Author | Editor Xi You | Wu Qing Even before it was released, this movie was tightly surrounded by negative labels. "Consumption hardship" is an alluring accusation: a star director like Xu Zheng shoots a movie about a delivery rider; a literary and artistic worker who has long a

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

"Retrograde Life" stills

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

Author | Xi You

Editor | Wu Qing

Even before it was released, this movie was tightly wrapped with negative labels. "Consumption hardship" is an alluring accusation: Xu Zheng Such a star director shoots a movie about a takeaway rider; literary and artistic workers who have long achieved financial freedom, and stories depicting hard work to make a living, both Is there a relationship between consuming and being consumed?

The huge contrast between the creator's stance and expression has caused suspicion to grow in the gaps. Is " Retrograde Life " a speculative work that exploits the hardships of ordinary people to earn tears and box office? Until the moment before the screening started, I still had doubts.

20 minutes later, I dropped the charges.

To be fair, "Retrograde Life" does not blindly exaggerate "hardship", does not create a distorted and bizarre landscape, and does not make people indulge in cheap emotions.

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

"Retrograde Life" does not deliberately avoid the sources of hardship for many riders: high housing prices and medical expenses, the lack of labor security, an algorithm system that blindly pursues efficiency and goes against human nature, and living in Huge pressure on individuals in a society where efficiency is paramount.

Precisely because of its exposure to these heavy life issues, "Retrograde Life" gave me the impression that it is not a superficial commercial film that only seizes gimmicks. Although its artistry as a film is open to question, it should be admitted that it has not given up its efforts to go deeper: it is questioning the business system that advocates competition and efficiency, and it is calling for a more powerful and comprehensive society. Safety net.

The story of Korean films influencing social policy changes has long been popular. Since "I am not the god of medicine ", Chinese realism-themed films have exploded in recent years, and they seem to be entrusted with some kind of ideal of Chinese filmmakers to save the world. . Following these expectations, a huge doubt faced by "Retrograde Life" is: Can making a movie about a food delivery rider really change anything? Or is it just to satisfy some filmmakers’ self-motivated feelings and make a lot of money at the box office?

"Retrograde Life" stills

Motives can never be proven to others. Pessimistic people can choose to believe the latter, but there will still be those who optimistically believe that narratives are powerful.

Because change must start with "seeing".

1

Middle class crisis

Gao Zhilei, played by Xu Zheng, is a 45-year-old programmer and a middle-level member of a large Internet company. He has a generous salary and a decent life, but at the same time he is under tremendous work pressure. Under pressure, he stayed up late, smoked, drank, and sat for long periods of time, dragging his body into disrepair and suffering from severe diabetes.

The "three-piece set of middle-class people returning to poverty" in the popular online narrative is cleverly stitched into Gao Zhilei's family in the film: a mortgage of nearly 10 million yuan, his spouse does not work, and his children attend international schools. Like many new middle-class families in first-tier cities, their lives may seem glamorous, but they are actually precarious. The family of five's pursuit of quality of life is all based on Gao Zhilei's personal income.

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Finally one day, the fulcrum broke.

Gao Zhilei was laid off by a large factory. The film's portrayal of this plot is somewhat bizarre, with dark tones, shaky images, ferocious faces, and the human resources director trying his best to mock Gao Zhilei, making it hard to breathe. Rather than restoring reality, what the film presents is more like a situation distorted by Gao Zhilei's subjective feelings, a moment of layoffs that has finally arrived in the eyes of a desperate middle-aged man.

Nowadays, Internet companies prefer to use the word "optimization" to refer to "layoffs."It may seem softer and more euphemistic on paper, but when you think about it, it's a ruthless semantic shift. What's ruthless is that it transforms an absolutely negative expression from the employee's standpoint into something that is absolutely correct from the company's standpoint. "Optimization" seems to describe the regular self-renewal of an organism, metabolizing aging and damaged cells so that fresher and more dynamic cells can grow.

is for example the "optimization" of Gao Zhilei. He is by no means incompetent. On the contrary, Gao Zhilei is the project leader, a technical backbone, and even a very responsible backbone in the workplace. A vivid little detail is that a new colleague deleted a set of codes by mistake. Gao Zhilei took the initiative to take responsibility and helped him hide his mistake and complete the repair.

Therefore, the layoff of Gao Zhilei is ridiculous like a betrayal: just because he is forty-five years old, no matter how unwilling to relax subjectively, from the perspective of the company, there are always young people who can endure it better than him. .

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

"Retrograde Life" is good at tapping into the current social emotions. It piles all the types of mid-life crises that modern people may encounter on the character Gao Zhilei.

was laid off after eleven years of work. The company was unwilling to compensate him in full, so he had to resort to labor arbitration. Borrow money to invest in p2p products. After 2018, p2p platforms collectively exploded. Consumers complained and had no choice but to repay the debts themselves. If you buy a house in a first-tier city when housing prices are high, you will have to bear a high mortgage loan of 15,000 yuan per month. However, if the house price drops, if you lose the ability to repay and sell it, you will have to bear a loss of 3 million yuan. The old man suffered a stroke and was admitted to the intensive care unit. He spent tens of thousands of dollars a day on rescue equipment and better but more expensive imported medicines, almost emptying his pockets.

All these constituted the driving force for Gao Zhilei to "take off Kong Yiji's long gown" and become a takeaway rider.

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

Even after becoming a rider, life is still full of dangers. The alarmingly high rate of traffic accidents, the highly stressful and even inhumane assessment system, the complaints and obstructions from customers and security guards.

"Retrograde Life" is not a romantic and inspirational story. It tells the shaky life and the many traps surrounding us. It is not only Gao Zhilei who is entangled with fate and still fighting against the trapped beast, but it may also be every one of us ordinary people.

2

Rider’s Dilemma

After Gao Zhilei becomes a rider, the film presents various characters and grievances on the takeout site in a somewhat romanticized and dramatic way. Gao Zhilei's continuous rise in performance constitutes one of the few pleasant passages in the whole film, just like watching the protagonist fight monsters and upgrade - this is the commercial treatment of "Retrograde Life".

However, there is still a real side to the takeaway world. For example, it does not weaken the traffic threat faced by takeaway riders: in the middle and later parts of the film, sudden traffic accidents occur frequently, destroying the slightly improved situation of the main characters at any moment when the plot turns slightly, and destroying the situation. They push back into crisis.

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

I once interviewed a food delivery rider in Chongqing. He complained to me last spring: "In order to earn such a small amount of money, the risk is so high that it is not worth it." It happened to be that work started after the Spring Festival. In just seven days, he experienced two traffic disputes. One was a collision with a private car that was turning, and the other was when he ran a red light to catch up with the delivery time and almost collided head-on with a car. .

An astonishing number is that in the first half of 2019, in Shanghai alone, there were an average of 1.8 road traffic accidents involving the express delivery and takeout industries every day, with an average of 1.8 casualties every day.

Moreover, the relationship between delivery riders and the platform is not a traditional labor-employment relationship, but a "cooperative employment".This is a concept that emerged with the platform economy and is not clearly defined in law: Riders sign an employment relationship with a third-party agency, but they need to follow the employment rules set by the food delivery platform. As for the costs and risks, most of them are borne by the riders themselves.

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

One detail in the film is that when Gao Zhilei received his pay stub, he found that about one hundred yuan had been deducted for insurance premiums. The reality is that the crowdsourcing rider interviewed above told me that as long as he goes on the road every day, the platform will forcibly deduct 2.5 yuan of commercial accident insurance.

However, this kind of commercial accident insurance cannot meet the actual needs of riders, regardless of the insured amount, variety or compensation efficiency. Li Yiran of the Legal Policy Research Center of Alibaba Local Life Company once wrote that according to the statistics of the cases involved by the litigation and legal department of Alibaba platform, once a work-related injury accident occurs to a rider or an accident causes casualties to a third person, "it is easy to appear in the litigation process." Insurance contracts are handled separately, insurance companies are not active in paying compensation, the compensation process is botched, and the insurance amount is insufficient to cover the actual losses or the compensation amount, which leads to a pile of judicial lawsuits."

From the perspective of the platform, Li Yiran believes that the employment dilemma of riders is not a deliberate negligence of the platform, but a "last resort" choice under industry competition.

"Competition" is also mentioned many times in "Retrograde Life". Competition between individual riders and competition between sites ultimately leads to competition between platforms. In order to compete for market share and please consumers, the delivery speed has become faster and faster, and the delivery fees have become cheaper and cheaper. We have no choice but to leave the right to evaluate the delivery drivers completely to the customers. A bad review with unclear reasons will offset the rider. A day of exhausting work.

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

As Li Yiran wrote: "Any management cost that rises to the extent that it threatens the survival of the platform will be decisively abandoned by the platform.

If the riders "are all included in traditional social security or directly establish labor with the platform Relationships will bring costs that can bring down the platform. The platform will face failure in market competition or even be on the verge of bankruptcy, and the overall business development will be hit."

The algorithm that traps riders is an abnormality in this fierce competition.

3

A Big Net

In the video, former programmer Gao Zhilei collected the rider’s understanding of the actual road conditions and designed the small program "Lu Lu Tong". At first, I thought the movie was trying to express: the relationship between reasonable design and utilization. Under the circumstances, the algorithm can be "good".

However, at the climax of the single-king battle, the reason why Gao Zhilei was hit by a truck was because of the guidance of "Passepartout". Taking a shortcut so that the truck driver doesn't expect someone to come out from that direction

"Passpartout" is not "good", it is just a supplement to the existing rules to help the rider work more smoothly. More efficient. But the advancement of technology itself cannot solve the plight of riders and make their work safer and more dignified. At the end of the video, Gao Zhilei was covered in blood and shouted the names of customers in the noisy karaoke hall. Come on, the reason why this scene is designed is not to portray the protagonist's tenacity and hard work. This is definitely not a touching scene, but a noisy, absurd, and full of hallucinations and carnival.

高志. The tragic situation at the base only magnified the absurdity of this moment: Why do you have to be so embarrassed just to meet the delivery deadline of a few seconds? Is it worth it to keep working even if you are hit by a truck for a bonus of 2,500 yuan? Just to live a decent life, why are people forced into this situation?

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

German sociologist Hartmut Rosa once put forward a concept: “The Logic of Social Acceleration.”He believes that the crux of the postmodern crisis lies in the transformation of social time structure.

The progress of science and technology has created huge economic benefits for human society, and the pace of life has accelerated. However, people have discovered that we seem to be drifting away from the life we ​​want. Modern people are like little hamsters running on a roller. "However, the desire for life and the world is not satisfied, but becomes more eager and frustrated."

The reason is that the principle of competition almost dominates modern life all areas. Maintaining competitiveness has gradually become the sole purpose of social and personal life. We can only "run as fast as possible to stay in place" - the plight of the riders and Gao Zhilei's fall in the film are such a sad example.

Stills from "Retrograde Life"

In Rosa's view, social acceleration in general, and technological acceleration in particular, are the result of a competitive capitalist market system. The only area that is not dominated is the distribution model and measures of the welfare state.

What is positive is that in recent years, in response to various current macro-difficulties, some Chinese economists and sociologists have also frequently called for "building a Chinese-style welfare state." In response to the macro trend of long-term population decline and excessive shrinkage, Cai Fang, chief expert of the national high-end think tank of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes that "we need to start by improving the social welfare system to solve more fundamental social externality problems."

In response to the current predicament of a cold economy, Zhang Bin, deputy director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, once said that improving government public services and improving the social security system can bring new credit growth, improve demand and increase supply at the same time. ability.

Stills of "Retrograde Life"

"Retrograde Life" may not be a very sophisticated movie, but what makes people sigh is that it allows the audience to see how a person stumbles through life in a highly competitive and crisis-ridden modern society. In my opinion, what the film secretly calls for is a social safety net with more affordable housing, more reasonable and lower medical expenses, and more effective labor protection. And this is exactly the direction that Chinese society is working towards.

This big net will softly catch anyone who unfortunately loses in the competition. Both programmers and riders can live with dignity with the support of this big network.

-end-

editor on duty | Zhao Jinghan

typesetting | qiqi