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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