IT’S NOT TECHNOLOGY THAT PLACES HUMANITY AT RISK IN BLACK MIRROR.
TECHNOLOGY DOESN’T IMPERIL HUMANITY IN BLACK MIRROR, IT’S HUMANITY PUTTING ITSELF AT RISK
BLACK MIRROR BUZZES ONTO YOUR SCREEN LIKE A MALWARE ATTACK, LEAVING YOU, BLINKING, TO FIGURE OUT THE RULES.
Black Mirror is hands down the most relevant program of our time, if for no other reason than how often it can make you wonder if we’re all living in an episode of it.
This prescient and mordantly funny science- fiction anthology is smart enough to be just barely ahead of its time. It doesn’t imagine interstellar civilizations or postapocalyptic scenarios. Instead, it depicts variations on a near future transformed by information technology – our world, just a little worse.
In one episode from an earlier season, characters carry an implant that records their every experience — a kind of cranial Google Glass that ends up torturing a man who learns his wife has cheated on him. Another imagines a society in which citizens can block people who displease them, rendering them as mute blobs of static — a whole- body version of Facebook unfriending.
In still another, a foulmouthed cartoon TV star runs a political campaign that begins as a lark and spirals out of control – abetted by a jaded public and cynical media – into vicious demagogy. (No further comment.)
Twentieth- century science fiction was a product of 20th- century science, a period of physical advances and inventions when humans split the atom and travelled to the moon. Black Mirror, created for British television by Charlie Brooker, is a product of the 21st century and its digital, virtual breakthroughs. It speaks to a culture of people who live virtual second lives on social platforms, in which Silicon Valley tycoons seriously entertain the idea that our world is actually a Matrixlike simulation.
So it’s concerned not with body snatchers but with the Internet hive mind; not nuclear winter but artificial intelligence; not the complications of time travel but the implications of being able to offload human consciousness onto devices. Its view of technology is not cold and robotic but deeply emo- tional, because — as with our smartphones — we’ve made the machines extensions of our bodies and souls.
What’s more remarkable, the show has made its statement with a mere handful of instalments: two threeepisode seasons in 2011 and 2013 and a Christmas special in 2014.
Last year Netflix acquired the series, and in true American and Netflixian fashion, the new version is bigger in every way. Its first six episodes, which appeared on Friday, nearly double the show’s oeuvre in one data dump.
Pace yourself, though: this is very much the same disorienting, relentless series, touching on techno- cultural themes — hacking, socialmedia mobs, drones, the narcotic allure of nostalgia — in stories that manage to be both dreamily speculative and of-the-moment.
As before, t here’s no theme music, no narrator to escort you into its clean dystopias. ( Each episode imagines a different alternative reality, but they share a minimalist high- design esthetic — what your nightmares would look like if they were art- directed by Apple’s Jonathan Ive.) Black Mirror buzzes onto your screen like a malware attack, dropping you in media res and leaving you, blinking, to figure out the rules. You don’t watch an episode so much as get abducted into it.
But the bigger canvas and larger episode order give Brooker more room to play with genre and tone. The feature-length crime procedural episode Hated in the Nation, in which a London detective ( Kelly Macdonald, Boardwalk Empire) investigates a deadly online- outrage campaign, uncomfortably compares crowd- sourced justice with state surveillance. ( Hated is the season finale, though you can watch the self- contained episodes in any order.)
Nosedive — written by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur ( Parks and Recreation) from a story by Brooker — is a tart satire set in a society where social media ratings hold totalitarian sway. It stars Bryce Dallas Howard, whose constant, neurotic monitoring of her personal ranking will ring familiar to anyone who can’t stop checking their Instagram feed for hearts. Playtest, about an immersive augmented- reality game, feels like a digital-culture version of an X-Files horror lark.
The best of the new batch, San Junipero, is also the biggest departure. First, because it deposits its lead characters, played by Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha- Raw, in the past, 1987 to be precise. ( I’ ll say no more, except that, per usual, the story takes more than one unexpected turn.) Second, because it’s bittersweet and moving — even hopeful — rather than horrific.
When the season goes dark, however, it goes very dark, as in Men Against Fire, a Rod Serling- esque parable about war and dehumanization, and Shut Up and Dance, about a young man who falls prey to an online blackmail scheme.
That latter episode, while suitably ghastly, touches on themes of cruelty and vigilantism that earlier episodes, like White Bear, have treated better. More episodes, it seems, means a little more chaff. Typical of the Netflix large- portions ethos, a few of the new episodes are too long, and compared with the lapidary early seasons, they feel diluted.
Still, Black Mirror hasn’t lost its currency. Its title refers to the glass screens of computers, tablets and phones, but the machines are not the danger here: it’s the anonymous, antiseptic monstrousness they can empower. The brilliance of Black Mirror is that it’s not about how technology imperils our humanity. It’s about the all- too- human faces reflected in our own black mirrors, staring back at us.
VARIATIONS ON A NEAR FUTURE ... OUR WORLD, JUST A LITTLE WORSE.