Federico Fellini | Guarantee Letter to the Spring Festival Gala

Dear CCTV New Year’s Gala:

Hello.

I just saw the program list for tomorrow night’s show. I took a quick look and will hold back for now. I plan to start live-tweeting my opinions at 8 o’clock tomorrow.

I just don’t know if you have the magnanimity. Or, if someone will allow you to have magnanimity. If those who don’t applaud enthusiastically are considered “problematic audience”, then what are the audience members who dare to criticize a certain program? Fortunately, the telescreens like in “1984” haven’t openly entered ordinary people’s homes, they’ve only been implanted in our phones. That’s all.

In 1984, we didn’t know “1984”. What we knew was you in 1984, and Ma Ji and his Universe brand cigarettes. That was the top stream of the New Year’s Gala, and an era where one could freely criticize. Of course, that was an era with relatively simple traffic management, where the masses had nothing but their words.

Unlike today, who doesn’t have a few public accounts that can explode at any time. When words become whips, the audience can be assassins – thorny onlookers. If magnanimity makes one uneasy, what’s the point? If it were me, my awareness might be even lower than this.

If magnanimity isn’t a matter of size, but a matter of whether it exists, then tomorrow night will be awkward.

In order to avoid embarrassment as much as possible. I make a guarantee here –

I guarantee to only evaluate the specific performance of individual or multiple literary and art workers in specific programs, and not to comment on the connection between the programs and the background of the times;

I guarantee to treat the Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Rabbit as a fictional Spring Festival Gala, in other words, to treat it as a Spring Festival Gala that might be held in any year in history or the future or a parallel world; at 8 o’clock tomorrow night, I will drink the Meng Po soup (a soup that erases memories), and sit on a small stool on time;

I guarantee that tomorrow night’s evaluation will be directed at people, not things, and that I will pay attention to the five virtues and four beauties when criticizing people, and try to avoid the well-known derogatory words in the dictionary, and instead use various symbols, jargon, homophonic puns without any annotations, and ensure that more readers who originally didn’t understand will not understand;

I guarantee not to make any negative comments on the last program “Unforgettable Tonight”.

Let’s leave it at that, see you tomorrow night.

Your loyal “assassin” Fellini

January 20, 2023