Traumatic exhilaration
CHANNEL 4 — NETFLIX — BLACK MIRROR — 2011
This series systematically takes one technical invention that is already developed or that is going to be developed in the near future and transpose it in a not so far future when these inventions have become predominant. The common point of all these episodes is that the control any individual believes they have over their own lives is negated by the use of this or that invention by people who weaponize them into control tools.
Then either the criminal side of the individual who is taken control of by the unknown manipulator is absolutely unacceptable by all possible standards, like pedophilia, and that becomes the leverage of the manipulator who blackmails the culprit into doing something even worse. Or the invention is pushed into some kind of society where nothing is under the control of any individual at all and the society that emerges is a society of eugenics, dictatorship, brutality, perversion, etc.
At times some episodes get to some kind of empathetic science-fiction, like a paradise on earth for those who “pass over” and are able to live forever in a pleasure town known with some exotic name where they are young forever. Unluckily along this line, we can also find those who want to get some revenge on the people who use twitter or some other social media to be nasty with someone, anyone, provided it hurts and provided you are one in a long list of participants who are the real target.
“Friend” becomes the very synonym of “hostile enemy” and “to befriend” someone is to announce and utter their soon to come death, demise, destruction. Yet along that line the most ignominious are those who implement some eugenics to clean up society and get rid of all those they consider as pest, cockroaches, roaches for short, no matter what the imperfection may be, though apparently not the skin color, and actually the Blacks in such situations seem to be those who find it difficult to go along with this discrimination that implies elimination and annihilation.
Far from being a series for those who are afraid of modern technology and mass media, it is a series for those who are conscious of the dangers these technologies and mass media can convey if they are used by criminal minds, if protection is not waterproof, and true enough protection can never be waterproof or airtight. So enjoy the thrills you can get from the deepest layers of your unconscious or at least secret impulses, drives, instincts, etc.
The one I find most disturbing is pedophilia in a boy who is hardly of age and who probably has not integrated the fact he is an adult and no longer a child. It is then not surprising that he can kill another older pedophile just to survive and be arrested by the police with the prize money he had himself robbed from a bank. And it all started with a love cake.
Good nightmares to sensitive minds and fragile beings. Apparently, the passage from Channel 4 in the first two seasons to Netflix in the third season makes the series a lot more gloomy and poignant if not sickening.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
