Atlantic
The Complex Humanity of Black Mirror
In its third series, the series achieves an imaginative moral and narrative depth
that counteracts its often-dark scenarios.
Nettix
JEFF VANDERMEER
8:49 AMET |
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Vladimir Nabokov liked to examine cruelty and the human condition. That
didn’t mean he was cruel; there’s no evidence he kicked puppies just for the fun
of it. Similarly, Black Mirror likes to examine possible dystopias, but that doesn’t
mean the showis cynical enough to endorse them. Instead, especially in season
three, recently released on Netflix, a sort of humanity has entered that serves asa counterpoint to the particular version of Bleakworld on offer. “Fuck the plant,
fuck the planet,” the main character in the first episode shouts at a wedding-
gone-wrong, but the message is of course the opposite: We should care about the
planet. We should care about each other—and we should engage, not look away.
I didn’t expect to go into season three thinking kinder, gentler thoughts in the
context of a show that debuted in 2011 with an episode in which a British
politician is forced to screw a pig for an hour. But there you go. Black Mirror
surprises, and never more so than this season, written primarily by the show’s
creator, Charlie Brooker, although each episode has a different director. Who
could predict the love story at the center of the season, episode four’s “San
Junipero”? Or, even, that the path of episode one, “Nosedive,” would lead to a
callow main character—played wonderfully by Bryce Dallas Howard—being
rendered complex by the end, ina scene in prison that’s deeply cathartic?
Some critics have noted Black Mirror becoming darker this season, but to me at
least, the characterization has become ever more humane, as if to provide
balance. After all, what is unrelieved horror but a form of boredom? What is,
dystopia unrelieved by humor or some contrasting element but a slog through
wastelands that only differ by degrees and, perhaps, the weight of a particular
baseball bat applied to a particular head?
The scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward,
often past the point where a lesser show would end.
In season three we discover that even in the midst of technological forces
beyond our control, the individual is still free—to strive to reject the oppressive,
to stop being a hamster on a wheel as in “Nosedive,” or to break on through to
the other side as in “San Junipero.” And most importantly, succeed or fail, the
individual still has the choice to pursue an ethical path over giving in to
darkness. “Hated in the Nation,” may be “dark”—as if somehow the real world
right now is a continual laugh riot—but it features characters with a strong moral
compass who possess a dogged endurance in the face of unspeakable bee-drone
horrors.Or consider episode three, “Shut Up and Dance,” in which every character is in
trouble for failing to pursue a moral path, and each of them has been reduced
down to a riveting quest that still allows a terrible chance at survival. We are
riveted because we believe in the idea of empathy and the ability to atone for our
sins. Even if it turns out someone we've expressed empathy for has sinned ina
way too terrible to be redeemed, we often still give the benefit of the doubt to the
next person.
What the best of these episodes share is a dislocation caused by opening up the
context, as if experiencing a telephoto lens that keeps widening our perspective
far beyond expectation. With an eerie precision, our sense of the context and
characters changes because the scriptwriters keep pushing inexorably outward,
often past the point where a lesser show would end.
nthat context, it’s striking to examine why the worst episodes don’t work,
while still being superior to similar examples from shows like Night Gallery
back in the day. Episode two, “Playtest,” shares the season’s common
thread of introducing a sympathetic or ultimately sympathetic character, Cooper
(Wyatt Russell), someone not embedded in the power structures of the world.
Black Mirror spends several minutes letting us see how likeable he is— even
though careful viewers will deduce he’s probably a day-friend, not a week-
friend, or a many-years-friend. So far so good.
But “Playtest” as an episode doesn’t share the quality of opening up, in a literal
or thematic sense, that Black Mirror often excels at, where you can think of the
opening up as a form of generosity. When you push past the expected point,
you’re not just hopefully creating something more interesting, you're also saying
you trust the viewer. “Playtest,” on the other hand, tends to close things down
into a personal context that’s less interesting.
When Cooper runs out of money in London while traveling across the world on a
cathartic trip following his father’s death, he winds up volunteering for a
simulated-reality experiment. While the acting is perfectly fine, what follows
actually puts the character into a smaller and smaller box. We do not widen out
into societal or cultural contexts, or even geographically into wider and wider
physical spaces. There is less and less movement of any sort as the episodecontinues—until we’re trapped in a haunted house, filled with horrors specific to
the protagonist but possibly not the viewer. That this includes Shelob with a
human face like a cheap knock-off from the Donald Sutherland version of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (formula = unsettling human face on animal body,
causing general queasiness and a re-examination of foundational understanding
of biological mutations) and a high-school bully dressed like somebody from
the1800s is inescapably banal. That claustrophobia you feel is boredom—your
own worst fear. You'd be better off dropping a spider with a human face into the
middle of Knausgaard's My Struggle.
eee
There’s a little red eye looking down on us, and it’s not
Sauron, or God, but surveillance that anyone can tap
into.
Although there’s fun to be had in how the episode comments on and messes
around with over-used horror movie techniques like jump scares, even a horrible
stink-sandwich like the movie Cabin in the Woods has played around with these
clichés before, and been devoured by them. The entire episode may be
impeccably shot and directed (by Dan Trachtenberg, who recently helmed 10
Cloverfield Lane), but, in the end, who cares—about the character’s attempts to
survive, or about his mom? A thirty-second mom, really; for moms that last a
lifetime, see Psycho.
Black Mirror has set such a high bar as an anthology series based on what you
might call “an acute examination of dysfunctional tech horrors or the horror-
implications of said tech” that a spider in a haunted mansion just doesn’t cut it,
any more than the Disney ride does. Or maybe augmented reality just doesn’t
cut it and that’s the point. Because once the episode reaches the VR-augmented
mansion, there is really no resolution involving the unraveling of different levels
of reality that will satisfy, even in an anti-cathartic way. Although, if you thought
Jacob’s Ladder was brilliant, scintillating cinema, you may disagree.
na similar but more successful vein, episode three, “Shut Up and Dance,”
playtests a different kind of renovation: Taking the premise of a movie like
Saw and placing it out in the wider world, with different types ofconnections and commentary. Part of the success of the episode is the actual
physical motion that occurs within it, a widening out and a meeting up with
other characters facing the same dilemma as our protagonist. There’s no yawn-
inducing trauma from being chained in the same filthy, visually uninteresting
room while a disembodied voice comes on over the intercom, followed by an
announcement that today’s menu, like the day before and the day after, will be
meatloaf. Thus, even this very simple idea of movement—while the info-age
subtext makes clear everyone is chained together in a filthy room and fed ona
steady diet of bloody meatloaf—makes the concept at least somewhat fresh. You
don’t always need a torture room to be tortured in the age of globalization. Just
beware: There’s alittle red eye looking down on us, and it’s not Sauron, or God,
but surveillance that anyone can tap into.
In fact, perhaps the least convincing aspect of the main character, Kenny (Alex
Lawther), being blackmailed through video of him jacking off isn’t that, given
our internet culture, he might’ve gotten 15 minutes of fame instead of shame
had the video leaked. It’s that the video is captured from the webcam on the
teen’s laptop and not, say, from the eye of a wireless Teddy Ruxbin cybertoy, or
the eraser in a mechanical pencil, or a chronically depressed refrigerator bent on
revenge for the stuff left rotting inside.
But that aside, as the photographer Kyle Cassidy—someone who’s not only
photographed John Carpenter but watched a metric ton of horror movies—noted
as we watched this episode together, “Shut Up and Dance” may not do anything
particularly new, but it does it extraordinarily well—and unlike in “Playtest, “we
do care about the main did-bad-things characters throughout, at least in the
moment, and we are largely invested in the epic (to them) aspects of their
struggle.
RELATED STORY
Black Mirrors ‘San Junipero’ is the Standout of the Season
Here, it’s probably wise to mention that one reason Black Mirror works so well is
it does a superlative job of casting episodes—there are topnotch actors in everyrole, consummately chosen and given great direction. If some of the old Night
Gallery and Twilight Zone episodes no longer really work, sometimes it’s that the
acting pulls us out of the story in a way that’s not as bad as Dark Shadows but
might as well be. “Shut Up and Dance,” with its ultimate deus ex machina
manipulation, is the best example of why that matters.
For one thing, Jerome Flynn, most famous for his rakish role in Game of Thrones,
pops up gloriously and unexpectedly as the mid-life, middle-class version of his
fantasy-realm character, harried and stressed and utterly convincing. Yet it’s his
counterpart in an agonizing alliance of convenience, the teenager played by
Lawther, who in all of his reactions is so excruciatingly perfect that you're
horrified, wanting to look away and yet mesmerized and for a long time really
rooting for him to get out of this—while also wondering just how many acting
awards he'll be up for.
You could argue that “Shut Up and Dance” says something we already knew,
because even those of us who have committed no crime are indentured to our
insecurities and petty secrets. Those who don’t like the episode, including my
wife, are right to think that ending with a montage of people in distress while a
sad Radiohead song plays could be considered papering over a lack of formal
closure. But, then, through our devotion to LOLCats, wise owl photographs
bearing fortune-cookie truths, and other internet memes, we know everything
already anyway, so every truth is banal and made fresh only by a new and
different context. I may be half-joking, but Black Mirror isn’t; the final twist in
“hut Up and Dance” plays hardball with the idea of who you root for, and why
you root for them in deeply uncomfortable ways.
f you need to beware of the devices around you that might surveil, you also
need to beware of the propaganda put in your head, as in episode five, “Men
Against Fire.” The episode fits comfortably into what I'd call the show’s
renovation mode, inhabiting a horror, comic-book subgenre you might call
“conflicted cybernetic soldier.” The fear of being altered to become the perfect
weapon can take many forms in storytelling, from Dr. Moreau-like mutant
scenarios to lost-Nazi-tech Hellboy versions. In “Men Against Fire,” a soldier
(Malachi Kirby) experiences a glitch that, in a war setting that seems ur-Balkan,
makes him see feral mutants as human. He then must make a terrible choicegiven to him by a psychologist played by Michael Kelly, infamous as the chief of
staff on House of Cards. (Another great bit of casting—Kelly brings the memory of
that terrifying performance with him, giving a minor role major depth.)
With its themes of wiping out genetic impurities and exploration of military
conditioning, “Men Against Fire” contains harrowing and heart-felt moments,
but the episode’s geopolitics are far outstripped by the complexities and horrors
of modern regional warfare. Juxtapose episode five with a show like The Last
Panther, which does a credible job of conveying the complex allegiances in post-
war Serbia, and you realize “Men Against Fire” sorely needs some additional
real-world grit, an amoral context, to muddy up and mess up the clarity of the
central situation. Because, honestly, how can you not see this situation as Good
versus Evil? The intricacies of a choice of whether or not to remember atrocity
seems like small beer in the wider context. Nor are the victims in this episode
given much interiority, which might have added depth. Asa result, the episode
rises above mostly due to a good twist at the end, an excellent performance from
Kirby, and cinematography so fine-grained it seems deliberately to mimic a
virtual-reality experience.
In considering these three “simple” episodes, it’s worth noting that most other
anthology shows don’t display a tenth of the sophistication evident even in Black
Mirror's half-successes. It’s just that Black Mirror has spoiled us by so often being
great, and so we keep pushing and prodding it to forever and always live up to its
best. Some day Black Mirror will take a baseball bat to its best plot and we will
rise as one to rage on social media, thus proving most of the show’s more
obvious points.
Put another way, especially regarding the idea of renovation versus innovation, a
flub like “Playtest “is an episode that uses element A (augmented reality) to
comment only on element A (augmented reality, like this parenthetical) and
possibly the psychology of element B, a specific character who in his Everyman-
who-can-travel-cheaply-abroad aspects carries little societal weight. Even
though more successful, neither “Men Against Fire” nor “Shut Up and Dance,”
for all of their merits, quite rise above our baseline idea of average Black Mirror
quality.
RELATED STORYBlack Mirror's "Men Against Fire’ Tackles High-Tech Warfare
But then you encounter an episode like episode six, “Hated in the Nation,” and
you find ample evidence that Black Mirror's best work displays complexity ina
way that resembles the verdict of “good synthesis” scrawled by professors on
English papers likely to get an A or B rather than aC-.
In “Hated in the Nation,” Black Mirror more or less fuses elements X, Y, Z1, and
Z2 to create a focused mystery narrative that also comments on any number of
issues critical to us now. Mechanical drone bees in artificial hives have taken the
place of real ones to help fertilize flowers, in a near-future where colony collapse
disorder has claimed all bees, and many other animals are extinct. Against this
backdrop, someone hacks a bee to kill a public figure reviled on social media for
hateful comments. The hashtag #DeathTo trends and turns out to have sinister
origin and real-world effects, while people through the United Kingdom play
along as if words don’t have consequences.
The complexity in episode six builds because the relationship between the two
main women characters, both police detectives, largely doesn’t follow noir-
fiction clichés, and this personal anchor of character is juxtaposed not just with
exploration of the sociological dimension of how people behave on social media,
but also the cutting edge of drone technology. And not only the cutting edge of
drone tech, but also the cutting edge of ecological preservation. It then expands
to include not just the general consequences of these elements “gone wrong,”
but a specific catastrophic disaster: With a nice sly nod to the mass hysteria
several decades ago over “killer bees” and other invasive species, the episode
manages to fuse several themes at once into a whole that’s dramatically
satisfying.
Drones as an invasive species, for example, is a wonderfully original way to
think about them, and it jolts you out of the perspective that they’re just going to
become part of the skyscape, as natural as a crow ora starling. The parallel
structures of human social interaction and bee hives make a powerful statement
in the context of recent scientific studies finding that bees express moreoriginality than previously thought and that humans express less, more of so-
called “conscious” thought consisting of automated responses.
Sois episode six “just” a commentary on social media? No. The one individual
the detectives question about the initial murder, who posted something harmful
on social media, teaches a grade school class of giggling kids, and sees her free
speech as something metaphorical. She clearly does plenty of good in the world.
The words “Death to...” aren’t action, are they, when the single voice emanates
from the middle of a hive mind? And the way in which the central action occurs
in the context of mecha-bees tasked with the purpose of fertilizing flowers so
agriculture can continue and millions of people not starve provides a wider
environmental context that cannot be overlooked, even if many viewers forget
it.
ne idea I’ve seen expressed recently is that Black Mirror’s creators are
somehow Dark Mountain acolytes unable to craft a subtle message about
modern technology—and especially about social media (which,
famously, hates to be critiqued by perceived luddites). But this idea seems
refuted by “Hated in the Nation.” I would argue that episode one, “Nosedive,”
also refutes it. The desperate search of the protagonist, Lacie (Bryce Dallas
Howard), for high ratings from her fellow human beings to sustain an overall
rating that allows her to buy a new apartment, keep her job, and in general
experience a better life is as old as civilization, or at least as old as capitalism.
If, in Black Mirror’s near-future scenario, you actually chock up points or
demerits via your smart phones, then perhaps the point is just that social media
can accelerate the process of being ever more caged within a Baudrillardian
hegemony. Certainly, the point doesn’t seem as simple as modern technology is
“bad.” Rather, it’s that modern tech may allow us to express terrible inherent
built-in negative aspects of the human condition if we let those tools rule us.
‘That there is a harrowing and a winnowing involved that makes the pace of life
(and thus our insecurities and sense of place on the social ladder) more
excruciating and deeply felt—and thus more visible and thus more repugnant.
Perhaps even while reading this paragraph of an article you've grown to despise.
(Please rate me three out of five if you must, but know how hateful that is
because I love you, and rate you six out of five.)The final scenes of “San Junipero” leave it up to us to
think about what life means and where it resides.
The structure of “Nosedive” has a striking similarity to that of “Shut Up and
Dance,” except instead of being pushed forward by an unseen person, Lacie is
pushed forward by her own concern about her social standing. For this sin, she
must embark on an odyssey of a trip to her childhood friend’s wedding, where
she is to be the maid of honor. If she’s lucky, the high ranking of her fabulous
friend’s guests will up her own ranking, overcoming a recent downturn in her
social fortunes.
The irony is that in making the trek to the wedding, during which all sorts of
misfortunes accumulate, Lacie displays fortitude and gumption. Along the way
she meets a female Snake Plissken in a big-rig who gives her a counter-culture
example to aspire to, she must fast-walk across highways, hitch rides, abandon
broken rental cars, and in all ways she becomes reduced or perhaps lifted up by
the experience. It's a clever tightrope walk both for the script and the actor—to
go from disliking someone to rooting for them—and it’s further evidence that,
Black Mirror isn’t cynical about its characters’ fates.
‘The moving “San Junipero,” though, takes a lack of cynicism to new heights for
the series, with a tale of two women (Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw)
who meet by chance in a mysterious city and whose lives become entangled in
unexpected ways. You could call “San Junipero” Black Mirror’s penance for
“Playtest.” The brilliance of the script lies in how neither character conveys the
secrets of the city directly in an info-dump kind of way. Instead, they lay down.
breadcrumbs, alluding to the mystery in a natural way that keeps the foreground
of the episode uncluttered by exposition. I find it hard to imagine Twilight Zone,
Night Gallery, or most other anthology shows being able to resist a more explicit
hint, and yet we understand very clearly what is going on. Exposition instead is
reserved for emotional content, the underlying sadness of the lovers’ situation.
The speculative element is beautifully subsumed in the character development
and, as with many Black Mirror episodes, this subtle use of the near future
scenario allows us to experience the couple’s dilemma all the more acutely. Indepicting an interracial couple and ruminating on aging and death, “San
Junipero” also exemplifies a commitment to diversity and demographics not
commonly served well by horror shows. The final scenes of “San Junipero” leave
it up to us to think about what life means and where it resides.
echnology is hard to write about, whether on the page or on the screen,
which is why in so much uncanny fiction (mine included) smart phones
don’t work and laptops inexplicably die. The burden of showing modern
tech visually in a way that doesn’t become dated is often insurmountable
because the contamination is already in the creator’s subconscious. Even lauded
recent movies like Midnight Special wind up reflecting a kind of entrenched
1950s Tomorrowland aesthetic. The challenge isn’t just the right look-and-feel,
but often the right stand-in for an electronic reality that isn’t particularly visual.
Do it wrong and you wind up with Tron-remake bastardizations or a kind of
bulkiness or weight that means inert objects meant to be in the backdrop intrude
on the foreground of the narrative.
So one of the crowning glories of Black Mirror—and yet another reason for its
success—is that even when it has to find tech surrogates, the show has a lightness
of touch and a seamless quality that has nothing to do with the kind of blank
seamlessness of Apple productions. Much of it finds a kind of liminal space, too,
that corrects much of the somewhat hamfisted True Detective approach to
cinematography; for example, if Black Mirror maps a highway from above,
you’re still getting the gorgeously dark thick-snake-like quality of that, but it has
some actual damn meaning. The default for Black Mirror’s look-and-feel seems
to be a varietal of Darth Vader noir most evident in the battleship scenes of The
Empire Strikes Back; or, to put it another way, it’s a dark, rich Pinot Noir, if Darth
Vader had owned a vineyard that made Pinot Noir, Cabs being a little too
unsubtle.
But nor does Black Mirror seem wedded to a certain approach to
cinematography, adapting to the needs of individual episodes. “Shut Up and
Dance” has a washed out late-70s realism to it, while “San Junipero” commits,
in the initial scenes, to a late ‘80s style that, for me, as someone who lived in
that era, felt preternaturally real. Rather than replicating the actual 1980s, Black
Mirror manages instead through set design, costumes, and blocking to replicatethe feel of various iconic ‘80s movies. The stunning result imbues the scenes
with a nostalgia not achievable by straight-forward historical reconstruction—a
nostalgia important for believing in the beginning of the relationship at the heart
of the episode.
Black Mirror’s episodes may feel claustrophic at times, make us paranoid about
reality and our relationship with it, but that continual questing and changing of
the equation—through layering, through cinematography, through inspired
acting and the striving of everyman characters—is a form of hope and marks the
best of season three. There is at the show’s base an essential curiosity about the
world, even if expressed darkly, that drives it. Black Mirror’s themes are wide
and broad enough they could easily switch to making the show about the 16th-
century court at Versailles, with no speculative element, and still be making the
same points about the human condition.
Do you want Black Mirror to have a less bleak view of tech? Well, did you want
Breaking Bad to be Breaking Good? Do you want Westworld to suddenly become a
kiddy carousel ride? Game of Thrones to never kill a character again? I thought
not.
At the end of the last episode of the new season, we catch a glimpse of a dogged
woman detective shadowing a mass murderer, under the glower of a distant
forest crag. Despite so much, she is still driving herself forward, not allowing the
horrors she’s seen stop her from doing her job. Fortitude. Endurance. When
Black Mirror works, it’s because it makes the hard choices. Or, at least, not the
expedient ones.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JEFF VANDERMEER’s latest project is The Big Book of Science Fiction, co-edited with Ann
\VanderMeer. He is the author of the novels Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance (the Southern
Reach Trilogy).
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