In the third episode of the fifth season of Black Mirror, Miley Cyrus starred as a female pop singer Ashley O. After a baptism of drug overdose, dream extraction, consciousness upload, artificial intelligence, holograms, and a vicious fight with a musical system and a greedy manager, Salles' Ashley O managed to regain his freedom and rediscover himself in the live house wild cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Head in a Hole."
This episode is the most commercially flavorful episode in the entire Black Mirror series. Nine Inch Nail sells Black Mirror peripheral T-shirts (creator Trent Rezno is a big fan of Black Mirror). Miley Cyrus, although in the midst of the new ep trilogy, has changed her name and image to Ashley O on social media.
Nine-inch nailed "Black Mirror" peripheral t-shirt
But audiences and the media rarely agreed on this time, and they regarded the episode as "the worst production in the history of Black Mirror".
It's too superficial, it's one. Ashley O, a popular female singer who is good at recording dream inspiration into songs, is run by her aunt/agent. She tried to escape, but was transformed into a vegetative person and fell into a long-term coma. Scientists were hired to extract music from her brain to make songs, and holograms replaced her flesh, bringing fans around the world an extraordinary live experience that can be as big or small as Sun Wukong, and can be combined and combined.
Ashley's flesh is trapped, and the bad aunt succeeds in her ruse, but forgets a loophole. Ashley O had uploaded all consciousness implants widely sold smart dolls. It was this doll, Ashley's own consciousness, that saved her physical body (with the help of fans).
The separation of consciousness from the physical body has long been a fantasy and dream of mankind. In this story, technology helps to achieve the separation of spirit and flesh, and the plot is complete, but there is no reverie, which is not as strong as the strong emotional shock of the strange story of the separation of spirit and flesh in traditional stories. Both the most resentful beings in Japanese culture and the wizards of primitive religions who communicate with all spirits out of the soul are much more interesting than the cartoon characters who exaggerate to rescue their own ashley.
Another weakness of this episode is that it is too closed and the good and evil are clear, so it loses the charm of "Black Mirror" using technology as a mirror to reflect the subtle charm of human nature. Ashley and the two teenage girls who help her are utterly good, Ashley O's bad aunt/agent and team like Crow Ink Black. There is no gray area in the confrontation between the two, and in the end, it tells a story of the victory of good over evil. Like what, like the fairytale world that Ashley O's character Miley Cyrus once lived in as a Disney child star.
If Ashley is an active victim of the entertainment industry, the 14-year-old is a passive victim in the more general sense, and therefore more worthy of description.
In fact, it has the opportunity to explore better angles, such as focusing on helping Ashley's two sisters, especially the 14-year-old sister. The star-chasing girl fully accepts the chicken soup jokes instilled by the stars, and is washed by "believing in yourself, there is nothing you can't do" every day, losing the ability to recognize herself. If Ashley is an active victim of the entertainment industry, the 14-year-old is a passive victim in the more general sense, and therefore more worthy of description.
Stories of falling into a trap without knowing it are interesting. In contrast, Ashley's struggle (that is, the confrontation between the star and the star-making system) has long been rampant on the screen.
In a brief interview with The Guardian, Miley Cyrus said "the depiction of the entertainment industry in this episode is very real". Is this really the case? After Ashley fell into a coma in the play, the agent held a holographic projection concert.
She first appeared on the scene with a smile and solemnly recommended this concert to her fans to replace the real person, without any effort to pretend to be sad. So cold-blooded, as if in reality, a person and a spit star are enough to drown this unscrupulous agent.
She triumphantly told the audience that even if Ashley never woke up, she would be able to live on stages around the world with holograms. What is more cattle is that the holographic ashley can be large or small, and the audience at the top of the mountain no longer has to search for the figure of the small ant tribe. What's even more remarkable is that from now on, large-scale hologram concerts can be held all over the world at the same time, and the live broadcast can also be kicked out of the field.
That's the layman's word, and it's hard to imagine coming from a successful broker. Its mountain-sized hologram, let the front row viewer see what, two legs? Holograms are now technically up to par, but why wouldn't a living star want to do that? Because the charm of live music lies in the implicability and unpredictability of the present.
Once it becomes a form that can be infinitely copied and disseminated like a film and television drama, it is not as convenient and fast as a pair of good brothers in the second episode to experience wild sex in virtual reality.
If Ashley O wasn't starring Miley Cyrus, who had a similar mindset change, the episode would really be worse.
Miley Cyrus plays Ashley O
In reality, it is not uncommon for stars to experience similar experiences to the female pop singer Ashley O in the play. With a bad father and a bad mother, a bad manager, who was choked by the contract of the big record company and had to be a puppet on and off the stage, Britney Spears and Fan Xiaoxuan are two familiar examples. Miley Cyrus is not so miserable, and her resemblance to Ashley O is more in her efforts to get rid of the image shed and "be yourself".
Miley Cyrus is the daughter of country singer William 'billy' ray Cyrus, who became an all-American teen idol in 2006 for starring in the Disney-produced sitcom Hannah Montana. That same year, Miley Cyrus toured under Hannah's name and released her debut solo album in the form of an acoustic soundtrack in October.
In 2007, she signed a four-record contract with Hollywood Records, but since her contract with Disney had not yet ended, she had to continue to play the role of Hannah Montana in the TV series (and in people's minds).
At the end of Hannah Montana in 2011, Miley Cyrus was nineteen years old and couldn't wait to kill the fictional Hannah herself and replace her with the real Cyrus. Her debut solo album, Can't Be Tamed, witnessed the birth of a sexy girl with brown hair in a leather coat, but it wasn't enough. In 2013, Cyrus signed to RCA Records, and the new manager Larry Rudolf was the hero of Britney's transformation, who also ran the same child star.
At the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards (VMA) awards, Miley Cyrus was like a sexy bomb, spitting her tongue and eating away Hannah Montana's sweet image.
After a few years of being so high-profile "bad", Miley Cyrus smoothly became Miley Cyrus and Hannah Montana became a thing of the past. In 2018, Cyrus married her boyfriend, Liam Hemsworth, announcing the end of her life as a wandering skeleton.
The character of Ashley O, played by the fiercely defiant Miley Cyrus, has its own interest in the overlap of reality and fiction. But it is more of a hidden irony behind it.
Ashley, who sings at live house in the show, apparently gave up the more popular idol role and liberated himself, at least partially, from the entertainment industry.
What is the real-life Miley Cyrus singing? In "She Is Coming," the first installment of the ep trilogy released on May 31, Cyrus reminds us all the time that she is a dirty, evil, unclean freak. Long before that, she said she would break with pop because "there were so many Lamborghinis, Rolexes and superficial sex in it."
But no matter what radical gestures she makes, she is still in the category of popular music. It's just a little "dirty" pop, completely devoid of the sharpness of changing the nine-inch nail song of the industrial rock era into a bubble pop song. A little thunderous, heavy rain and small meaning, and a little boring.
Ashley O singing bubble pop songs
As for miley Cyrus, the star who changed her social media account to Ashley O, she showed an image that was familiar with the operation of the entertainment industry. This image is in contrast to the characters in the play who are desperately trying to get rid of their control, and the combination of the inside and outside of the play enriches this incomparably thin episode of "Black Mirror".