Black Mirror

Dave and I have recently been watching a series called Black Mirror, written by brilliant satirist Charlie Brooker. I love it. In it, Charlie Brooker explores everyday elements of the 21st century Britain taken to the extreme. I love the genre of dystopia but it's been a while since I've seen such an amazingly crafted, complex, intelligent and original take. With the possible exception of one episode, all of the stand-alone stories in Black Mirror are chillingly plausible and darkly insightful of the technologically advanced moral vacuum we inhabit.

One thing that is fascinating about Black Mirror is how much it really makes me think. I have been bowled over by how compellingly tragic and clever the series is and how it deals with deeply worrying and disturbing developments in culture. Without going too deeply into the details of the specific episodes, I just wanted to share some thoughts here.

Commercialisation

Black Mirror exposes the ruthless commercialisation of everything- beauty, innocence, grief and bereavement, dreams, politics, justice, just to name a few. Nothing is off limits. Nothing is considered sacrosanct. Everything is commercialised and stripped of originality for profit. Everything is up for grabs to be sold out and cheapened. 

Charlie Brooker explores the extremes of commercialisation through reality talent shows, including the even starker and more raw crossover with pornography. Many of the episodes include an unforgiving expose of the sexualisation of women to a disgusting degree for commercial gain. With dystopic flair, he creates a world in which even the concept of justice is commercialised, with the obsessed public paying to attend a 'justice park' where they watch and take part in the protracted psychological torture of an accomplice to a child’s murder, in the name of punishment for her crimes.

Moral vacuum

Along with this ruthless commercialisation is the underlying moral vacuum that pervades society and popular attitudes in our generation. There isn't any sense of right and wrong. There is no sense of ideology or morality that go deeper than self-centred individualism and consumerism. All that is left is the pursuit of self-gratification and elevation of entertainment in all its basest forms.

Black Mirror shows this subtly and repeatedly using useless but flashy developments in technology. Gadgets which ultimately serve no real purpose. An artist does illustrations on an electronic tablet with an electronic paintbrush, then shuts the blank screen away, leaving nothing there. A man who operates an animated blue bear to ridicule politicians with puerile innuendo struggles with the emptiness of life. He is left devastatingly speechless when confronted by a politican who screams, "Who are you? What do you even stand for? At least I stand for something!”

The way that Charlie Brooker shows this moral vacuum in Black Mirror is so powerful. This pervasive amorality is shown to be a consequence of the relentless commercialism and individualism of our ‘advanced’ and affluent culture. In our relentless satisfaction of the self, we have lost any sense of moral compass or values. All that remains is emptiness - with dire repercussions for society and the individuals in it.  The man behind the bear disintegrates in this emptiness, destroyed by his despair and depression. It is painful to watch.

But Black Mirror goes further than this, which I think is amazing. This moral vacuum gives way to unbelievable cruelty. The public mood of mudslinging and obsession with assigning blame reaches fever pitch in this dystopic society. People lob shoes at politicians with contempt, angry with their hypocrisy yet holding no deeper ideals of their own. The child murderer is demonised, made to suffer every day for the explicit entertainment of the public, harrangued, unethically drugged and psychologically abused.  Zealous and extremist self-righteousness becomes a way of self-gratification, readily drawn on for commercial profit. 

Groupthink

Alongside the extremes of commercialism and amorality, Black Mirror is also haunting in its foreshadowing of a sort of groupthink, a mindless vapid conformity which turns ugly very quickly. No one in Black Mirror is able to stand up to this soullless mass mentality. This is the death of the individual conscience, replaced by a groupthink bent only on the things I have mentioned already. Brainwashed, individuals are incapable of acting and making decisions independently, puppets of the commercialist forces on which they feed.

The prime minister is forced by public opinion on social media to commit an unspeakable act to free the princess from a terrorist. With the power of a cult, the crowd on a reality talent show vote to have a contestant forced into the pornography industry. No one questions or feels guilt or shame about their behaviour. The power of the masses is the only rule. Frightening when the masses are little more than unreflecting and selfish consumerists.

What really haunts me about Black Mirror is that no one wins. No one comes out really alive, retaining something good and pure and real. Everyone succumbs. The episodes hurt to watch, even more so because they are so plausible. We are human and desperate and this is the world that we live in. That could be us one day, left to our devices and to the corrupt powers of this culture. 

This insanely powerful speech is the climax of "Fifteen Million Merits".  It is absolutely soul-destroying when this man succumbs. How do you really and truly kill a revolutionary ideology? You commercialise it. 

I highly recommend Black Mirror, especially the episodes “White Bear” and “Fifteen Million Merits”. (A disclaimer though: swearing and some sexual content, so if that’s not for you, stay away.)  British writing at its best, and it does what it says on the tin - it's a black mirror, showing us the deepest and darkest parts of our society.

Well done Charlie Brooker.