Black Mirror (n.phr) A cold, dark, two-dimensional object that projects a distorted, useless, spectral image back to a confused (and bored) viewer.
Black Mirror is modern pornography.1 Pornography comes in many forms, but all entail excitement for the self, which positively wants — fulfilment, sex, power — or negatively doesn’t want — loss, fear, decay. There are therefore two kinds of second-rate art, that of the positive kind, which is filled with things to crave, such as delicious food, consumer luxury, heaving breasts and high tech gadgets, and that of the negative kind, which is made up of the repulsive and the fearful, such as abject poverty, violent murder, supernatural possession, and various kinds of monstrous threat. In great art the wanter is stilled, and deeper, impersonal qualities, both dark and light, emerge of themselves, while in second-rate art we reach out for or recoil away from some thing related to the personal self, either positively or negatively.2
Black Mirror, written by award-winning, middle-class Guardian columnist, Charlie Brooker, perfectly exemplifies modern pornography of a resolutely negative stripe. It is therefore, as you would expect, filled with things to be appalled at or afraid of. Terrifying parents crop up regularly, as do sadistic bosses, creepy stalkers, masked killers and evil politicians. The tone is unremittingly bleak, hollow and nihilistically devoid of redemptive humanity, which is itself a form of pornographic titillation, much employed by the video game designers Brooker admires (he started his career as a reviewer for PC Zone), who well know that chilling, dystopian loneliness sells.
The problem is not negativity as such though. As with any other film about banal and nasty middle and upper-class people, the problem, or the porn, is not that every character is a petty, cruel, colourless replica of every other character, although they are, or that the worlds they inhabit are unreal nightmares of endless banality stretched over an abyss that is never considered, although they are that too; but that there is nothing else. Brooker has no understanding or experience of anything outside or beyond his fabricated (yet grimly literal) realities, which thereby envelop the universe. He is, we might say, of the mirror, and so cannot see the horror of it.
Take, as counterexample, Jens Lien’s 2006 film The Bothersome Man, in which a man wakes to find himself in a superficially fulfilling and comfortable world that, as we understand through his moral perspective, is a profoundly hollow dystopia. This seems, on the face of it, to be similar to an episode of Black Mirror, yet in the ethical position it takes, beyond the dystopian essence of its world, it is far more incisive (and the ending is almost infinitely more horrific) than anything Brooker imagines. Thomas Vinterburg’s Festen, in which a morally courageous protagonist, who commands our sympathies, uncovers the putrefaction underneath the good taste, right-seeming seriousness and bonhomie of wealth, serves as another example, as does Roman Polanski’s Carnage (written by Yasmina Reza) in which two dreadful bourgeois couples have a petty disagreement that escalates to such a pitch that their polite moral-masks completely dissolve. Here there is more of a sense of sympathy around the periphery (the children whom they are arguing over) but there is also the felt reality of a story which is coming from an ethical universe that is genuinely finer — and therefore, crucially, funnier; all these writers have a far better sense of black humour than Brooker’s jaded sneering.
There is no truly sympathetic protagonist in Black Mirror, no higher ethical perspective, no conscious awareness of the whole. This explains a few salient features of the show. The first is the outrageously feeble characterisation. All of Brooker’s characters are interchangeable. One might be a woman, another Irish, another black, but3 you could easily swap their dialogue, their back-stories or their values and not notice the difference. Indeed one of the most repulsive tales, Be Right Back (in Season 2), has an entirely synthetic human being who differs from his living original in the most preposterously trivial ways (he sleeps with his eyes open and is a bit of a bland wimp). When it comes to the crunch his bereaved girlfriend can’t kill him because he starts faking tearful desperation; she was sad, stupid and insensitive enough to believe in and buy a synthetic replacement for her loved one in the first place and, after discovering he’s not quite the same as the original — she ends up keeping him! We return, as we often must, to Philip K. Dick’s classic point:
The only way to determine whether someone was an android was empathy. What separated humans from androids was that androids had no sense of empathy. The difficulty was that very few humans did either.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?4
The second consequence of the totalising ethic-aesthetic world of Black Mirror, is that when Brooker tries to write of love, of honour, of sacrifice or of any meaningful human quality, his scripts become soaked with sentimentality, the ‘bank holiday’ of cynicism,5 because he cannot conceive of a qualitative counterpoint to his pseudo-realities.6 The most egregious example of his schmaltz occurs in the lavishly praised San Junipero, in season 3, which not only offers a denouement roughly on the level of ‘and it was all a dream’, in which the reunion between two beautiful lesbian characters, in an artificial, media-generated version of 1980s San Francisco, is accompanied with a gold-red sunset and an unironic rendition of ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ by Belinda Carlyle,7 but in presenting all this ‘genuinely moving’, ‘uplifting’, ‘optimistic’, ‘consciousness-transcending’, ‘beauty’8 actually glorifies an entirely bodiless (and, ironically, tech-free) virtual reality.
This takes us onto the weakness of the plots in Black Mirror. You know you are watching an empty story when most of the pleasure of it comes from speculating on the ending. Even the greatest stories arouse the reader or viewer’s curiosity, but this is in service to what is happening, a series of intrinsically interesting episodes which reveal the fateful artistic truth of the whole. When ‘Bull’ McCabe (Richard Harris) fights his own son in The Field, for example, or when Taylor (Charlton Heston) says, in Planet of the Apes, ‘take your stinking paws off me you damned dirty ape,’ we watch in fascinated awe at the meaning of the act, of the dialogue, and, through that meaning, of the dark providence it is fused with. In great stories the moment, or ‘beat’, and the whole, are one, just as character and plot are one, each speaking to the other in a manner which makes both reveal themselves to us. This is just as true of great, popular, ‘low-brow’ stories, such as (confining ourselves to film) Alien or Superbad, as it is of artistic masterpieces, such as Wings of Desire and Red Beard.
Hollow narrative art by contrast, without artistic truth to call on, must rely on titillating the spectator, with pornographic gore, violence, misery, sentiment, sex and, one of the more subtle or abstract forms of titillation, which is so common in Black Mirror as to be a defining characteristic, mere curiosity, which is to say puzzling the reader or viewer — creating discomfort — in order to relieve that discomfort with a mere explanation. ‘Ah-ha, so that’s why she’s been acting so strangely’, ‘ah-ha, so that’s where the treasure was hidden’, ‘ah-ha, so that’s whodunnit…’ This is the chief pornographic draw of Black Mirror, which invariably begins by raising all kinds of questions, ‘why… why… why…’ and then concludes by merely answering them. It is the artistic equivalent of wearing uncomfortable shoes all day in order to enjoy the relief of taking them off.
In order to deliver a maximum ‘ah-ha’ at the end of the story Brooker, like all mediocre writers, sacrifices any and sometimes all of his characters to the plot. Two friendly and ordinary women in season 6, for example, one in Loch Henry, another in Demon 79 are both, we discover, mass-murderers. There is nothing about either of them, nor about any of the many characters who off each other at the drop of a hat, that explains how this is possible, because character is of no importance or interest to Brooker, only the big wow, delayed for long enough to pique interest, then revealed — and then the main character is destroyed by it.
The pay-off of each episode is invariably cynical, hateful, morally null. Redemption is practically impossible. Most protagonists finish their arcs lost forever, frozen forever, eternally doomed.9 One of the better episodes, Nosedive (season 3), has one of the most potent premises in Black Mirror (everyone is rated for everything and low ratings lead to social exclusion) and one of the most sympathetic and well-acted leads‚ who, through an unguarded outburst of anger, loses all her points and ends up in prison and outside of the dystopian glitz, where she finally expresses her liberation by… mindlessly insulting someone! This is freedom in Black Mirror, as it is for Brooker; the opportunity to vent your spleen, an activity which Brooker has made a career out of.
We should note here, before we leave plot, the massive importance of exposition to Brooker, whose stories are so artificially assembled they cannot speak for themselves and must instead rely on expositional dialogue along the lines of, to quote a typical example from season 6 (Joan is Awful), ‘You’re a version of Joan played by a digital likeness of Annie Murphy… When source Joan watches the TV show ‘Joan is Awful’ she sees you playing her. That show is the fictive level we’re on right now, here.’ All clumsy story telling has characters lecture the audience on what is happening, but it’s particularly common in science fiction and fantasy which derive so much of their meaning from ‘big ideas’ rather than from genuine dramatic conflict and resolution.
Returning to pornography, another cheap thrill that second-rate art offers, in lieu of meaning or truth, is the warm glow of groupthink, identification with ‘us’. This is the principle pleasure offered by, to pick a few examples; bigoted comedians of the 1960s and 70s, leftist political comedians of the 1980s and 90s, the yearly celebration of ‘culture’ represented by the Superbowl half-time ceremony or the last night of The Proms, the globalist management-class ‘values’ of Friends, the ‘we losers are actually winners’ subtext of Star Trek conventions, and this year’s extended hymn to third-wave feminism, Barbie, which, actually, is oddly similar to Black Mirror; the knowing nods to artificial culture, the cynical hostility to human beings, the clumsy exposition, the servile acceptance of bourgeois ethics and the Micheal Cera cameo.
Charlie Brooker, edgy satirist that he is, bends over backwards to accede to the demands of wokethink. The evils of racism, homophobia and sexism are regularly telegraphed to viewers eager to ‘identify’ with the overlooked-but-actually-brilliant young female employee in her battle against the hapless — or straight-out evil — white, male boss. I say ‘white, male’, but, naturally, all skin-colours and sexualities are given scrupulously fair representation. In one case (Loch Henry, season 6) one of the characters tactlessly jokes that the success of one of the other characters might be due to ‘fucking diversity and all that’ — a character played by a laughably wooden black actress. A clever gag from Brooker? Unlikely. He’s a cynic, but he’s not, bless his little cotton socks, heartless.10
Not that the target audience of Black Mirror is the woke-o-sphere of course, which Brooker probably detests as much as did when he co-wrote Nathan Barley (with Chris Morris), which attacked an earlier incarnation of the disciples of Newchurch. No, Brooker is aiming for the world-weary mind-worker; comfortable, but afraid of discomfort, fearful, but comfortable with fear, ‘disenchanted, stony-eyed, bored to tears, but dry inside.’ This emotionally-retarded, tight-necked group of school-children, 4channers, Burning Manners, Dr. Who fans, ‘I work in data’, quiz-night enthusiasts, history buffs, type-designers, Goldsmith’s students and the like; this is ‘us’.
Another consequence of Black Mirror being what we might call ‘unconscious’, or unable to morally or aesthetically distance itself from the narrow parameters of its critique, is its fundamentally unchallenging, uncritical attitude towards the world system. It directs its critical attention at androids, smartphones, television, social-media and game shows, but the intelligent viewer will notice that one aspect of our technological present remains completely untouched by Brooker’s satire. Technology itself. We are never, at any point in Black Mirror, invited to ask ourselves how the technological prison works as a whole, or what the effect of the entire system is on the core of human nature. The ending of San Junipero, as noted, has its protagonists locked for eternity on a hard disk — and this is a positive outcome. That such a prospect would be hell on earth is not considered.
‘I believe they are nowhere.’
(San Junipero)
There are dreadful events that happen within the virtual world (the protagonist of USS Callister ends up trapped in a horrible online world) but no critique of virtuality itself. There is much bile directed at Bad Leaders within the system, but nothing at all at the system itself. There are plenty of digs at political parties (mainly, of course, Republicans and Conservatives) but no critique of statist democracy itself. There is plenty of anger, frustration and confusion in Black Mirror, as characters confront the intrusions of particular technologies into their lives, but no critique of technology itself. No connection is drawn between, say, the insipid one-dimensional characters in the series and the fact that industrial technology destroys character. Of course there isn’t. Brooker’s bourgeois unpeople are supposed to be human.
The world of Black Mirror is similar to the 2013 Spike Jonze monstrosity Her, in which a bland middle-class guy falls in love with a computer. As in most of Black Mirror, the entire world of Her has been designed by Muji for intensely middle class professionals whose individuality, ethical awareness and free-will exist only to select lovely shades of green and put them together with equally lovely shades of pink, or beige perhaps. No mention is made of the sterile horror of such a world (or the poor sods who built it) — it’s a background given to the specific technical difficulty being tackled; and as it is only a technical difficulty, only technical intelligence (perform x moves in x order in x time; as in USS Callister, season 4) or violence (chuck the computer out of the window; as in Joan is Awful, season 6) can win the day. Can, but doesn’t. As the sole message of Black Mirror is that humans are losers (or perhaps that ‘some tech is very bad’), nobody wins.
Similarly, limited aspects of our postmodern state are criticised — celebrity culture appears again and again and again — but postmodernism itself, a depthless cultural-world which resembles a freakish pantomime of its own past forms, is not only implicitly accepted, but celebrated. We are invited to titter at constant in-jokes and ‘Easter eggs’, sigh with bland pleasure at the ‘period details’ of 1960s middle America or 1970s Northern England, ooh-ahh at celebrity cameos self-consciously referencing themselves, sigh with pleasure at a series of images with precisely the same filtered ‘taste’ as every other contemporary television show, and kill dead time before a story which, like everything that appears on Netflix, Hulu and the like, scandalises nobody, outrages nobody, changes nothing; all is received in total complacency by viewers and reviewers alike.
Which brings us to why Black Mirror is with us at all, why it was made in the first place, why so many people love it; because it is not horrifying, not awful, not radical, not critical. It is surrogate moaning, which is itself surrogate pain, surrogate meaning, surrogate revolt. Brooker points his sneering, cynical finger and the viewer sadly shakes his head, because isn’t it all so terrible? If Black Mirror told the truth of the world, it would, in the words of that great and true dystopian, Franz Kafka,11 ‘wound us, stab us, wake us up with a blow to the head, affect us like a disaster, grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into dead forests far from everyone, like a suicide.’12 This is the Black Mirror we need, but it is the Black Mirror that we have, and our complacent enjoyment of it, that prevents such an axe from ever striking the frozen sea within us.
Joyce makes the clearest distinction between pornography and art in his discussion, in The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, of the difference between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ art.
The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing… The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system.
Examples of positive pornography include adverts, cute animal videos and chick-flicks, examples of the negative pornography include horror movies, snuff videos and the news. Literal pornography and video games, which excite our desires and at the same time disgust us, straddle both extremes. After a profound artistic experience we find the world brighter, more meaningful, a place that we are reconciled with. After indulging in porn we are not just unchanged but reduced and further confined.
Minus a couple of obvious regional markers.
This, by the way, is the principle weakness of the Turing test (apart, of course, from Turing’s own belief that ‘the question of whether machines can think is too meaningless to deserve discussion’). Namely, how can an unconscious human tell if a machine is conscious? The same flaw exists in many studies of human intelligence, sensitivity, empathy, happiness and so on; the group under investigation is nearly always a stressed, institutionalised, modern human under test conditions.
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
Ricky Gervais exhibits the same cynicism, revealed by the same perverse mawkishness when he seeks qualitative counterpoint to his bitter negativity (Gervais and Brooker come from the same town by the way, Reading, where I now live — which, to be fair, is like a cross between Black Mirror and The Office).
This is what happens when the cynic drops the mask of irony. The spectator vomits.
All expressions used in the reviews of this ‘ground-breaking’ episode, breathlessly applauded by The Guardian, The Independent, The Onion’s A.V. Club, The Atlantic and so on.
Brooker, like many atheists naturally coopts tropes from the religion he repudiates; in this case the eternal damnation of Christianity.
I wonder if he’s realised how racist the title Black Mirror is?
Who loved God, a love which never appeared in his books, but Kafka’s exalted ethical perspective makes the spiritual exile of his characters so much more freakishly chilling than the merely angry and fearful characters of Black Mirror, for the simple reason that Brooker’s dystopias are really just tremendously uncomfortable versions of his utopias. Quantitively different but qualitatively the same.
A paraphrase from Kafka’s letter to Oskar Pollak.