The Old Straight Track
A woman drives a sinister car down a sinister road. She is texting. She is in the hospital after being struck by a driver who was texting; the first half of the episode is only a dream. Her physician “blocks” her on Facebook after having an argument with his son, which kills her in real life. She goes to Hell. In Hell she is forced to derive ironic punishments for other women who have texted while driving.
The Clearinghouse Dolls
A bunch of dolls just kill everybody because they’re all so busy staring at their phones.
Be Seeing You
The hypocrities of our modern society are exposed.
Grendel’s Mother Pays A Visit At Tea-Time
A woman falls out of a plane and wakes up to find that it wasn’t a plane at all. It was her seven-year-old daughter, who she had murdered because she kept blocking the screen while she (the mother, that is) was trying to watch reality television. Now she’s trapped inside of reality television, and all of the judges are seven-year-old girls with cattle prods. The real monster is society.
An Innocuous Everyday Phrase Imbued With Sinister Meaning Due To Context
A kindly-looking old woman wipes your memory with the trigger phrase “the perils of the technology we rely on in our daily lives.” You won’t remember seeing this episode.
The Sum Of All Feels
A mandatory update to popular social media site MyTunes requires all users to upload their dreams in a continuous loop to an external server. A group of teens is selected to reenact every single dream sequence based on the popularity of their Vines. Maria, a teen, finds herself recreating her best friend Jared’s dreams, and must give up one of her internal organs to a wealthy invalid with every line she flubs.
Raise High The Red String
what if phones, but too much
Nice Weather If You Don’t Mind Rain
Marie Antoinette wakes up on the final day of her life perplexed by the fact that her courtiers insist on speaking to her in modern English. She discovers she is living inside of a vast Reddit simulation, and the only way to free herself is by stopping Hitler, who has disguised himself as the duchess of Marseilles.
The Final Flight Of Marie Templeton
It’s Google Glass, but it’s your whole body, and Marie jumps out the window.
The Men Who Left
It’s Christmas, but everybody’s dead because nobody just reads anymore, you know? Nobody lifts their heads up for a second from those infernal pocket jailers we call phones to even cross the street before being merrily struck by a car. And everyone’s on Twitter, and that’s just terrible, and you’ve murdered everyone, and now it’s Christmas half the time, and murder the other half, and phones all of the time, and it’s all television’s fault.
Tags: black mirror, i hate this stupid show, surrealism, television
hm, yes, technology IS alienating and dehumanizing, I will change my life at once
Are you saying… the future is not as bright as it might seem at first glance? What is this crazytalk, Mr. Brooker?
This is perfect.
ORTBERG BOUND
A man is sexting a pig. She sends him a link to ‘The Toast.’
This basically happened but worse.
But what if male pig ?!
A couple lines of dialogue on that matter was in the TV show.
“what if phones, but too much” is also the synopsis of every anti-Millenial article ever.
Not nearly enough awkwardly inserted misogyny to resemble Black Mirror.
Indeed.
Allow me to attempt rectifying this.
**************
Messaged Directly
A TEENAGE LOWLIFE trolls female critics and journalists on Twitturd, sends threats.
His alienation from human society grows.
One day he is direct-messaged by a person who seems very supportive of him, and they seemingly become friends (or so the TEENAGER thinks)
Slowly it is revealed that it’s not a “person” at all, but a literal reification of THE PATRIARCHY itself, manifesting from interactions of numerous internet douchebags more or less the same way a human consciousness manifests from firing patterns of numerous individual neurons. Its power is vast, and it transcends human understanding the way a human transcends an individual neuron.
Its dark, Lovecraftian secrets drive the TEENAGE LOWLIFE to madness and eventual brutal, ritualistic suicide. Taking a hint from ancient Twitturd user @Grawly, the TEENAGE LOWLIFE live-tweets his step-by-step ritualized self-destruction as THE PATRIARCHY watches and cheers on.
In the process of doing so, THE PATRIARCHY drops hints that it is actually of female gender (to the extent a self-aware reification of a concept can have a “gender”).
The TEENAGE LOWLIFE lies on the floor, staring into the abyss of his webcam’s cold, uncaring lens, and feeling the emergent thing he considered to be his only friend stare into him.
As life and warmth slowly leave his body – as blood pools underneath him – he hears a silence, a silence of a kind no human has ever known and lived to tell the tale.
Terrified of this silence, he tries to break it, and manages to utter but a single word: “WHY?”
Suddenly, a browser windows appears on his screen, with https://twitter.com/messages in the address bar.
There is but one message.
It is from PATRIARCHY.
Message contains a single shared photo. It depicts drunk people partying and seemingly doing drugs.
The lowlife teen stares into the screen, his face stricken with horror of realization, and finally expires.
The TEENAGER lies on the floor, grievously disfigured and exsanguinated, his pale face distorted with existential despair, eyes starting into infinity in the general direction of the screen where reified PATRIARCHY keeps spamming party photos.
Camera zooms in onto his face, showing us a macro shot of his eye and dust motes as they dance in the air currents and slowly settle upon TEENAGE LOWLIFE’S lifeless cornea .
Lights flicker and there is a slow fade to black.
**************
So, what’s your opinion?
Not enough misogyny ?
Too much Lovecraft ?
So Slender-man is the patriarchy?
Well, my inspiration was Pantegral from New Model Army (and a friend’s musings on ethics of poisoning your own neurons 🙂 ) but I like Slendy, so it works, too
Reminds me of The Gernsback Continuum. But with iPhones.
Yay William Gibson reference.
I liked this show, but yeah.
How is Aaron Sorkin not on top of this?
Wish me luck, this weekend I’m submitting a pilot script for a show called Brown Coffin. It’s about a woman who goes home from her job programming the ENIAC and gets killed by a 1:4 scale model of an unemployed mathematician.
This post is the best.
Black Mirror = Men’s Rights Activist dystopian fantasy
Like, the Christmas special was pretty much: “Oh nOoooOOO! In the future, technology and law enforcement have come together to give women complete and total control over how much contact they have with abusive stalkers. WHAT HAS THE WORLD COME TO”
Really? I don’t think he was supposed to be a sympathetic character. I mean this is a British show we’re talking about, everyone is awful to everyone.
Yeah, I hoped the misogyny was purposeful, especially considering the punishment of the guys dehumanising women (prison-hell, eternal solitude, and getting murdered.) Although it was hilarious to see the reddit subforum on it, and how much that particular section of the programme (woman blocking her ex) enraged the male commenters.
Not really – that character might be “sympathetic” to some degree initially, but turns out a violent murderer later, making the blocking totally justified. The whole blocking thing is only really questioned when Jon Hamm has universal blocking by everyone as his punishment etc, which is obviously not just about single twitter blocks but the idea of What We Do With The Technology.
Plus, Black Mirror has some pretty good quasi-feminist aspects. Be Right Back had a well-written woman as protagonist with real flaws and desires and all (unlike Her, which everyone compared to BRB but was basically a straight man whinge fest). And the opening story of White Christmas was a pretty good takedown of PUA bullshit.
Basically, what I’m saying is Black Mirror is unsubtle but from a feminist viewpoint, it’s definitely one of the less shit series around IMO.
I read it as more sympathetic to him. Like, the ‘block’ is supposed to be a grander scale version of a social media block, but since we don’t have any technology like that in real life (Charlie Brooker isn’t taking the Oryx and Crake approach of making all the technology versions of stuff that’s in development now) its closest real-world equivalent is a restraining order. And the block is portrayed as completely terrible, and I thought Joe was characterised as a nice, slightly pathetic bloke whose only flaws are that he’s alienated by the technology around him and he Loves Too Much and end up being driven over the edge by the block. So the taste White Christmas left in my mouth was ‘Remember, ladies! If you take out a restraining order rather than try to make a relationship work with your nice boyfriend who shouted and broke a vase to try to stop you from getting an abortion and stalked you to your workplace, it’ll be your fault if he subsequently kills your father and daughter because you’re a heartless bitch.’ With a bonus of ‘Oh no! I’ve been cuckolded and the proof is that my girlfriend had a non-white baby, how terrible!’ racism. All of which is a shame, because I really liked Black Mirror until White Christmas.
But he was yelling at her and being borderline emotionally abusive as she broke up with him.
I read the character as being a ‘nice guy’ – the type who follows the social rules because he believes he should be rewarded for doing so.
The ‘racism’ is more about giving the audience a ‘aha’ moment, which is hard to communicate visually aside from race.
I think I’m in the minority with my perception the show, but it serves as great satire of technology panic. I don’t know the intent of the writers/directors, but the Black Mirror’s portrayal of the future is so absurd and hyperbolic that it’s hard for me to imagine that the stories are meant to have a moral.
IIRC, Charlie Brooker’s intent with Black Mirror was to depict what may happen if technology is taken too far. Or if our consumption/use of it goes too far. So it’s supposed to be hyperbolic and absurd.
That cranky old woman you keep trying to block on Twitter? Its you. Except “you” are now “E.W.E.”, a mechanized sheep-goat hybrid developed in 2035 to pacify the subservient masses with soft adorable sweaters and delicious cheese
I think you mean sheep-phone hybrid
I mean, if these were the actual episodes, we’d still have nine more episodes of Black Mirror than we currently do and I would be 1000% okay with that.
I would love to see how people who obsess over the genius of Black Mirror would react to a version dubbed with American accents.
They’re making an American remake. So we won’t have to wonder much longer.
“The Clearinghouse Dolls
A bunch of dolls just kill everybody because they’re all so busy staring at their phones.”
The end shot reveals the dolls are controlled by youths with cellular telephones who believe they are merely playing a video game.
Could that video game be the Kim Kardashian:Hollywood app? Because if so, DUUUDE I TOTALLY GET WHAT UR SAYIN
The end shot reveals the dolls are controlled by youths with cellular telephones who believe they are merely playing a video game.
That is literally the plot of an Iron Man comic, except replace “dolls” with “giant flying killer robots.”
It’s also the plot to the somewhat under-appreciated and totally bizarre Robin Williams vanity project “Toys.”
My family and I love that movie, in a rather protective fashion. I’m particularly fond of the Christmas song and dance number at the beginning.
Isn’t it also the plot of Enders Game?
I read this on my phone.
I read this on my phone. Where is that bloke with the stairs?
I think “Be Right Back” is legitimately brilliant, and “White Bear” was great, but… yeah, this, pretty much.
I feel like “White Bear” was a pretty interesting idea, but kind of bady executed. It was really hard for me to remain sympathetic to a main character that does not thing but scream and cower in terror for an hour. Ugh.
yeah i could barely even pay attention because the screaming was driving me bananas. i liked the show for the most part but this piece is spot on and hilarious
also televised talent shows suck, amirite
OR AM I RIGHT
don’t be nice to anyone ever or you might accidentally force lady sybil into doing porn!!!!!
all human kindness will lead to suffering in the terrifyingly cynical world behind…the BLACK MIRROR
I love that hating Black Mirror is the thing dudes seem to get THE MOST angry at Mallory for on Twitter. Mallory posts about killing all men and founding a glorious new misandrist empire and a few guys get a little peeved. She tells guys their British sci-fi show isn’t as smart as they think it is though and IT IS ON. “How dare you? You haven’t even watched it all! Your opinion is objectively wrong and you don’t understand how deep the show is! Probably because you are looking at Twitter all the time, the service I am currently using to respond to you.”
I love black mirror I am a bad feminist I guess 🙁
I JUST REALLY LOVE MEDIA WHERE EVERYONE IS TERRIBLE ALL THE TIME
We should make a test that rates the quality of feminists based on their response to black mirror
And automate it. And turn it into an app.
This can only end well 😉
Just want to clarify: I don’t think liking the show makes anybody a bad feminist. I’m personally NOT wild about media where everybody’s terrible all the time which is probably why I don’t love Black Mirror but a lot of people whose opinions I respect are crazy for the show and I don’t, like, think less of them for it. I just think it’s hilarious that this of all things is the opinion where terrible dudes on Twitter just cannot sit idly any longer. Mallory’s all but directly told them to come at her in the past and also after that she actually directly told them to come at her. Barely a peep compared to making fun of a British anthology show that’s aired like…8 episodes total.
I think it’s the default internet need to explain why people are wrong. Like, I think a lot of this article’s humor comes from taking satire literally for effect, which is the perfect mode to be in if you want to wind up Dudes on Twitter.
oh man have you watched Transparent yet
YES
LOVE IT
EVERYONE IS A MONSTER
m. ortberg in 1959: “srsly rod sterling his glasses broke? hacky.” “it’s like: ‘what if alienation of the individual through modernization but too much?'” 😉
ok
So I rewatched “Time Enough At Last” recently and it’s HILARIOUS how repulsed everyone is by the fact that the dude reads books. They LOATHE him for it. It’s super fun to watch but as Deep Thoughts About Alienation go it is not the deepest.
Yeah, I mean, I love the hell out of the Twilight Zone, but “Twilight Zone, your messages are heavy-handed and melodramatic and sometimes ludicrous” is 100% a legitimate criticism.
no no no you guys
it is impossible to like twilight zone if you don’t like black mirror
so cut it out
Black Mirror sees its relfection in a regular mirror. It pulls off its face. Beneath, it is the Twilight Zone. It turns to the camera and screams.
ROD SERLING: Who are any of us, really? Underneath a thin mask of perceptions, maybe the soul is really a mirror into itself. A black mirror, reflecting a blacker world, here in…
…the Twilight Zone.
NGL, at least 40% of the appeal of the Twilight Zone is Rod Sterling’s mellifluous voice.
Yeah, you guys can’t tell over the internet, but my Rod Serling impression is very good.
I mean, your internet impression of him was pretty good. If I can hear somebody’s voice doing the narration, it’s a pretty good internet impression.
I AM NOT ALONE.
It’s so smooth and resonant, yet also filled with purpose and determination!
no you’re right dude
i feel so alienated with all this technology that allows me to instantly contact my friends and loved ones all over the world
It’s almost as though, despite the ability to be connected at all times, we’re more alone than ever!
I love Black Mirror and this is hilarious.
I often fantasize about A Man commenting about how we all used to read on the train instead of looking at our phones so I can wordlessly show him my open Kindle app and the thousand page sci-fi novel I am reading.
Unfortunately, I’m sure if that ever did happen I would be too reticent to say anything or that I would happen to be checking Twitter at that exact moment.
hate it break it to you but you’re doing reading wrong
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2…
TECHNOLOGY, haven’t u heard
Lord. Is there nothing people won’t pearl clutch over?
Right? I only clicked on that article in the first place because I was like “OH NO IS MY KINDLE SECRETLY FRYING MY EYEBALLS????” but then it was just a cranky old person not understanding the difference between an e-reader and a tablet.
HANDWRITTEN PAPYRUS SCROLLS OR GTFO.
women don’t have the intellectual capability to truly appreciate SCIENCE FICTION, what are you talking about
It’s true, I am having a bit of trouble focusing on the plot past all of the “in the future, everyone is beautiful and bi but all of our male characters JUST HAPPEN to be in straight relationships and all of the villanous lady characters use sweet nubile coeds for sex,” crap.
What book is this silliness?
You do realize that the best possible outcome is that The Man would conclude that you are The One Woman Who Is Not Like Those Other Bitches and must therefore sex him forthwith?
On the other hand, Jon Hamm.
I do not even know what this is but I am still amused, Mallory.
bless you mallory this show is so fucking stupid
any girl who competes on reality television is an attention-hungry whore! A WHORE, GET IT??
No, no, it’s not her fault, it’s how TECHNOLOGY and our CULTURE make all of us into whores. And how whores are the literal worst thing.
not sure if trolling, or legitimately did not understand the point of 15 Million Merits, but I am gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and hope you are trolling. otherwise…..
Yeahh, I am with you. Do people really not realise that the scene with the girl on stage in FMM was supposed to be a criticism of how the media automatically sexualises women no matter how talented they are?
That one about Marie Anoinette would make a pretty good Doctor Whom episode, though.
The problem with Black Mirror is, all the technology that’s supposed to be scary and dehumanizing is actually awesome and should totally happen ASAP.
I know, I totally want one of those television/online bedrooms like they live in on “Fifteen Million Merits.”
I like Black Mirror, but this is really funny.
That’s not a problem, that’s a feature. It would be daft to have evil technology imposed on your life that turns out to be evil. Cool stuff that you love but comes at A TERRIBLE COST NOT REALISED UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE can make for a good story.
I am a huge huge huge fan of The Twilight Zone (ESPECIALLY its melodrama), like to the point where I am writing a multipart poem about it for reals, and I watched the first ep of Black Mirror and was deeply unmoved. Also, I cannot understand how nothing I have read about it talks about the “haha the prime minister has to fuck a pig” as a sexual violation of the highest order–not of the pig, but of the human. Like, I kept seeing people talk about “degrading himself” but not “forced to commit a sexual act without his consent,” which seemed pretty important to me. There was something about the tone of that episode that just horrified me and made me not want to watch anymore.
i think i love you. WANT TO READ THIS POEM.
but anyways, i actually liked black mirror pretty well in all its goofy glory but i definitely always tell everyone to skip episode 1 because…why did they even write that.
When this poem is done, it will be my crowning glory
“I kept seeing people talk about “degrading himself” but not “forced to commit a sexual act without his consent,” which seemed pretty important to me. There was something about the tone of that episode that just horrified me and made me not want to watch anymore.”
That was my exact reaction. I was like, so, everyone is ok with watching a man being raped (I think being forced at basically gunpoint to have sex with a pig is rape, along with bestiality and probably a ton of other problematic things), and then in the world of the show it is seen by some people as the epitome of art? WTF? I thought it was very disturbing and made me not want to watch any other episodes.
Oh thank god I’m not the only one! My partner and I just sat gaping at it, and at the end I was so disturbed I was like “did we just watch what I think we watched?” and then I could not stop replaying it in my head for days. Which is a tribute to the acting, I suppose–I fully believed that I was watching a man be raped at the order of his government. And yeah, not that thrilled at the idea that rape is a metaphor for our corrupt society blah blah blah.
Man, what in the hell kind of show is this???
I actually snickered at this point, but that might just mean that I’m not a very good person and probably means that I have issues with most, if not all, figures of political authority (including fictional ones).
everyone I spoke to viewed it as rape? It was meant to be just the worst most horrible thing you could do to a person
Yeah, this is a good point. Also the guy who devises, plans, and orchestrates the whole scenario in the episode is basically just a stand-in for Brooker – they devised the same idea for the same purpose, yet no time at all is given to exploring how messed up and broken somebody who would do that to prove such a dumb point is.
Yes! “Look, our society is so horrible we’d rape people for a stunt! So now let’s watch a simulated version of that.”
THANK YOU. I admit, I haven’t watched the show, but that is because I saw that episode synopsis and the way it was recieved and noped the hell out of there.
It makes me feel the same way I felt after watching the ‘Yes Minister’ stage show last year. Where one of the central conflicts was whether they should pimp out an employee’s daughter as a child prostitute to secure some kind of deal. All played for laughs. And just… what? This is your hilarious satire?
No thanks. I’ll take my social commentary without the side of ‘ha ha rape such a hilarous dilemma’ thank you.
I literally have no idea how anyone could like the first episode. From the moment they set up the dilemma I was expecting him to have to fuck the pig, and… then he does. Literally nothing else. The whole episode was boring because obviously he’s going to have to do it, and then he does it and that’s boring and horrible too. There’re no clever concepts and every part of the experience is more boring and stupid than the last. It was like The Newsroom, except somehow they managed to extract all of the fun out of it and leave only the sad bitter remains of self-righteous stupidity.
Black Mirror 1450
-People are so addicted to printing and reading all these new books they forget how to speak. A man falls off a pier and drowns in full view of everyone as he helplessly tosses broadsides reading “save me please, I’m drowning” into the wind.
-Heedless use of these new devices causes everyone to become nearsighted. A man is devoured by a wolf he didn’t see coming.
-A trollop lures a man into a giant printing press. He is crushed.
–A man thinks he sees an angel. It turns out that he is just in a Medieval Mystery Play where everyone has been given a script.
I love this show, but this is spot on and brilliant.
I would watch the hell out of the Marie Antoinette episode. Honestly, I would watch the hell out of any of these.
I want an episode where people cheerily slide into the Minority Report goo because the health benefits are amazing, and you’re preventing MURDER, and also you get to vicariously check out people’s lives at high-intensity moments. High fives all around!
The current version is a little bit “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas” and no-one thinks about the child in the dungeon. I want something more like the one where the autistic girl gets to be a crab that is in a place with excellent rocks and the crab has fewer sensory problems.
I actually kind of wanna watch “Nice Weather If You Don’t Like Rain.”
I love Black Mirror AND I love this article. Plus, props on the subtle Prisoner reference.
I don’t particularly mind BM (it’s very… uneven, shall we say, but there are redeeming moments), but this was hilarious!
P.S.:
Also, I’m curious what people think about my very humble stab at this whole “parody black mirror” thing (edit: figured out how to link to specific comment here. Yay me!) 🙂
I think they should do that Marie Antoinette one because it is my NIGHTMARES. (Reddit is The Worst.)
Eventually Black Mirror will run out of ideas and every episode will just be people in giant smartphone costumes bumping into each other.
ilu Mallory
At first it seemed like Charlie Brooker’s closest American analogue was Lewis Black, but over time it’s become a little more apparent that he’s nothing less than the Penn Jiilette of the UK. Whatever the case he’s solidly in the Vociferous White Man Opinions school of comedy. I was gabbing about it with a friend who compared him to Louis CK (in that they’re both TV auteur types) but, even as ambivalent as I am about CK, his comedy has a neurosis about it that Brooker’s lacks. VWMO comedians never disappoint themselves. It’s what makes them such abysmal satirists.
The whole internet is so in love with this trash it’s giving me a headache. I can barely find ANY critique of how gross it is. Anyone have articles?
When I was 14 I had a boyfriend who swore blind he’d come up with the idea for the Matrix and began every sentence with ‘if you think about it’.
I dunno, Black Mirror always makes me think of him.
Was he Charlie Brooker?
Black Mirror is the Banksy of TV shows.
…but what has banksy ever done to you?
Banksy showed me that war is bad, and now I can never be happy again 🙁
Do tell more. No, really.
But war is over, if you want it.
One can only hope that Black Mirror’s “riskiness” clears the way for better shows.
Uh oh. I was excited to start this but now am worried it is a cesspool of terribleness. I couldn’t even get through True Detective – my fuse is short!
yeah, too much screen time of just white men gabbing. Blah de blah de blah de existentialism. (TD)
I got most of the way through the second episode, and then I got bored and quit.
IIRC, Charlie Brooker's intent with Black Mirror was to depict what may happen if technology is taken too far. Or if our consumption/use of it goes too far. So it's supposed to be hyperbolic and absurd.
Yay William Gibson reference.
YES! And… why would anyone dream this thing up to show how horrible our society is, and then be the driving force behind making him do this horrible thing? So between being horrified and the character motivation not making any sense at all, nopenopenopenope. If I’m going to feel sick after watching TV, there had better at least be some brilliance behind it, too. And nope. That first episode had might as well just be, “Please do not watch our show, the writers look down on the viewers as awful specimens who watch simulated rape for the sheer spectacle of it.”
This was supposed to be a reply to Dr LadyBusiness up there. Oh well.
I’ve never seen an episode of Black Mirror but after reading the premise this is exactly what I assumed it would be and thank you for giving voice to the dismissive anticrotchetiness of a generation