It’s about a struggle to loose the bonds of conformity, the stultifying mores imposed on us by the commercial gods we worship, the commercial gods that make us bulimic and alcoholic, that fill us with road rage and make us slaves to Internet porn, church, heroin, television and our shitty jobs. It’s about a kind of reclamation of ourselves as infinite vessels of potential, a call to heroically struggle to find our real humanity in the face of crushing oppression. Or maybe it’s about fucking. The night Nikki gets caught fucking Sean in the dorm in Durham–Doug the director pounding on the door and saying her name, demanding that she open up this instant–she decides that the programme’s promise of a happy future isn’t worth the constant monitoring, the idiotic puritanism. That the programme’s promise is worth precisely nothing. She’ll never become who they want her to be, or worse, she thinks, she’ll become one of them, half dead and full of fear. Sean practically cowers as he pulls his T-shirt over his head, scrambling around her bed looking for his boxers and shorts.
