When Baudrillard suggests that "the ambition of objects (is) to act as replacements for human relationships" and that objects and technics can be perceived "as substitute answers to human conflicts" he is in essence talking about a principle of displacement and containment – in other words, we transfer onto technology our desires and our fears.

Extending this analysis, technology becomes out imaginary death; it is a projection of the human temptation to regress towards death as an escape from anxiety. If objects of technology were infallible this would become a vital source of anxiety. The infallibility of the object pointing consequently to our very real obsolesce (death). The cult of technology points to the dysfunctionality of our present situation and social structures which are based in the capitalist order of production and the capitalist imperative to consume – serially and socially – the cult represents a projection outwards of a social malaise that conceals the very real conflicts inherent in individual and social relations.

Both Series 7: The Contenders and Battle Royale clearly suggest that attempts to use technology as substitute answers to human conflicts is a futile exercise in displacement and containment even though it is one we practice. Indeed the films can be read as exposures of this practice through their investigations of the interface between technology and the body and the environments. These films are a mis-en-scene of the way in which violent interactions are played out between the three, as well as violence within the body as the site/sight of technology. Display, voyeurism, performativity, transgression and violence are key ways of discussing these issues.

Consistent themes appearing in these films signal a metaphor for the death of ideology. It is also a metaphor for out living death. These works show us what we know but refuse to acknowledge, preferring instead to transmute death by projecting it onto technology and subsequently willing its death. And these films demonstrate how we deny that knowledge through social/cultural/sexual regression – which leads ultimately to the death of the social/political body.

Whence the sudden welter of instantaneous retransmission equipment, in town, in the office, at home: all this real-time TV monitoring tirelessly on the lookout for the unexpected… This is the industrialization of prevention, or prediction: a sort of panic anticipation that commits the future and prolongs "the industralization of simulation; a simulation which more often than not involves the probable breakdown of and damage to the systems in question."
~~ Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

The scenarios in Series 7 and Battle Royale may be extreme but they do feed into desires and frustrations felt by audiences who see, watch and empathise with narratives of lives that reflect their own psychic states. The technology, the environments, the social order of things – these are all systems and sites that remain hostile to a generation, the youth generation, that has to meet with sometimes insurmountable difficulties in order to become integrated. This is the "world" these films portray and that audiences recognise, both reflecting and exposing the post-industrial society in which we live, the society of post-industrial decay and commodity capitalism.

The contemporary cultural condition is defined as a "coming after", as looking back, as lacking its own history – because it is defined only in relation to the past. Indeed, in its lack of history it rejects history and, because it has none of its own, stands eternally fixed in a series of presents. Viewed in this context contemporary culture is non-oppositional and does not challenge what is past. Rather it only "recycles" what is past. This idea of recycling is closely associated to the notion that post-industrial recycles waste, that it needs its waste in order to live, that it recycles dead styles. It survives on dead styles and seeks only perfect simulation. It invents nothing. It pastiches culture. Baudrillard in Simulations (1983) explains this pastiche culture in the following way: because culture is reproducing what has already been reproduced, today culture reproduces not the real (because that has already been produced) but the "hyper-real" that is a simulacrum of the real-perfect simulation. And it is in the loss of distinction between the real and representation that Baudrillard perceives the death of the subject, the individual. If there is no distinction between real and simulacrum how can you signify as distinct? If you recycle dead styles how else can you signify except as "lack" as death? You re-present nothing, you merely simulate it.

This idea of non-representation as lack is particularly strong in Series 7 and Battle Royale. Non-representation as lack is perceived as a by-product of the post-industrial machine. Whereas the industrial system led to the alienation of the subject (through lack of control of the means of production), the post-industrial system, because it merely reproduces goes a stage further and leads to the fragmentation of the subject and its concomitant dispersal in representation If it is fragmented how can the subject represent its self to itself as a unity? In its fragmented state, the self shows all the symptoms of embodying a "schizophrenic" condition.