Black Mirror reflects today’s ‘festival of dystopia’
Meet the second coming of Rod Serling.
“The Twilight Zone,” Serling’s creepy classic, used the supernatural to spin its cautionary tales. But Charlie Brooker’s British anthology series “Black Mirror” mixes social commentary with modern technology to tap into our fears.
And Brooker has fodder for inspiration just by watching the news.
“It’s difficult, but 2016 feels like a festival of dystopia,” he says. “Who would have thought, at the start of the year, that by this time you’d have far-right populists on the rise in Europe and half of our cultural icons dead?
“I hope that we are equipped to deal with this as a species.”
Mirror takes its near-futuristic “what-if ?” scenarios global when its six-episode third season premières Friday on Netflix, which comes aboard as co-producer.
Sometimes amusing and often horrifying, the new season includes standalone episodes in which a young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) lives to increase
her social-media status; an American traveller (Wyatt Russell) learns the horrors of an all-too-real virtual-reality game; and two tourists (Mackenzie Davis and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) meet weekly in a California beach town circa 1987, with life-changing consequences.
“You finish an episode, and you can’t help but just sit there for a little while and think about yourself,” says Michael Kelly (“House of Cards”), who plays an enigmatic psychologist who helps soldiers fight alien enemies in the “Men Against Fire” episode.
“It really makes you question your moral compass and what you would do in these situations.”
Brooker welcomes descriptions of “Mirror” as a techno-Twilight Zone (“I’d be honoured and almost embarrassed”), and Russell sees the similarities.
“All of the existential ideas that certain ‘Twilight Zone’ episodes had were really deeply thought out. Rod Serling was the one doing it all, and Charlie Brooker is doing the same thing,” says Russell.
The actor fell in love with the show after watching a second-season episode in which a young widow (Hayley Atwell) misses her recently deceased husband (Domhnall Gleeson) and has his persona uploaded to a robot body. (Suffice it to say, the old magic is gone.)
While “Mirror” spotlights humanity’s darker side, Brooker finds himself using his chops as a former comedy writer to pull off these “gotcha” punchline stories.
“Often in ‘Black Mirror’ there’s a worst-case scenario being played out that’s getting worse and worse and worse, which is the same dynamic that occurs in ‘Fawlty Towers,’” Brooker says
He’s already hard at work on a new season, and he’s finding inspiration at home:
One of the stories will focus on parenting.
“My latest thing is watching the kids play with iPads and having their own Netflix profiles,” Brooker says.
Brooker says he’s simply paying attention to the world around him.