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How Netflix’s 3 Body Problem Loses Its Own Plot
The China episodes are excellent. The London ones are bizarre. The reason is less obvious than you think.
The Cultural Revolution denunciation ceremony itself has never been portrayed with such length or detail in cinematic or TV history, not even in the mainland (the Chinese Tencent adaptation, released last year, skipped the scene entirely; we’re only told by present-day characters that the betrayal and murder occurred). What emerges from this history is the extreme form of logical reasoning that propelsLiu’s trilogy: the ability to arrive at the analytical conclusion quickly and act accordingly, as well as to communicate and infer a great deal from very little, without the option of assuming privacy or good faith. This problem of translation gets a whole lot worse when dropped into the American entertainment industrial complex, in which decisions about representation and narrative are always beholden to imperatives of customization: appealing to different viewing demographics by representing romantic versions of themselves back to themselves.
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