Charlie Brooker

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Haven’t had a TV for years and can’t say I miss it. Don’t want to spend all that time watching more and more shows, as wonderful as the seemingly endless content might be. The only program I’ve gone out of my way to view in the past five years is Black Mirror, a brilliant and often hilarious satire that some have called futuristic, though it can barely keep up with the present.

That’s not the fault of Charlie Brooker, the program’s creator, who’s brilliant. As I wrote in 2015, it’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. In our souped-up world, with ubiquitous cameras and speeding media cycles, as soon as you can get a handle on a situation, the moment has passed. It’s on to the next outrage or suspiciously communal viral moment. It all seems quantified, commodified and focus grouped, even the spontaneous bits. If someone can break through this sound-stage world with something genuine, no matter what it is, how we appreciate them. We’d even consider them for President.

In a Vice interview conducted by Angus Harrison, Brooker, who’s just released the third season on Netflix, discusses the near-impossibility of being a futurist when every day is tomorrow, the difficulty of satirizing and ever-more extreme society. An excerpt:

It’s impossible not to recognize a hint of frustration in his voice when I mention the binary “technology goes wrong” view of the show some people have. “I think sometimes, when people are parodying it, they miss how self-aware it is,” he says. “I know when it’s being a bit silly.”

It’s an important distinction, given the 21st century’s unstoppable, almost unknowable rate of progress. The idea of being lectured or chastised for behaving in a certain way feels alienating and reductive. Yet, crucially, Black Mirror has never really set out to make people look stupid; rather, its intention has always been to make people look like people. Flawed, bruised, and lacking the requisite software to cope with the threats and promises of the digital age.

Take “Be Right Back,” surely the best episode of the second season—if not the entire show. It’s a harrowing hour of television, in which a young woman clones her recently deceased husband using the blueprint of his identity, as spread across his social media activity. The episode isn’t a lecture: The characters are left confused and morally conflicted, much like the viewers. Is this where satire has to turn in an increasingly extreme world? To the intimate and the personal?

“Possibly,” Brooker nods. “I hadn’t thought about it like that, but quite possibly, that’s where you have to go if reality starts outpacing the grotesqueness of the fictional world.”

This outpacing, of course, specifically alludes to the two starkly prophetic instances in earlier episodes of Black Mirror—series one’s “The National Anthem” and series two’s “Waldo Moment,” both of which depict events with eerie similarities to real political events: Cameron’s pig-fucking debacle and the rise of Donald Trump, respectively. Yet, while the parallels do bear striking resemblances, the episodes show more the mind of a writer who is fearful of ochlocracy and the corrosion of democracy.•

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It’s tough being Paddy Chayefsky these days. Charlie Brooker, the brilliant satirist behind Black Mirror, comes closest. If he doesn’t make it all the way there, it’s not because he’s less talented than the Network visionary; it’s just that the era he’s working in is so different. I’ve read many articles about Brooker’s impressive program and pretty much all of them miss the point I believe he’s making about our brave new world of technology. That includes Jenna Wortham’s recent New York Times Magazine essay, which referred to Mirror as “functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course.” The Channel 4 show is barely about the future. It’s mostly about the present. And it isn’t about the present in the manner of many sci-fi works, which create outlandish scenarios which can never really be in the service of telling us about what currently is. Brooker’s scenarios aren’t the exaggerations they might seem at first blush. In almost no time, our hyperconnected world delivers something far more disturbing than his narratives.

Chayefsky and Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan could name the future and we’d wait 25 or 50 years as their predictions slowly gestated, only becoming fully manifest at long last. None of that trio of seers even lived long enough to experience the full expression of Mad As Hell of 15 Minutes of Fame or the Global Village. Brooker will survive to see all his predictions come to pass, and it won’t require an impressive lifespan.

Consider the initial episode, “The National Anthem.” In this installment, the British Prime Minister is blackmailed by an unknown terrorist into having sex with a pig on live TV in front of a gigantic worldwide audience. It’s supposed to be a shocking media event that unfolds before a rapt world, but the most surprising thing about it is that more people don’t time-shift it. About three years after “Anthem” aired, ISIS released its first beheading video, marrying Hollywood torture porn to real-life extremism, and millions of curious people pressed play. Ah, for the simpler days of pretend PM-on-pork penetration.

Another episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” offered a similar example of the future arriving fast on the heels of a seemingly outrageous provocation. “Merits” creates a world in which humans are reduced to automatons, forced to ride stationary bicycles to provide power the world desperately needs, the riders soothed by drugs and apps and pornos they can purchase with merit points earned by pumping pedals. One of the disconsolate workers not fully anesthetized by the sensory overload, Bing, offers his points to a beautiful coworker, Abi, so that she can buy a ticket to compete on Hot Shots, an even-more-offensive version of American Idol, hoping to become a pop star and escape a life of drudgery. She walks into a latter-day dance marathon where they don’t only shoot horses but the riders as well. Abi doesn’t realize her version of stardom and is instead shunted into pornography, another body offered up to appease an unwittingly depressed populace. Last year, just three years after this episode aired, the Fappening arrived one weekend on screens in our pockets, a hacked sex show sent to distract and titillate the world. One of the victims of the breach was the British actress Jessica Brown Findlay, who had portrayed Abi in “Merits.” Again, technology enabled the so-called future to arrive before the prophecies had been digested, and it looked even uglier than dystopic fiction.

And that’s how things are now. Before Brooker (or anyone else) can fire a warning shot, before we can decide how to proceed, tomorrow is already moving in for the kill, a drone at our doorsteps that may be delivering takeout or, perhaps, a bomb. If you hurry, there’s still time to smile into the camera. We’re all pioneers now, constantly, without traveling anywhere, without moving a muscle. We live only in the past and present, the future hardly existing. That’s what Black Mirror is really about.•

 

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I’ve read a thing or two in the Hollywood trades that made the British anthology series, Black Mirror, sound like it’s right up my alley. Charlie Brooker’s Twilight Zone-ish program looks at the dark side of all things digital, which is a favorite topic of mine. (Though the bright side of technology is equally a fascination.) The first two paragraphs from Andy Greenwald’s wonderfully written Grantland consideration of the soul-shattering show and how we now live inside a series of screens, which seem like mirrors until we realize, perhaps too late, that they may be something else:

“Midway through ‘Be Right Back,’ the soul-cleaving fourth episode of the British anthology series Black Mirror, I sought refuge in a second screen. It happens sometimes when I watch TV, usually when things get too emotional, too painful, too intense. The mind can’t wander, so the hands do, fiddling with pens and scraps of paper, drumming on the desk. Eventually — inevitably — I found myself lifting up my iPhone, my thumb moving circles across its screen as if it were a rosary. The mindless swiping of Candy Crush Saga didn’t help me process my feelings about ‘Be Right Back,’ didn’t make it any easier to see Hayley Atwell’s face shattering like a dropped wine glass. But I guess it didn’t hurt much, either. Distancing myself made the experience of watching seem less passive. It restored a flickering feeling of control. I couldn’t handle what was coming at me, so I threw up a wall to stop it.

Modern life is full of little walls like that, tricks we can pull to blunt unwanted or unexpected impact. There’s always a game just a click away. Or a photo. Or a ‘friend.’ It’s actually what ‘Be Right Back’ is about. The episode begins by toying with our natural need to be distracted, placated, and protected from the world before demonstrating, in disturbing ways, how the world is increasingly designed to meet that need. It’s about how we’re willing to submerge ourselves in the comforting warmth of denial right up to the moment reality sidles up beside us and rips our hearts out of our chests. So was it ironic or inevitable the way I was idly crossing striped candies when Atwell yelled at Domnall Gleeson for not being fully present? (Gleeson played her boyfriend, or at least he had earlier in the episode. The specifics are both too confusing and too important to the overall experience to discuss here.) I was hovering on the edge of two screens, fully engaged in neither. Did that make me the viewer or the subject? Which one was the game and which was the drama? Was I consuming media or was the media consuming me?”•

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