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Charlie Brooker, 2011–2019
Not only was Black Mirror the TV show I’ve
had recommended to me the most over the past few years, but when I became
a public school teacher, I discovered that it had become the go-to show
among my colleagues when they needed a break and wanted to give the
kids a movie day.
From what I had gathered, it was the 2010s’ answer to
The Twilight Zone: an anthology series about
worlds a little different from our own in one way or another, often with
a dark twist.
Ellie urged me not to watch the entire series from start to finish,
explaining that it wasn’t designed that way and that I would
essentially be subjecting myself to 23 consecutive extremely bleak
movies, some of them the length of feature films, and that instead
I should just skip around and sample a few of the lighter-hearted
ones.
I can see where she was coming from.
There is indeed some truly horrific stuff in here.
But not as horrific as watching things out of order.
I soon learned that, much more than The Twilight
Zone, Black Mirror had a running theme that
united its diverse offerings.
To wit: “Isn’t it crazy how technology in general and
smartphones in particular have changed our lives—the way we
interact with the world, even the sorts of creatures that we are?
What if this sort of technology continued to advance?
How might we all be living in a few years?”
This made it a bit of a weird watch for me, because I’ve never
owned a smartphone.
As I’ve discussed in my recent minutiae articles, at first they just
didn’t seem worth the money for me in particular—a tiny
computer for when I’m away from my real computer? I’m never
away from my real computer!—but as I saw what they were
doing to people, I decided that my brain was dysfunctional enough as it
was.
So while I imagine that most viewers watched Black
Mirror thinking, wow, this might be the future we’re headed
towards, I more often found myself thinking, wow, this might be the
future all you people are headed towards while I continue to hang out here
with my landline telephone and tower desktop, answering emails on
Thunderbird 2 and listening to music on Winamp 5.
I’m not going to do a full write-up of each installment, but here
are a few thoughts.
(I’m writing these for those who have already seen the episodes,
meaning both that there will be spoilers and that there won’t
always be synopses.)
“The National Anthem”:
This first installment is in some ways atypical of what would follow,
missing the sci-fi angle most episodes have, but it does foreground the
role of social media in the world, and the elements of trolling and
hostage taking would recur in later seasons.
I dunno.
This one kind of irked me insofar as it gives a relatively happy ending
to and thereby seems to endorse a ’70s-era policy of appeasing
terrorists.
The later episode “Shut Up and Dance”
seemed to me to have the more accurate read on such a policy.
“Fifteen Million Merits”:
To a great extent this is what you might get if you asked a committee to
generate the most obvious possible dystopian projection of 21st-century
trends.
You have people living in small cubes whose walls are all video screens
that, like those in Nineteen Eighty-Four, cannot
be turned off; they live lives of unrelenting drudgery, racking up credits
which they then spend on meals made of space-age polymers and on new hats
for their cartoony onscreen avatars, but most of them seem content enough
with their video games and porn; the only way to escape the drudgery is to
win on Pop Idol; that escape consists of a
slightly larger cube that shows a view of trees instead of TV shows about
knocking over fat people with hoses.
There’s no need to suppress dissent, because it just gets repackaged
as a well-paid vlogging channel.
Still, even if there’s nothing entirely new about these ideas when
summarized like this, there’s something to be said for actually
building the sets and filming the story.
And I thought that the specific flavor of drudgery
depicted—people lined up on rows of exercise bikes, watching
their credit balances creep up as they pedal—was a memorable
metaphor for dead-end subsistence labor.
“The Entire History of You”:
This reminded me of
a Ted Chiang
story that started from the same observation: hey, you know how a lot
of people seem to spend most of their waking hours recording everything
they’re doing?
What if that were automatic?
What if everything your eyes and ears registered
were recorded, and whenever you wanted, you could pull up any date and
time, or choose material cross-indexed for content, and relive those
faded memories?
Or share them with others on a nearby monitor?
The Chiang story focused on how our brains are not
recording devices: our memories are unreliable, and we can genuinely
misremember things.
It also drew parallels with the advent of writing, and the way that it
allowed for records that weren’t as malleable as
memory—much to the chagrin of those who found it advantageous
to themselves and to the community to “misremember” things a
bit less genuinely.
“The Entire History of You” adds the
question of how much might you obsess over fleeting expressions and subtle
gestures you notice if you could project them onto a big screen TV the
next day and pore over them at your leisure.
And ultimately, a question that doesn’t really require sci-fi at
all: if you can catch someone in a lie, either because the truth is stored
in a chip implanted behind that person’s ear or because you have
more conventional evidence, when does the damage to your own life that
would come from pressing the point mean that the better call is to just
let it go?
“Be Right Back”:
Another association: way back when, I watched a
Murphy Brown episode in which Frank’s
present to Murphy on her birthday is to hire an actress to play the
sister she’d never had.
Murphy is impressed by the amount of research the actress has put in and
is even fairly friendly to her, or at least as friendly as Murphy
gets.
But she doesn’t really engage with the actress in character.
And I remember thinking that if I were in her place, I
absolutely would.
Even knowing that it was an artifice, I would have jumped at the chance to
playact the relationship I never got to have with my sister, who died in
infancy.
Watching this Black Mirror episode about a woman
commissioning an experimental simulacrum of her dead husband,
reconstructed by feeding his digital legacy into an AI, I realized
that this was no longer the case.
It’s not that I’ve grown—I’m as
psychologically stunted as ever.
But I have aged.
When that Murphy Brown episode aired, I was
sixteen, and my sister would have been thirteen.
Her life experience would have consisted of growing up in the same
household that my brothers and I did.
An AI or a really dedicated actress could have assimilated the relevant
data and created a convincing character.
But today my sister would be a middle-aged adult.
Her life from age eighteen to forty-four could have been
anything.
That is now too big a blank to fill in.
“White Bear”:
This one hits a lot of Black Mirror’s
recurring themes.
Yes, there are the people holding up their phone cameras, trailing after
the protagonist like ghosts in a game of
Gauntlet.
But the big recurring theme is punishment.
Someone does something wrong—whether mildly irksome or, as in
this case, horrifically evil, it’s something that would make most
viewers want to see the perpetrator pay a price.
Punishment does indeed ensue.
And the episode pretty clearly takes the stance that the punishment is
disproportionate and/or that our appetite for this punishment is
ghoulish.
We may even come to feel that imposing such a punishment is itself
worthy of punishment, and on and on the loop goes.
(Loops are another recurring theme, specifically the notion that being
trapped in one is a species of hell.)
“The Waldo Moment”:
A lot of people have talked about how satire can’t keep up with
reality and that after Donald Trump had been elected president, a
a foul-mouthed cartoon bear coming in second in a parliamentary race
seemed like weak tea in retrospect.
But I think this episode makes some points that are too rarely
articulated.
We conduct elections based on personality, but
policy is what actually shapes whether we live
lives of ease or hardship.
Bad policy means that there’s a lot of hardship out there, which
produces a deep pool of anger, but that anger is not directed at the bad
policy (for the media keeps policy mostly invisible) but rather at
“politics” and “politicians”.
“They’re all phonies! I hate ’em all! We need to get
someone in there who’ll shake things up!”
But “shaking things up” in this way rarely means replacing bad
policy with good policy.
Usually it just means damaging the institutions that make implementing
good policy even possible.
It’s always interesting to see what happens when you can divorce
policy from personality—say, through the initiative process,
in which voters directly approve or reject laws rather than selecting
someone to make those decisions for them.
They may not always make good choices—California has been
suffering from the effects of Proposition 13 for over forty years
now—but they do frequently make choices directly opposed to
the policy positions of the candidates they’ve voted for on the very
same ballot.
“White Christmas”:
Pattern 23: after struggling through six episodes that were very,
very British, I was more than a little relieved to hear Jon Hamm’s
voice.
It was like when your computer finally finishes a task with a heavy
processing load.
I could feel my loudly whirring internal fan spinning down to a gentler
hum when he was talking.
Everything people had told me about how Black
Mirror should be thought of as a collection of twenty-three
unrelated movies was wrong.
There may not be strict continuity from one episode to the next, but
there is a lot of overlap.
On top of the little Easter eggs connecting up each installment,
there is shared technology, to the point that near the end of the
series’s run it’s taken for granted.
Here the “you are a camera” technology is
back—this time used for broadcast rather than
storage—and we’re also introduced to the idea of
copying people into computers, which would return again and again.
Also returning here is the theme of crime and over-punishment, with cops
sniggering as they condemn a sentient copy of a murderer to over a million
years in hell.
The Jon Hamm character winds up with an updated version of
The Twilight Zone’s “invisible
man” sentence.
And then there’s what happens to the digital assistant, stuck in a
world of nothing for months, but I’ll talk a lot more about that in
another article.
“Nosedive”:
The show moves to Netflix, and we get an American setting rather than a
lone American actor.
The first Netflix episode is about
.
Everyone already rates everything online; the Meow Meow Beenz just apply
those ratings to people.
Fives have lives, threes have fleas, ones don’t get a rhyme because
they’re garbage.
You can’t even really call this science fiction, because not only
is it a minimal extension from the world of compulsively checking social
media sites for any new “likes” or begging viewers to
subscribe to a channel to build equity as an “influencer”,
but even codifying people-rating into the structure of society isn’t
that wild an idea: we already do it economically with credit ratings, and
my understanding is that a lot of these plots were a reaction to reports
of China implementing a Social Credit System very similar to the Meow
Meow Beenz.
I guess what is most interesting to me about this is that it isn’t
even merely an extension of a technological trend.
I vividly remember having a freshly minted driver’s license and
being press-ganged into service ferrying gift baskets from my
father’s medical office to other medical offices, in the hopes that
it would lead to patient referrals down the line, and that was before the
web was even a thing, let alone smartie phones.
Heck, people living fifty, or a hundred, or five hundred years ago would
get the fundamental dynamic at work here: schmoozing and doing favors
for people not out of the kindness of your heart but because it might pay
off for you in the future.
What left me scratching my head a bit is that, sure, I very much get being
irked by inauthenticity, but I’m not so much on board with the
suggestions that it is the height of oppression to penalize people for
venting hostility and that spewing insults constitutes glorious
liberation.
“Playtest”:
The haunted house stuff didn’t do much for me, but I liked the
ending.
I wondered to what extent it was inspired by all the people who make the
flight attendants come out and say, “Please put away your
phone—it interferes with the instruments,” and
then still don’t put away their
phones.
Then, after typing the above sentence, I flicked through the episode again
and saw that this sort of thing is specifically referenced two minutes
before the final twist is revealed, so I guess the answer is “to at
least a non-zero extent”.
“Shut Up and Dance”:
As noted, the flip side of “The National
Anthem”.
This time doing what the terrorists say buys the characters
nothing.
This also follows up on “White Bear”,
presenting a cavalcade of people who have done wrong—a
married man soliciting a prostitute, a CEO sending emails that could
launch a racism scandal, etc.—but now making the faceless
entities administering the punishment into not just ghouls but outright
supervillains.
It’s
all over again: most of us have felt the desire to see some miscreant get
his just deserts, and at the same time, most of us have a skeleton or two
that we would prefer not to have hauled out of our closets.
I can’t imagine that this could be one of the episodes my colleagues
have been showing their classes, but it did strike me as a potentially
interesting text to put into a unit on reader-response criticism.
All things being equal, we tend to want the protagonists of stories to
achieve their goals, which in this case would mean keeping their secrets
under wraps.
As we instead see a montage of their lives falling apart, how many
viewers reacted with empathy, and how many watched with grins like that
of the trollface that pops up on the characters’ chat programs?
“San Junipero”:
I gather that this one is a lot of people’s favorite.
The first episode with a happy ending—deliriously happy,
even!
I have my reservations, which I will get to in a moment, but I have to
think that for me this episode will end up being the most memorable.
The central premise is a killer: yeah, okay, you can upload a copy of
yourself into a simulated world, which by now we have seen before in this
series and will see many times in the episodes to come… but this
time around the gimmick is that while in the real world we can visit
different cities but are stuck in whatever year
it happens to be, the simulated world allows you to visit the same city
in different years.
The sequence that had me gasping was that in which one of the two
protagonists goes looking for the other one in 1987, then 1980, then 1996,
then 2002, and the characters’ hair, clothes, and
glasses change appropriately, and oh, oh, if that
were a thing you could just do… I had no
idea what a powerful fantasy this was until it was presented to me.
It is a hell of a thing to grow up in what, as Thomas Piketty has pointed out, is an anomaly: a period
of growth so rapid that the world is actually perceptibly different from
one generation to the next, such that you become an adult and realize that
your childhood unfolded in what is now a historical period.
And then you get even older and realize that even part of your adulthood,
when you were roughly the same person you are now, has turned into a
foreign country where they (and you were part of “they”) did
things differently.
Apparently the seed of “San Junipero”
was something called “nostalgia therapy”, of which I’d
never heard, but which I have since learned is the practice of building
environments for dementia patients that simulate an era familiar to
them.
And of course there are ’50s diners and ’80s radio stations
and Decade Day during your local high school’s Spirit Week.
Immersing yourself in the past isn’t a new idea.
But I’d never seen it done quite this way.
I am dubious about the ending, though.
So one of the protagonists give a long speech about how utterly
presumptuous it is for the other one to suggest prioritizing their
relationship of a few weeks over her marriage of fifty years… with
the meta undercurrent that, hey, we out here in the audience are equally
guilty, holding the same misplaced priorities just because we happen
to have seen those weeks and not that half-century.
And then she immediately flip-flops?
Apparently just for the sake of allowing for that (admittedly awesome)
recontextualization of “Heaven is a Place on Earth”?
I dunno, it doesn’t sit right with me.
After writing the above, I did a little research and discovered that the
big speech was intended to set up one ending, but happening to hear the
song persuaded the author to go a different way.
But as far as I’m concerned, that just makes this a case study in
how you can have two powerful pieces in your story, but if one sets up A,
and the other pays off B, you can’t just glue them together.
“Men Against Fire”:
This one’s a pretty on-the-nose response to the book of the same
name.
In fact, because it is so on the nose, I could
imagine a teacher showing this to a history class, if not for the fact
that it’s the one episode that for some reason has more than a
couple of fleeting frames of nudity in it.
“Hated in the Nation”:
Another crosswalk.
There’s no one worse than the sort of people who trigger Twitter
mobs, except for the sort of people who join Twitter mobs.
Seriously, the sort of people who would wish death upon others?
They need to die.
This is one of the top Black Mirror episodes,
though.
It’s a great Pattern 38 story, weaving Twitter mobs, the
surveillance state, and bee extinction (of all things) into a single
narrative, headlined by the Black Mirror
performance that may stick with me the longest, Kelly Macdonald’s
police inspector.
And its handling of the crosswalk is interesting, even if I’m not
sure I entirely endorse it.
Basically, we have a handful of people who do something to get themselves
anointed as the asshole of the hour.
Hey, you can’t just say that / do that!
You need to be punished!
So the online mob rises up with its hashtags, insults, and death threats,
which flips our sympathies, especially once its targets do start turning
up dead (and horribly so).
Hey, you can’t just say that / do that
either!
You also need to be punished!
We learn that the guy killing these targets with robot bees is not part of
the mob but is actually anti-mob, motivated by watching his crush attempt
suicide after she’d been on the receiving end of the ol’
280 Characters Hate.
So we get a story that builds sympathy for the terrorist, and when we
learn that he’s actually targeting everyone who uses the #DeathTo
hashtag he set up as bait, there’s actually some catharsis there:
oh, good!
They will get the punishment they deserve!
Let’s see how they like the fate they wished
upon others!
But of course now he’s a mass murderer who
deserves punishment.
And it is a bit weird that the episode concludes on a triumphant note that
he too will soon get what’s coming to him.
That is, the story never lets us off the retribution pendulum.
As it ends, we’re still clinging to the bob.
“USS Callister”:
The first Black Mirror episode I ever heard
of.
Somehow I gathered the impression that it was about racism.
It is actually very much of a piece with what had come before: people
upload copies of themselves into a gameworld—the technology
even looks the same as in “San
Junipero”—which in this case is a
Star Trek clone.
As with “Hated in the Nation”,
we’re introduced to a character with a sympathetic
backstory—in this case, a guy who’s snubbed and
taken for granted at work, with others reaping his rightful
rewards—and are then encouraged to discard that sympathy as
he responds to the blows that life has dealt him by becoming an outright
villain.
He doesn’t kill 400,000 people, but he does lord it over the
digital copies of his co-workers, as sentient as their progenitors, and
even kills (a digital copy of) a child, whose DNA he holds hostage so he
can make more copies as needed to keep his primary enemy in line.
And while the mass murderer in “Hated in the
Nation” presumably faces a pretty quick death for his
crimes, the villain here receives the punishment Black
Mirror returns to again and again: eternity in a hell of
nothingness.
“Arkangel”:
Another one that I will have more to say about elsewhere, but perhaps
not any time soon.
The censoring gimmick was interesting, and the moment when the mom tunes
in to Lake Dalston is a heck of a gut punch.
I dunno.
I sort of covered this in what is now chapter three of
Ready, Okay!, but your child partaking in
teenage experimentation “hits different” (as the kids
say) when you did not partake yourself at that age.
“Crocodile”:
To a certain extent this is “The Entire History of
You” redux, though this time it’s organic memories that
can be read and televised rather than digital recordings.
The thing that will stick with me about this one is that it is very
clearly set in Britain but even more clearly filmed in Iceland.
And, like, whut?
This show swaps in South Africa for Southern California, which works, and
swaps in Sao Paulo for an unnamed U.S. city, which works less well, and
I’ve seen other shows that swapped in Vancouver for New York City,
which is a real stretch… but here
we’re getting into alternate universe territory.
“What if the U.K. had never let Iceland go after Operation
Fork?”
“Hang the DJ”:
Another happy love story with a twist, like “San
Junipero”, and also like that episode, one that offers up
the fulfillment of a wish I hadn’t even realized I had wished for so
devoutly.
Sure, people have been talking about computers locating your soulmate for
you for nearly as long as there have been computers, but that’s
actually not what I mean.
This is an episode of many twists.
One of them is that it presents a world in which people sign up for a
system that provides them “playlists” of relationships:
they’re told flat out (unless they decide not to look) that they
have been assigned to this partner for twelve hours
and then to that one for eighteen months.
And to know how long your status quo will last—not just this
relationship, but this job, this residence in this apartment, this
presidency, this life… if there
were actually an app that would indicate the stop dates on all those
things, it would be one of the few things that actually would get me to
buy a smartphone.
“Metalhead”:
Aside from “the Star Trek one”, which
turned out to be “USS Callister”, the
other Black Mirror episode I had heard about
before watching the show was “the interactive one”, which
several people recommended to me upon learning that I had once written a
few pieces of interactive fiction.
This is not that—“the interactive one” turned out
to be Bandersnatch.
But I think that “Metalhead”
actually captures the feel of interactive fiction, or at least the IF
I’m familiar with, better than any other episode,
Bandersnatch included.
You’ve got a lone character traversing a limited space in the
aftermath of a disaster, which is pretty much the archetype of an IF
setting—the climax even consists of reaching and exploring a
post-apocalyptic house.
The protagonist is pursued by robots whose behavior can be understood and
planned against, and we watch sequences that are very clearly instances of
puzzle-solving.
The short running time even made it feel like a comp game.
“Black Museum”:
Yet more digital copies of people, and yet more
over-punishment—this time the digital copies are
subjected to the electric chair over and over, the torture multiplied onto
little Tamagotchis.
We also see Black Mirror’s take on the
nightmare ending of Being John Malkovich, with
one consciousness trapped in the head of another with no
control.
This consciousness is then discarded, reduced to yet another
iteration of this series’s fixation on the notion of being trapped
in emptiness forever with nothing to do.
This was probably my least favorite episode.
Bandersnatch:
A few years ago I saw that a bunch of my old friends in the IF community
had turned our shared interest in interactive narrative from a hobby into
a full-fledged career.
I expressed an interest in trying my hand at doing the same, and
one of those
friends leaped into action and, purely out of her own awesomeness,
lined up a bunch of meetings for me.
One of these meetings led to my getting involved in an interactive
television project.
The company that brought me in wanted interactivity that went beyond
mere “choose your own adventure”—could I do
that?
I could.
I developed a whole system of viewer input without explicit choice points,
leading to divergent storylines based on accretive characters.
My concerns were that the story was required to be set in a geographical
location I’d never been to and knew nothing about, in a workplace of
a sort I had no experience with and knew nothing about, so while I could
handle the form, I was not the guy to handle the content.
No worries, I was told.
I’d be working with highly regarded sketch writers who would handle
the content.
I should focus on the interactivity.
Anyway, weeks passed.
Occasionally I would send out messages asking when I might be able to
meet up with these writers and get started on the project.
And eventually I got my answer: instead of focusing on the material and
letting me handle the interactivity, as I’d been hired to do,
the sketch writers had written a full script all on their own.
What type of interactivity did it employ?
Choose your own adventure.
Anyway, so here’s a choose-your-own-adventure TV show.
It’s binary choice with a little bit of event tracking.
It’s also highly meta.
I understand the temptation.
My own IF works are highly meta.
I’m not happy about that.
It’s just that the meta ideas were short enough to complete, and
the ideas that didn’t comment on the medium would have taken long
enough to implement that, during those periods that I had enough saved up
to work on a project, I would have run out of money before I ever came
near finishing one.
Maybe someday.
(Though back when I dreamed up all these ideas for non-meta IF stories, I
felt like I had a lot more “somedays” ahead of me than I do
now.)
“Striking Vipers”:
The arcade games in “San Junipero”
pushed my nostalgia buttons; the computer games in
Bandersnatch, even more so, as I spent way more
of my youth in front of my 5150 IBM PC than I spent in arcades.
This episode revolves around Mortal Kombat-style
fighting games, which I recognized, but have never played myself.
But even if I wasn’t sighing « Toute ma
jeunesse! » as I watched this episode, I was still highly
amused by the first sequence in which the fighting game is translated
(by what is now extremely familiar Black Mirror
technology) into live action.
As for where the story goes from there… I’ve probably
mentioned this before, but I was pretty weirded out back in college when,
during a discussion in my senior seminar, one of the guys in the class
declared that he absolutely, positively never
played female characters in video games.
He even refused to play Ms. Pac-Man.
I found that totally bizarre.
But maybe he was afraid of finding himself in a situation like this?
“Smithereens”:
Thought one: Hostages, again.
Thought two: This one has a bit of a PSA feel to it.
Stay off your phone when you’re driving, kids!
Better unread than dead!
It is interesting in how it highlights the way that, even apart from the
often poisonous nature of online interactions, the deliberately
addictive nature of social media platforms—the dopamine hit
of getting another “like” on that dog picture—is
hugely destructive in and of itself.
I also very, very strongly related to this exchange:
“I hear you. You sound like you’re in a lot of pain.”
“Oh, Jesus fucking Christ! Speak like a
fucking human being!”
“Rachel, Jane and Ashley Too”:
When I realized that the pop star’s big hit was “Head
Like a Hole” reworked into a vapid bubblegum song with trite
“empowerment” lyrics, I thought it was an amusing
Easter egg.
As the story went on, I realized that the payoff was either going to be
the real “Head Like a Hole” playing over the credits or else,
if the story had a happy ending, Miley Cyrus singing it in order to show
how her character was now making more mature, authentic music.
It turned out to be the latter.
But… it’s still a very Disneyfied version of the song!
Not that “Head Like a Hole” is even the hardest of hard rock
or anything, but still, these are only about Three-and-a-Half Inch Nails
at best.
And yet, demonstrating once again that there is no longer any such thing
as parody, apparently it was the “before”
picture—the the pop-by-numbers “I’m on a
roll” version—that ended up charting.
Like, in the real world.
The Black Mirror team put together a joke song as
a commentary about how terrible pop music can be, and legions of listeners
unironically went clickety-click cueing it up on their streaming
services.
So, that’s that.
I guess my last thought is just that, assuming that Black
Mirror is indeed over, it ran from 2011 to 2019, the same span as
Game of Thrones.
Other prestige TV projects have also run for the same length of time:
The Sopranos from 1999 to 2007,
Mad Men from 2007 to 2015.
Watching Black Mirror, I did sometimes find myself
thinking that the anthology format did mean that it could only go so
deep—that, say, Mad Men had had more
to say than “Fifteen Million Merits”
about the commodification of dissatisfaction, and certainly a lot more to
say about its decade than “San Junipero”
had had to say about any of its.
But I dunno—which is a more satisfying legacy as a
writer?
To be able to say that, hey, over the course of a decade or so I told one
epic story—or that I wrote
over twenty pretty darn good movies?
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