Black Mirror: TV Review
Unlike anything that has been on TV for a long while, Black Mirror is a sharp satire.
Charlie Brooker’s dark, satirical look at our society’s relationship with technology began with The National Anthem, a harrowing parable of how the “hive mind” of public opinion is amplified by social media. When a twisted mastermind kidnaps the universally-loved “Facebook Princess” Susannah, he issues only demand in a video uploaded to YouTube: in exchange for her life, the Prime Minister must have unsimulated sex with a pig, filmed Dogme ’95-style live before the nation. But what at first seems like a cruel, juvenile joke quickly spirals out of control, as the video spreads globally, every Facebook post and tweet the world over asking the same question: will he do it? Attempts to rescue the Princess go disastrously wrong, contingency plans to simulate the interspecies intercourse become public knowledge, and when the pinched Royal’s severed finger arrives at a TV news channel’s studio, the embattled Prime Minister comes to the terrifying conclusion that he must debase himself in front of the entire world, watching with bated breath.
What made The National Anthem so shocking, and ultimately powerful, was the fact that the subject matter was treated with absolute seriousness. What starts as a cruelly silly parodic set-up soon becomes sickeningly plausible. The writing is taut and razor-sharp - Brooker’s perceptive eye for how mass media mutates and pillages a story, coupled with his knack for brisk, frenetic dialogue, leant the whole scenario a kind of unnerving realism. The actors wisely don’t allow themselves to be in on the joke, and the performances throughout, especially as we enter the merciless and gruelling third act, are absolutely spot on.
The direction was elegant yet briskly paced; the film moved with the rhythms and tone of a political thriller, but always managed to pinpoint moments of heartbreaking emotional gravity. What we are left with is a bleak, bold, intelligent, disturbing, moving piece of filmmaking, utterly compelling and harrowing in equal measure, that crawls under your skin and stays with you long after the distressing conclusion.
The second episode, 15 Million Merits, for which Brooker shared writing duties with wife Konnie Huq, was an Orwellian swipe at cynically manipulative humiliation contests like the X-Factor. Set in a future that looks like Big Brother installed a Kinect in everything, mankind toils at exercise bikes all day, earning “merits” to spend on myriad meaningless televised distractions. Brooker and Huq’s media-saturated dystopian vision was ingeniously conceived and stunningly realised - there is the uneasy feeling that we are only a stone’s throw away from the ubiquitous interactive screens, vicarious living through digitised avatars, and oppressively intrusive advertising messages of this bleak future. In many ways we are already there, and it is the texture of this world that makes 15 Million Merits so gripping.
Amidst this mass-consumerist nightmare we meet Bing, an ennui-stricken citizen whose monotonous and unfulfilled existence is brightened by the enchanting Abi. Hearing Abi sing in the toilets, Bing feels an elation he’s never felt before, and decides to front Abi fifteen-million merits (thousands of man-hours of drudgery) to enter a Britain’s Got Talent-style talent competition called Hot Shots. One of the strengths of 15 Million Merits is the relationship between Abi and Bing, and there’s a subtle kind of poetry to the couple’s brief moments of shy tenderness.
This embryonic romance is dashed, however, when Abi appears on Hot Shots, and despite delivering a knock-out vocal performance, is cruelly manipulated by the serpentine judges (including a delightfully oily turn by Rupert Everett as Simon Cowell’s Australian doppelganger) to become a porn star. On trial here is the way these shows chew up and spit out contestants, moulding young stars, packaging and selling their very existence as a media commodity. Huq and Brooker’s writing is unforgiving, and no target is spared - Bing’s nihilistic anti-authoritarian ranting before the judges, intended as an act of revenge for what happened to Abi, becomes commoditized too.
The final episode, The Entire History of You, imagined a near-future where everything we see and hear can be recorded and replayed via a chip implanted into our brains – a sort of Sky Box in our heads. An off-the-cuff comment by slimy lothario Jonas (Tom Cullen) about rewatching memories of past flings compels insecure young lawyer Liam (Tony Kebbel) to suspects his wife Ffion (Jodie Whittaker) of playing away from home. So he scours through his memories looking for evidence of an affair, with disastrous consequences.
The Entire History of You marked a distinct tonal shift from the previous two episodes, focusing much more on the “human” drama than high-concept satire. Written by Peep Show co-scribe Jesse Armstrong, the dialogue for the episode certainly retained the staccato patter that characterises the sit-com, but often drifted in shouty melodrama. This would not be such a problem if every one of the characters wasn’t so unlikable. Liam’s obsessive jealousy made him so repulsive that even when his suspicions are finally vindicated it’s hard to feel much sympathy for him.
But, like all of the stories in Black Mirror, The Entire History of You doggedly pursued the implications of its premise to its logical conclusion. As Liam, tortured by the endlessly repeated memories of his failed marriage, tears his memory hard-drive out of his own head, we see the same uncompromising writing that characterises the shocking conclusions of The National Anthem and 15 Million Merits. And the way Black Mirror punishes its characters makes it very unlike anything that has been on TV for a long while, tapping into our anxieties over technology, but offering no easy answers or happy endings.
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