but at the same time they have gradually lost the opportunity to participate in labor.
As a courier, Ricky's job offer is a procedural blind spot that the technology has not yet solved, but it is difficult to say whether this is a great luck or a greater misfortune. As a person with individual consciousness, he is placed in some kind of algorithm and program, for the background system, he is an appendage to the express scanner, any deviation from the scanner's requirements will be identified as a mistake, in most cases, it is a non-error-free overseer, its intelligence is enough to allow it to plan every process of Ricky's work, there is no room for relaxation, there is no room for game.
It has to be said that this is a kind of exploitation that is extremely precise, and more importantly, it hides the exploiter behind a program without a living entity, and such a new economic model of gig work thus becomes a buffer zone between opposing classes, and its possible consequence is that the fighting nature of the working class is gradually dissolved due to the destruction of the subjective consciousness (Ricky was told at the beginning of the job that he is not a wage worker), and their rights and interests are also avoided or even abandoned. Because under the invasion of the wave of intelligence, the opportunity to work has become a scarce resource.
Ricky has tried his best, but for reality, trying his best is far from enough.
The film has its blandness, but it also has its softness. One of the things that touched me the most was when he proposed to the site director that he wanted to take a leave of absence at Christmas to be reunited with his family. Here I see a husband who is sympathetic to his wife and a father who is distressed about his daughter.
"My daughter Lisa, who is 11 years old, has insomnia."
Ricky is too failed, he has his plan, he wants to change the future of the family through labor, but he has to be absent from the life and growth of his two children, he desperately wants to provide a warm home for his family, but he tries his best to become a burden in the child's growth process. For Lisa, her father was not a slave who earned his money in the midst of his knees, so when his father was bitten by a client's dog, he stubbornly wrote "You owe my dad a new pair of shorts" on the courier slip. At that moment, you can feel that Ricky is not a worker who has been stripped of consciousness by the machine, but an individual full of life emotions, and through the perspective of his daughter, the audience can really feel his pain, his tenacity and his helplessness.
However, for intelligent programs, emotion is an unrecognized code, high-intensity work makes him have no time to take care of personal and family life, he wants to set an example for his son to strive to change the future through his own actions, but the latter insists on trying in vain, you can certainly say that this is his rebellion and sinking. But in the face of the harsh reality, this is a view with group identity.
Ricky's family experience is a microcosm of the bottom group of this era, they are thinking about the future, and clinging to the status quo, and because the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the way to change their own destiny also shrinks, and the cost of their success is inevitably increased, may be higher capital investment, may be longer time cost, more likely to be greater health consumption, and their ability to bear risks has not increased because of the increase in cost input, or even more fragile, rising debt. Deepening contradictions, deteriorating bodies can become a burden that crushes hope.
When Ricky is robbed and beaten on the way to work, what follows is not a perfect work injury determination, but a series of compensation lists, which translate into new debts on Ricky's shoulders, and he has no chance to rest, but can only drag his heavy body back to work. The dignity of the individual is broken and crushed in such a cruel external environment.
Will the future really change? The film doesn't give an answer, but all I can see is the despair of a middle-aged man.
"Sorry, We Missed You" captures the inherent contradictions of the times in this society that is moving towards greater efficiency and intelligence, and the Ricky family is just one aspect of this contradiction.
We certainly have reason to celebrate the light of civilization brought about by the technological revolution, but we should not forget that this society still has an obligation to provide a future that preserves self-worth and meaning for every subject with personality.