What is Charlie Brooker’s black mirror? Is it the darkened TV screen we get when we switch off our sets? Is it the ashen view of society he intends to show us in this three part mini-series?
Whatever the metaphor is supposed to be, it is as heavy handed as it is bleak. Still, it is some of the most confronting viewing of the year so far.
This week’s adventure is an adventure into the fatuous entertainment stream which overwhelms our lives.
Its a patchwork of everything dystopias have shown us before. Equal parts 1984, Fahrenheit 451 with Network thrown in for a little modern adjustment.
Bing, played by Daniel Kaluuya, is our Winston Smith.
Just like Winston, Bing is bored and disaffected. He wants to break the mould, to end the drudgery of his existence.
Citizens of this timid virtual world are forced to pay not for the entertainment, but for respite from it. The endless stream of bad porn and reality TV is paid for by a currency of exercise credits. We don’t have time to delve into the ins and outs, but we can safely assume some sort of overlord society exists who use all this green power.
Nothing in this second episode is really new. This story is taken directly from every dystopia ever written, with campy allusions to modern technology and reality TV thrown in for a 2011 audience.
It is through such an X-Factory (haha) type show that Bing tries to connect with another human being, the Julia to his Winson, timidly modest love interest Abi.
It is an aching desperation for something real, for some visceral danger, which leads him to spend all his currency on what he believes is a chance for Abi to escape.
Of course he fails, his grand gesture simply feeds the great entertainment machine another hapless victim. Abi is boxed up as a neatly commidified package of flesh, her body inserted into the matrix of hardcore porn that makes up at least half of the viewing time of the biker-drone proletariat.
Although the proliferation of screens is directly from 1984, the world of 15 Million Merits has most in common with Fahrenheit 451. Just like Bradburys cautionary tale, the speed of society has fused with technology to allow instantaneous candy to waft through appreciate of the little moments.
Of course the next step is for Bing to get mad as hell, which he does with Howard Beale-esque élan.
We are most of all let down by Bing himself, who will not pull the trigger. He threatens, he huffs and puffs, but is never able to blow the house in. He allows his desperate truth-telling to be packaged, just as he allowed his genuine feelings for Abi to be turned into something nasty and abstract.
Winston Smith himself might have stopped re-writing history to have a gawk at this one.
It isn’t easy viewing, but Brooker succeeds in re-iterating what many have told us before. Black Mirror has all the added punch because of its self-reflection. To laugh ironically at its own regurgitation has always been post-modernism’s biggest weakness and simultaneously its enduring strength.
