Through the Black Mirror

Jenkins explores the Black Mirror (2011–) episode, “The Entire History of You,” in relation to two other narratives about prosthetic memory and wearable computers—Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 feature film, Strange Days and Steve Mann’s 2001 book, Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of Wearable Computers. Black Mirror’s Grain, Strange Days’ SQUID, and Cyborg’s WearComp each represent new media technologies which enable humans to record, process, access, and share their perceptual experiences in real time, resulting in what Mann describes as a “cyborg perspective.” Each is an extension of the human sensorium, which opens up radical possibilities for managing knowledge and interacting with others. Yet, in each narrative, “old troubles” catch up with us, as powerful institutions and systemic inequality shape how this technology gets used in practice.

Petrovic reads “White Bear” through theories drawn from Louis Althusser’s and Slavoj Žižek’s work. Althusser explores how the state rewards proper subjects who perform particular behaviors in accordance with the state’s larger ideologies. Likewise, Žižek engages themes of control that are commandeered to ensure that the Lady becomes an empty vessel onto which others cast their most abhorrent desires. Ultimately, “White Bear” questions the degree of punishment that should be placed upon any state prisoner, where the mechanisms of retributive justice neglect empathy in favor of perpetuating state ideology.

On its initial broadcast on Channel 4 on 25 February 2013, the finale of the second season of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, “The Waldo Moment”, was regarded by many reviewers and online commentators as something of a disappointment. However, from the middle of 2015 onwards those returning to the episode seemed to have very different observations to make about “The Waldo Moment”: Sabienna Bowman now suggested that it was “the most relevant episode of Black Mirror of them all” (2016) and Brogan Morris indicated that “None of it looks far-fetched now” (2017), with Charlie Brooker adding to this with a memorable post on Twitter on 9 November 2016 that simply read “This isn’t an episode. This isn’t marketing. This is reality” (qtd. in McDermott). What might have happened then between 25 February 2013 and 9 November 2016 to have changed opinions in such a way about “The Waldo Moment”? How did a forty-four-minute-long drama about the emergence of an unqualified and unsuitable political candidate made famous by a popular television show, with no clear opinions or policy, who instead prefers to insult opponents while offering little substance outside well-worn platitudes, someone who nobody thinks could win an election but who proves able to connect with voters who have come to regard all of those who represent the political establishment as self-serving and corrupt, a candidate who asks and even offers to pay for supporters to physically attack his rivals and opponents, go from “unfocused” to “the most relevant episode of Black Mirror of them all”?

“Nosedive” addresses a number of social concerns that have arisen over the ubiquitous use of the social media alongside a recognition of the growth of audit culture and the way new forms of classificatory systems are emerging because of it. The episode draws attention to aspects of the quantified self, big data discourse, the simulacra involved in modern identity construction, the processes of self-presentation and impression management that goes into making and possessing the self, and the bio-political forms of surveillance that are countenanced in and through these new forms of augmentation. “Nosedive” also shows how the gendered body is particularly caught up in this regime of docility and passivity. Finally, the episode offers us a way of resisting and rejecting these status cultures—a message sketched out in the final scene’s language play, and the let loose forces of Lacie’s unruly or wayward body. In this chapter, I explore the key themes found in the episode, concluding with a discussion of the idea of planned obsolescence, the message which I will suggest “Nosedive” is operating from.

Daraiseh and Booker present a critical overview of the key issues that drive the Emmy-winning “San Junipero,” the fourth episode of the third series of Black Mirror (2011–). Widely regarded as the most optimistic and utopian episode in all of Black Mirror, “San Junipero” deals with a future in which the infirm and dying can have their consciousnesses uploaded to computer-simulated worlds, where they can happily live on in virtual reality, free of the maladies that had struck them down in the physical world. The episode focuses on a simulated California seaside town in 1987, though it implies that other times and places are also available within this system, which is operated by a large corporate entity known as TIKR systems. This chapter focuses particularly on the way popular culture from 1987 is used to enrich the virtual-reality environment of San Junipero, noting the way in which this aspect of the episode participates in a recent wave of nostalgic representations of 1980s popular culture. In addition, it discusses the way this episode participates in the phenomenon of postmodernism, especially as theorized by Fredric Jameson. Finally, it addresses the utopian orientation of this episode’s treatment of technology, but notes that it contains important dystopian aspects as well.

The opening episode of Black Mirror’s (2011–) fourth season, “USS Callister,” follows the show’s commitment to topical relevance by taking on toxic white masculinity. To this end, the episode uses an adventure narrative typical of the classic TV show Star Trek but recontextualizes it in the interplay between the embedded reality of a digital game and the framing device of the gaming company where “real” characters interact. This two-tiered ontological structure allows the episode to address the role that adventure plays within the bourgeois normality of white-collar work within a neoliberal economy—as a form of escape for some, as a confining narrative that must be rewritten for others in order to attain self-determination. In its indictment of escapism as an elitist prerogative, and its embrace of autonomy for subjects outside the specific white male bracket, “USS Callister” struggles with the ideological implications of the adventure narrative as it veers back toward the confirmation of neoliberalism. To the extent that “USS Callister” itself relies on the thrills and pleasures derived from classic adventure as a form of commercial entertainment, the episode provides a valuable insight into the possibilities and limitations of digital culture to analyze and critique itself.

This chapter analyzes “Arkangel,” the second episode of the fourth series of the British anthology series Black Mirror (2011–). The episode, set in a fictional dystopian future, imagines the intersection of surveillance, technology, and parenting in a world where a parent can opt-in to omnipresent real-time monitoring of their child's respiration, heart rate, bloodstream (including screening for illicit substances), and view a live video feed of what a child sees at any given moment—all without the child's knowledge or consent. As the name suggests, Black Mirror works rhetorically to encourage some degree of self-reflection around our emerging dependence on social-surveillance technology. This chapter develops the concept of Surveiller-Parenting—a network of surveillance norms, practices, and technologies which encourages parents to place their children under intense surveillance—to understand emerging trends in parenting today and “Arkangel.” In this chapter, I argue that “Arkangel” expresses contemporary anxieties about fragmentary and disparate techniques of surveillance by constructing a future of intensified networks of control which link the families, schools, and corporations under the logic of late capitalism.

This chapter offers a close textual analysis of the Black Mirror (2011–) episode “Metalhead” and situates this analysis in the broader nested contexts of similar dystopian and horror films as well as the meaning of Black Mirror as a whole in the context of early-twenty-first-century social and cultural anxieties. I consider the ways in which Charlie Brooker, the episode’s writer, and David Slade, its director, use various science fiction and horror elements such as wide shots that showcase the barren, post-apocalyptic landscape, refutal of human agency, and stalking sequences that highlight female-victim vulnerability in this rather typical “rise of the machines” story. The result is a narrative that thoroughly critiques increasing human interaction with technology and leaves the viewer with a nihilistic sense of the future while simultaneously refusing the possibility of change. True to the thematic arc of Black Mirror as a whole, Metalhead not only examines but also indicts a burgeoning human addiction to technological interventions in our everyday lives; further, this episode reflects our own fears of being replaced or worse, made obsolete.

“Black Museum,” the fourth season finale of Black Mirror (2011–), establishes for the first time that all the episodes of the series are in fact taking place in a single narrative storyworld. This chapter thus reads “Black Museum” as Black Mirror’s first articulation of its overall series mythology: the development and enslavement of artificially intelligent minds called “cookies,” digital copies of human minds whose rights and freedoms are incredibly precarious and a site of ongoing political struggle. “Black Museum” tells us the story of one of the main architects of this sociotechnological regime, as well as the story of the young black woman who seeks him out both for revenge and to liberate the enslaved cookie of her deceased father; the episode thus unites Black Mirror’s typical meditation on the emergence of transhuman technologies with new questions of anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggle. The episode is also singular in the context of Black Mirror for its complex but overall happy ending, exemplifying the strange notion of “hope with teeth” that China Miéville argues is necessary for utopian thinking in the present.

For a television show that has often seemed to delight in shocking viewers since its very first episode in 2011, which, in case we needed reminding, featured the Prime Minister of Great Britain having carnal relations with a sus scrofa domesticus, Black Mirror saved one of its greatest surprises for 28 December 2018 with the release of the 20th instalment in the series, Bandersnatch, directed by David Slade. While two of its previous episodes had centred on video games: the highly regarded dystopian vision of gamification en masse, “Fifteen Million Merits”, and the horror-inflected augmented reality tale of “Playtest”, in an unexpected turn of events for both Netflix and the creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Bandersnatch was not just about video games, it was one. This chapter explores the significance of Bandersnatch as an intriguing combination of video game and film, an example of what many referred to as an “interactive movie” or what Nitzan Ben Shaul called “hyper-narrative interactive cinema” in his Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (2008). The authors interrogate how far Bandersnatch emerges as a text immersed in some of the defining thematic elements of what we might call “the Black Mirror experience” but also uses the interactive nature of the project in original and compelling ways connected to the protagonist’s experience of trauma which the audience or “interactors” are forced to share.