A ‘Mirror’ to Our Souls

Black Mirror, which now runs to four seasons and 19 episodes, is unrelenting in its depiction of connectivity as a conduit for cruelty. A condemned murderer is repeatedly tortured in a privatized prison that doubles as a public attraction. A doctor with a malfunctioning brain implant meant to heighten his empathy to patients’ discomfort becomes so addicted to pain that he ecstatically slices off portions of his own body. A woman is hounded relentlessly by a robotic guard dog equipped with fiendish devices designed to crush, kill, and destroy. One could be forgiven for wanting to take a bath after watching Black Mirror—at least until the fourth-season episode “Crocodile,” in which a man is bludgeoned to death in the tub.

How is such a mordant series mesmerizing? The episodes share three underlying traits. First, they are, according to the show’s creator Charlie Brooker, “about the way we live now—and about the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time if we’re clumsy.” He calls Black Mirror a “mini-film festival” of different genres, including police procedurals, space operas, coming-of-age stories, and so on. Brooker was influenced by The Twilight Zone, which used fantasy to comment allegorically on contemporary social and political issues. He has also taken to heart that show’s twist endings, many of which were dark: “The Twilight Zone was sometimes shockingly cruel,” he noted in 2011, “far crueler than most TV drama today would dare to be.”

Black Mirror has crashed right through that dystopian glass ceiling. The show reflects our contemporary fears of information technology, its second salient feature. Brooker modestly insists that the episodes are little more than “campfire stories.” “I try to focus on us being entertaining,” he said in 2016. “I don’t have any answers.” But his pessimism taps into a very popular vein of worry. Born in 1971 to a Quaker family and raised in a quiet village, Brooker had what sounds like a bucolic childhood. Yet his maternal grandparents were active campaigners against nuclear weapons, and he recalls being terrified by documentaries on atomic war. He found solace for his anxieties, he says, in “nihilistic horror films.” And he eagerly plumbed the dawning age of video games in the 1980s, which provided him with fantasy environments he could master: “I was fascinated just by the notion that this TV had a stick attached and you could control what happened on the screen. It was love at first sight.” The real world, of course, is less tractable, and he readily admits to worrying about everything. “Pointing out the madness of things is reassuring to people because other people feel the same. . . . It’s good to know other people are scared as well.”

Finally, Black Mirror isn’t just about technology, as one might assume from its title—which refers to the dark screens of dormant cell phones or computers. Unlike the usual science fiction show, it doesn’t consciously extrapolate into the future from contemporary science and technology. Instead, Brooker brainstorms outrageous “What if?” scenarios about ordinary human beings, and then imagines gadgets that can actualize such premises. He’s been surprised to discover that some of the bizarre notions he dreamt up actually exist: He feared that the drone bees in the third-season episode “Hated in the Nation” might be too goofy, until he discovered that researchers in Japan were already pursuing a similar concept as a way to address the recent decline in hive populations. “We use technology as a McGuffin to tell the stories,” Brooker says; the show is about “what’s going on with people.” Black Mirror focuses on ordinary individuals who have been granted extraordinary powers by new technologies, but have yet to fully recognize their own responsibilities and the technologies’ unexpected ramifications.

Freud pondered this question following the unprecedented massacre of millions enabled by the concerted use of science and technology during World War I. Humans had become “prosthetic God[s],” he wrote, who lacked the psychological maturity to master their mechanisms. Given the savage events represented in Black Mirror, Brooker seems to view humans instead as prosthetic devils who revel in virtual voyeurism, exploitation, blackmail, and communal shunning—all subjects that the show has explored.

Channel 4 / Netflix

The terrorist in “Hated in the Nation” is a misanthrope who proclaims in a manifesto, “Thanks to the technological revolution, we have the power to rage and accuse, spout bile without consequence” (an idea Brooker himself has publicly expressed). He decides to create a “Game of Consequences,” which encourages people to vote for the individual they’d most like to see killed. All anyone need do is append the potential victim’s name to the inviting hashtag “#DeathTo.” Many participate, assuming it’s a joke; and even when high-scoring individuals start to be murdered, new victims continue to be nominated online. The murders prompt the police to investigate. They discover that the killer’s motivation in creating the game is more diabolical than merely killing those who have been chosen by crowdsourcing. His real aim is to collect the names of all those who callously tweeted out a potential victim. In a single moment, he massacres the nearly 400,000 participants by commandeering a recently developed technology: those decidedly non-goofy drone bees, which had been developed to replace the loss of real ones. Watching the massive swarm of buzzing drones hurl themselves like bullets into the bodies of their victims is horrific, but—characteristically—Brooker adds a bit of parody, too. The violence is reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, and one can imagine Brooker chortling over his pairing of the birds and the bees.

While he shares the terrorist’s outrage at the irresponsible use of social media, Brooker is no misanthrope. In writing the show, he tempers the satirist’s rage with empathy for the ordinary foibles of individuals. “I think most people are inherently good,” he says. “When they throw themselves behind some ugly cause, it’s usually out of fear because they’re not availed of all the facts. The show generally reflects that. It’s usually just people with a weakness who end up f—ing up. We don’t have many mustache-twirling villains.” Jon Hamm’s portrayal of Matthew in “White Christmas” is a case in point. (A fan of the show, Hamm contacted Brooker, who then offered him a part.) Hamm plays a down-market version of his Don Draper from Mad Men, cajoling others to do his bidding with a combination of smarmy charm and high-tech devices that prove more injurious than cigarettes. Matthew hasn’t foreseen the consequences of his gung-ho salesmanship and gets his comeuppance. But the punishment seems disproportionate because we’ve come to like the guy, whose moral lapses are not that different from those of the smug authorities who sentence him.

For all its darkness, then, Black Mirror captivates because it is one of the rare science fiction shows with relatable characters whose emotional responses are plausible and affecting, no matter how bizarre their circumstances. The second season’s “Be Right Back” explores how a young wife copes with the loss of her husband in an accident and the temptation of living with a simulacrum constructed from the traces of him (emails, blogs, voice messages) remaining in the Cloud. In “Arkangel,” from the fourth season, a mother’s urge to protect her child from the traumas of everyday life leads her to adopt a technology capable of blocking anything unseemly from the child’s vision, which takes the consequences of helicopter parenting into tragic dimensions.

David Dettmann / Netflix

Brooker first became known as a humorist, writing for a British television show mocking the news, and as a columnist for the Guardian. This background contributes to Black Mirror’s distinctiveness. The show is frequently satirical but draws its pathos from treating inherently comic ideas in deadly earnest. The comedian Larry Gelbart famously claimed, “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it isn’t.” Brooker goes beyond breaking to shattering, imparting to Black Mirror its peculiar ability to lampoon and unsettle at the same time. He told an interviewer that the episode about the prime minister and the pig was “an outrageously jokey premise,” which when played straight became “genuinely disturbing and harrowing because, of course, it would be” if it really happened.

He also had a long stint reviewing computer games professionally, and his knowledge of the medium has had a major influence on the show, particularly in the magnificent world-building of each episode. Black Mirror is lovingly and convincingly detailed in its representation of projected gadgets and future environs. The show’s homes, offices, and labs shimmer in hues of blue-gray and off-white that evoke Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. The imagined devices are seductively organic and appealingly simple—both imitating and mocking the minimalist contraptions made famous by Apple’s Jony Ive. “White Christmas,” for instance, features a “Cookie,” a bean-sized device that makes an artificial replication of human consciousness. Inserted into an “Egg,” it creates a miniaturized version of your self that runs your home and life. With its white, contoured volume and single bright light at its apex, the egg resembles a Brancusi sculpture coupled with HAL 9000: a beautiful prison for the human soul. You can understand why the show’s characters would be willing to be implanted with or colonized by sleek, chic devices that make Alexa and Siri appear as clunky as a Commodore 64. One character has a tiny mechanical fixture jutting out from behind his ear that is likened to a sexy piercing.

Black Mirror episodes often adopt the narrative-style of video games, with characters plunged into a mysterious, unfamiliar world that reveals itself progressively. The second season’s “White Bear,” one of the most terrifying episodes, opens with a woman sitting alone, unable to remember where or who she is. She wanders through different rooms, scrutinizing furniture, photos, and other objects for clues. (Gamers will be reaching for their controllers, such is the urge to click on an item.) Stepping outside, she discovers that people are monitoring her from buildings or following her stealthily and taking pictures. They refuse to acknowledge her pleas for help. Abruptly she’s accosted by figures straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, wearing grotesque animal masks and brandishing guns, knives, and power drills. This opening is gripping, but it’s also a familiar, in medias res gambit from the introductory scenes of numerous video games.

Brooker is particularly fond of “Easter eggs,” those inside jokes so prevalent in computer games. He brought many of these self-referential allusions together into the gloomy exhibit spaces of the season four finale, “Black Museum,” and in interviews likes to refer to “the Black Mirror universe.” Creating internally consistent imaginary worlds has become a major trend in mass culture—Steven Spielberg’s new hit Ready Player One is little more than a hymn to a multiplicity of them—spurred by the pervasive cultural influence of computer games and the vogue for fantasy and science fiction generally. Thus, the writer David Mitchell declared recently that all of his previous novels are part of a wider fictional universe, just as Marvel and DC comics have exported their complex narrative “metaverses” into their film franchises. Black Mirror exemplifies the widespread contemporary desire to inhabit virtual realities of the imagination. Like Alice’s looking-glass world, Brooker’s is an intriguing space consisting of thought experiments and provocative reflections on the limits and promises of the material and virtual worlds.

Yet Black Mirror’s pessimism, especially in the early episodes, can be troubling. The first two seasons emphasized limitations over possibilities and squandered the show’s potential to combine entertainment with insight. This is not to say that dystopian fiction can’t have utopian purposes; pointed warnings about current trends can foster alternate approaches. Indeed, a Black Mirror episode from the second season, “The Waldo Moment,” proved eerily prescient in its bleak depiction of mass democracy in an age of infotainment. Waldo, a foul-mouthed cartoon bear operated by an apolitical comedian, mocks the political establishment on a television comedy. To garner publicity for the show, the producers enter him in an election, in which his role is to insult his opponents and execrate the status quo. Waldo has no platform but gains wide support by alluding to the size of his penis and farting in reply to any assertions by the real candidates. Not only does he do well at the ballot box; he becomes the face of populist dissatisfaction with politics around the world and a leering mascot for authoritarianism. When the episode aired in 2013, reviewers complained that it was implausible, one insisting, “There’s just not enough there to suggest that Waldo’s moment would last much longer than 15 minutes.” By 2015, views had changed dramatically. “When Trump was elected,” Brooker has recalled, “there were people with banners saying, ‘This episode of BM sucks.’ At that point, you go, ‘Okay; we stand for something in people’s heads.’ ” “The National Anthem” proved unexpectedly prescient, too; in 2015, a biography of David Cameron alleged that as a college student the prime minister had “inserted a private part of his anatomy” into the mouth of a (dead) pig as part of an initiation ceremony at a dining club. Clearly, Brooker has a knack for intuiting public sentiment, technological innovations, and the possible porcine proclivities of politicians.

But if he’s an occasional Tiresias, he’s also a full-time Cassandra: Many of Black Mirror’s early episodes simply promoted catastrophic thinking and suggested the only response is passivity and escapism. Season one’s “Fifteen Million Merits,” for example, features Bing, a doe-eyed rebel against a totalitarian society that controls its media-bedazzled serfs with the possibility of upward mobility through American Idol-like talent contests. Inspired by his love for one of the contestants, Bing sacrifices everything to help her win, only to discover that the whole scheme is a sham. Even worse, his rage against the system, when publicized, proves to be a huge ratings winner. Ultimately the authorities co-opt him—Bing is given his own show to rant against society’s injustices, thereby strengthening its leaders’ claims about its meritocratic and democratic nature. “Fifteen Million Merits” promoted the very condition Brooker was assailing: the capitulation of human agency to technological determinism. Unlike “The Waldo Moment,” many of Black Mirror’s early narratives retold rather than rethought familiar complaints. Stories about technological surveillance, cyberbullying, and the malign social consequences of popularity rankings didn’t say much that was new, although they said it memorably. The show’s reliance on the contrivance of artificial consciousness, whereby human personalities are reproduced down to the tiniest quirk, led to episodes that were closer to fantasy than to science fiction.

Netflix

With its third season, however, Black Mirror began to fulfill its artistic potential and to dramatize the life-enhancing capacities of technology alongside its dangers. One of its most acclaimed episodes, “San Junipero,” explored how virtual reality could enable loving relationships that were frustrated by the social conventions and physical limitations of the real world. (The episode garnered two Emmy awards, one for outstanding writing and one for outstanding TV movie.) “Hated in the Nation” may have featured a fiendish villain skilled at manipulating technology, but it also featured a detective equally adept with high-tech who brings him to justice.

Season four, which debuted in December, continues this trend. It “was definitely a conscious attempt to expand what the show was,” Brooker says. “We didn’t just want to do bleak and nihilistic.” The episodes “USS Callister” (a Star Trek parody) and “Black Museum” both feature protagonists who capably use reason and technology to solve problems triggered by innovation. And, revealingly, four episodes from the latest two seasons feature women shown heading off victoriously into an open, albeit uncertain, future. Brooker wants to suggest that “we’re learning how to deal with these new capabilities that we have, these new superpowers we’ve suddenly been granted.”

Using his mirror to capture a wider spectrum of possibilities, Brooker is true to the central aim of science fiction. That is sometimes defined as forecasting the future, but while some science fiction authors have successfully made informed—or lucky—prognostications, it has never been much of a prophetic genre. (The number of stories that predicted the Internet can be counted on Chewbacca’s paw.) At its core, science fiction instead reflects the hopes and fears of the times in which it is created, but transposed into the future, the past, or an alternate world. The original metaphors it deploys help its audiences to better understand the technocultural changes they are experiencing. When novelist William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” in 1982, the Internet and personal computers were still gestating, and his fecund metaphor for how these innovations could create “consensual hallucinations” influenced many of those who established the infrastructure of our webbed world.

Science fiction provides the enabling myths of our scientific culture. These are all the more necessary today because those who helm the Silicon Valley giants don’t seem to be thinking far beyond their revenues. Black Mirror is ideally situated to proffer some enabling myths, given its stated focus on “the way we might be living in 10 minutes’ time” and Brooker’s bravura ability to tell humane stories informed by a canny appreciation of technology’s yins and yangs. These can’t be cast in the black-and-white terms that were used so glibly in the past—the 1990s with its techno-utopians; the 2000s with its jaded pessimists. (These were often the same people.) Charlie Brooker’s show has a clever title, but he’s making it one of the most compelling on television by seeing the world in shades of gray.