Black Mirror: The Present Tense of The Future's Digital Dystopia

FAIR WARNING: This article contains spoilers

Right now you are using what Charlie Brooker calls a "black mirror." You may be using more than one if you have a television on in the background. Black mirrors are the screens of smartphones, computer monitors and televisions that are making up the new ways people digest media and communicate with one another. In the 21st century, people are using social media and text messages to talk to each other instead of making phone calls. While print media is on the decline, information is being published on the internet. Even television has moved from traditional broadcast formats, with writers and actors developing programming for Netflix and Youtube, bypassing network TV. While technology changed the way we do things in very noticeable ways, it comes with side effects that may not be as obvious. It is the side effects of technology that Black Mirror chooses to talk about. It's common for science fiction to examine complex ideas and offer parables to give readers a glimpse of beautiful worlds. Black Mirror uses the science fiction genre to explore the impending horrors the digital age brings closer while making unsettling futures to create satirical dystopian realities we may live in one day.

Charlie Brooker explains it all.

In many ways, Black Mirror gives Brooker the opportunity to continue his lambasting of modern culture and its relationship with television. With a six part mini-series entitled "How TV Ruined Your Life," Brooker rants on how television shows have warped people's notions of beauty, given them expectations of life they will never see, and generally misinformed them throughout their lives. It's just a little funny that these mini documentaries were produced for television. The series is on Youtube (for now), and would be a good introduction to the way Brooker uses cynicism, sarcasm and vitriol to make his point. He makes the same points in Black Mirror that he makes in How TV Ruined Your Life, only he does so with hour long dramas in what may be the best anthology to come along since Twilight Zone. 

There are no elements of the future in the first episode of Black Mirror. Flying cars and laser guns are nowhere to be seen and android police play no role in the world of  "The National Anthem." In a lot of ways, it has a visual tone of an Aaron Sorkin drama, with his signature "walk and talk" style building a fast paced world where the characters are constantly moving and information is flying at the characters and audience at an unbelievable rate. Sound familiar? When you take a step back, it is dark view of our current world that we are looking at. "The National Anthem" opens with a wake up call, literally. The Prime Minister is woken by colleagues to find out the Princess has been kidnapped. Posted on Youtube, the ransom video shows the princess, tied up, reading a demand letter that says she will only be released if the Prime Minister has sex with a pig on live television, by 4pm. Even though the British Government takes down the video from Youtube and urges local media to not give the matter attention, it's new media that takes over and lets the video  and story go viral.

"The Princess & The Plea"

The episode soon moves to the setting of a television news room. When the producer mentions that adhering to the D Notice, which has kept the story from breaking on the air, a smart mouthed member of the show lets everyone know that "facebook's coverage is pretty comprehensive." This is where the heart of the episode comes out. Local people are shown glued to their televisions and smartphones for updates while discussing the kidnaping and terms among  themselves. It's the screens (black mirrors) that act as the driving force behind the reality these characters live in. With cellphones, televisions and tablets updating the politicians, journalists and viewers, the audience watches people addicted to black mirrors as if they were watching a news story develop in real time. "The National Anthem" has its events mirror a real news story, with constant coverage and speculation turning horrific events into reality TV which is brought to light when Mrs. Callow address how people react to a world where such misfortunes are used as building blocks for the 24 hour news cycle, saying: "I know People, we love humiliation."

The audience watches the people living in this version of England, as they go from screen to screen for information, getting feedback from people on Twitter and Facebook, watching a TV journalist use her phone to send racy photos to a member of the PM's staff to get undisclosed information that puts her life in danger as she searches for footage that will draw in more viewers. Every step of the way, black mirrors move the story to its frightening conclusion. By the end, the event is revealed to have been masterminded by a prize-winning artist and a broadcaster notes that an art critic referred to it as "'the first great artwork of the 21st. Century,' in an event in which we all participated."

In an interview with The Guardian, Brooker says the following: "If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects? With "The National Anthem," the side effects present a culture that is so obsessed with cable news and social media that it fails to see how they are being used by the artist that is also manipulating the prime minister. The world of "National Anthem" shows a culture where the participation of viewers that "love humiliation" create Mr. Callow's fate, a culture where the audience watching the Prime minister and the audience of "The National Anthem" are blurred and suggested to be the same.

Hot Shot is forced on Bing for the Fifteen Millionth time

Black Mirror goes on to put its audience in the show with episode two. "Fifteen Million Merits" shows a future world where people either ride a stationary bike to earn merits or clean up after the cyclists. In this future, the highest aspiration available to people is to earn enough merits (15 Million) to use for a ticket to participate on a reality TV show, Hot Shot, that will give them a new life or embarrass them in front of the world. Personal values and the importance of human connection is questioned where people spend merits on accessories for their avatars, to play video games, eat and skip commercials put on the screens occupying their surround walls.

In this dystopian future, Bing wakes up every day to mount a cycle. While the people around him play games, build their avatars, and watch pornography as they cycle, he is uninterested by the digital options, and pays to avoid ads that urge him to be a consumer. Bing lives a mostly solitary life until Abi joins the cycling team. Struck with her beauty and vocal talent, Bing uses the merits he inherited upon his brother's death to buy her a ticket to compete on Hot Shot. While people watch her sing from their room, their avatars take up space in the theatre, make facial expressions and mime their movements. Even though the audience enjoys her performance, the judges convince her to become an adult actress. This leaves Bing heartbroken, meritless and just as alone as he was before meeting her.

With a new mission, Bing puts in as many hours on the bike as he can. Opting to eat the leftovers of other cyclists and watching every commercial, a montage shows Bing earning enough merits to gain an audition on Hot Shot. With everyone's avatar joining the judges as they watch, Bing begins to dance before taking a shard of glass to his throat. In a long speech, Bing address the judges, the audience of Hot Shot and people watching Black Mirror, the people the avatars are a stand-in for:

"All we know is fake fodder and buying shit. That's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves, is buying shit. What, I have a dream? The peak of our dreams is a new app for our Dopple, it doesn't exist! It's not even there! We buy shit that's not even there. Show us something real and free and beautiful. You couldn't. Yeah? It'd break us. We're too numb for it. I might as well choke. It's only so much wonder we can bear. When you find any wonder whatsoever, you dole it out in meagre portions. Only then until it's augmented, packaged, and pumped through 10,000 preassigned filters till it's nothing more than a meaningless series of lights, while we ride day in day out, going where? Powering what?"

When Bing addresses the judges, with the excerpt above, it is no longer him. These words are from Charlie Brooker and sound like the commentary he uses on How TV Ruined Your Life. The judges and avatars that face Bing are the real world. This speech nearly breaks the fourth wall to comment on the consumer culture of Black Mirror's audience by placing them in the future where they are cogs in a machine, earning merits to be spent on non-existent things that are constantly at reach and being dangled in front of them with their own black mirrors.

With a twist ending, Bing gets commissioned by a judge to makes his own show, where he rages to an audience about the world they live in. Though Bing is seen finishing a show in his nice apartment, drinking orange juice from a pitcher instead of a packaged container, the episode ends with him just as alone as he was in the beginning. Regardless of class, "Fifteen Million Merits" shows a future so burdened by consumerism, filled with people that live through dopples and absent of real experiences, that even winning the game show that everyone tunes in to can't help change who someone truly is, or influence their quality of life.

With four more episodes and a Christmas special starring Jon Hamm, Brooker went on to give more focus to dystopian futures fueled by man's relationship with technology. These episodes have a recurring theme of how technology will make us more distant from one another, more focused on our technology and more interested in our new eyes than the world we're looking at. But it's the first two episodes that actually bring the viewers in by giving them analogues through the avatars of "Fifteen Million Merits," and viewers of "The National Anthem," that make those episodes so life like that it's hard not to see how the side effects of technology have already begun to take root.

For anyone interested in Black Mirror, you can buy the dvd box sets or find them on Youtube before they're taken down.

Fan Fiction, Genre and Plot

Genre is a big problem in literary theory. It's as big a problem in literary theory as it is in music. There's a level of constraint in how readers and critics approach a work when terms of designation are introduced. By introducing these terms, there's an element of expectation and the potential for complaints when a work doesn't form itself using all the expected elements. Playing the "what if" game is a staple of science fiction. If SF is "what if," then maybe fantasy is "only if." Stories in the world of Literature come about from asking "what if" and then thinking, "now only if," but present the finding in different ways, modes that reflect the same world as the reader. This is the contingency that keeps literature from becoming sci-fi or fantasy. That notion confuses genre when a reader isn't foreign to or othered by the worlds of the book. But it's possible to read a science fiction book that seems so plausible in its futurist notions that there's no need for suspension of disbelief.

This suggests that genre can be as much a temporal construct as it is a form to build upon. An example would be a point in humanity's future where the problems presented in a work such as Philip K. Dick's, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?," manifest themselves from a natural progression in humanity: If, in the next 100 years, humanity creates artificial intelligence while letting the environment continue to degrade to the point where acid rain gets caustic, plant life struggles to maintain and animal life follows to the point of extinction, the world of Androids would not be so fantastic but realistic. This is to say, if the predictions in a Science Fiction work of the past manifest, the work becomes a reflection of the present in the same way a work of contemporary literature does. A scientific analog would be when a theory turns into a law of physics after being proven correct. While a theory at the time of inception, it develops into something else, a law, without a single change occurring to its makeup.

Asking "what if" does not always create science fiction. It may be the cornerstone in the genre, but it's also the cornerstone of Fan Fiction, a genre that can't help but open a can of worms that each have their own tinier can. It is a genre that exists as an extension of previously published works, characters that someone else fleshed out and created. While it may not be considered Fan Fiction, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea won several literary awards even though it exists as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen takes several characters from the annals of genre fiction, such as Captain Nemo, the Invisible Man and many others, and puts them in a Victorian setting where technology grew faster than it historically did. Is League now a steampunk book because of these elements or is it a work of fan fiction because it's the product of a person building something with other people's characters? Or, is League something else entirely because it takes existing characters and puts them together in a new world, an alternate England? But Moore is a creator with a very distinct tone, present when he writes Watchman or WildC.A.T.S. This begs the question of whether or not Moore has the right to be called an auteur, the word that seems to be the answer a lot of people (academics) use when trying to solve the problem of genre. While auteur is properly designated to filmmakers and cinematic criticism, it has been applied to all forms of artists that create a body of work that suggest the creation of an entirely new genre.

Before we go on, let's take a look at an entry for Fan Fiction provided by Dictionary.com:

noun

a fictional account written by a fan of a show, movie, book, or video game to explore themes and ideas that will not or cannot be explored via the originating medium[...]

According to the definition, both Wide Sargasso Sea and League are fan fiction. Both books take previously created characters out of the (cold dead) hands of the original creators and puts them into the hands of fans to tell different stories. With League, the use of Dr . Jekyll/Mr. Hyde could even be seen as bringing a character back to life since the original work suggested the character was dead... though by the words of an untrustworthy narrator, the town drunk. According to the definition, most super hero comics are also fan fiction, as are all Star Trek and X-Files novels. By the definition, every issue of Spider-Man and X-Men not written by Stan Lee is also fan fiction, as are all non Bob Kane Batman stories. This shows franchise as something that has a life blood of fan fiction.

But fan fiction can't be seen as a genre. While a science fiction novel can, in time, no longer appear to represent an alternative once the theories are proofs, thus seem more like literature, fan fiction seems more like an original story only after the original text is lost to the people reading it. How many readers know that Family Matters, (the actual name of the Urkle show), is a spin-off (thus a fan fiction) of Perfect Strangers? Never hear of Perfect Strangers? That's the point. This shows fan fiction to be something as fluid and personal as language (colloquialisms), a way to recreate things to make them relevant, keep them alive. When looking at fan fiction this way, it's easy to view it as a force of literary memetics. As long as the ideas behind the characters, what they stand for, is relevant, more fan fiction will come of it. But, the second it becomes old hat, it turns into cultural fodder or gets stored in the memory of the readers and their computers.

Fan Fiction is truly the reincarnation of the imagination. While the proliferation of fan fiction may owe a lot to the internet, it does so poetically. If the internet does become some sort of common ground, where everyone shares ideas and creations for free (like I'm doing right now --screw you academia!), our forms of entertainment may become quality works that do more than blur the line between the entertainer and the fan, they may erase the line altogether.