Some time ago while attempting to sort out my own thoughts on his first novel, I did a bit of digging into Louis-Ferdinand Celine and historical reactions to his work. I discovered one piece wherein the writer’d read Journey to the End of the Night while riding a train for some extended stretch of time, and had thus consumed it all in one sitting, only to leave the train feeling nauseated, as if the world around him was far removed from that one from whence he boarded, and everything seemed to make him sick. This is a feeling not dissimilar to the ones experienced while watching one of TV’s most ambitious recent efforts, Black Mirror.
Essays encapsulating the aforementioned can be found all over the internet (or here, here, or here, to name a small handful) so this won’t be one of those, but it’s necessary early on to nonetheless address the notion that watching Black Mirror is unlike watching other television programs because it so immediately engages with its audience, even having premiered in the UK over a year ago and just come to US Netflix recently.
If George Costanza was Larry David’s early rendition of himself as the everyman, television-watching, careless 90s white thirty-something, then each character is some flinty aspect within our cortex awaiting its ignition, each situation in the series is some event we haven’t lived and yet we’re so enmeshed with the subject matter, often posed in extreme first person with characters themselves, that a bit of the Celinean nausea can be expected, and might arguably be encouraged. The word most uttered this year related to television, it would seem, would be “binge-watching,” and what better way to properly acclimate oneself to the twenty-first century than a bit of purge-watching in turn, staring into the crooked reflected image of our not-too-distant world and realizing just what we’ve wrought and what ideally must change. And yet, this isn’t The Wire, there are no long monologs on the death of the working class or the shift in political discourse after 9/11 et cetera et cetera, rather the focus here is on an artful diagnosis of potentialities and conclusions to the many narratives we’ve set before us when we start and stop so many things on a daily basis that our potential life is simply too overwhelming to make sense of our actual life.
Charlie Brooker, the show’s creator and noted English satirist, anticipates this sense of being overwhelmed with the possibility of oncoming dystopia, so rather than throwing in the towel and giving up he hones in deftly on extremely personal accounts of the future that illustrate directions the state might take, as well as the media, romance, and identity itself in episodes so jarring one can’t help but feel rather frantic while watching, as if everything must be done simultaneously to avoid such possibility and we’re suddenly unable to move, transfixed to the screen that will shortly itself become that black mirror when the credits finish, and thus Brooker’s show again bleeds into our lives and warps our nauseated take on contemporary existence.
This is important, and another parallel exists here between Larry David and co. Any viewer of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm who’s seen more than a handful of episodes can quickly describe a moment in their daily life as similar to something which occurred on the show. It lends itself to conversations in the workplace, and ties our dull meandering to televisual drama that makes us laugh and thus perhaps lends some degree of perspective. Black Mirror operates in a similar mode, only it’s more as if your nightmares have been plucked and rendered by Philip K. Dick and Alejandro Jodorowsky and thus the show connects with our daily lives by accentuating the evils around us, and rather than offering us heroes or ways out, the means of escape are in large part left to the audience.
This is another tone frequently taken in essays about the show, wherein writers will simply state YOU NEED TO WATCH THIS NOW. This is an interesting phenomenon, and one I’m not unfamiliar with. After watching the available six episodes over the course of two days of frantic engagement I told everyone I knew who might be interested in this sort of thing (attempting to define the first episode’s premise while indicating it will pull out your guts and dip them in bleach is a laughable enterprise) they needed to watch it, not because I felt excited to discuss the show with them—as has been the case with discovering fellow fans of stuff already mentioned, and more—but because I so trusted the experience provided by this TV show that I knew it could fundamentally help anybody living today, which is fucking rare, and probably impossible.
Unlike novels which might’ve been passed around to visitors in the nineteenth century with excited recommendation, Black Mirror is more like the newly-published work of the Marquis de Sade being smuggled and printed out of prison, meets the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci surfacing and being a source of comfort for readers in the outside world. It’s as if it’s this insidious piece of propaganda that you know to be right and good, operating from a place of kinship with the universe and humanity in general, and yet you’re endlessly excited because you’re sure it’ll take someone back to the first basement punk show they ever attended, or the first piece of strange literature read that seemed to assert I’M FUCKED UP TOO AND I KNOW IT’S HELL TO LIVE HERE.
What’s equally fascinating to me, is that for everything I’ve read regarding Black Mirror over the past few weeks, for every interview observed and every special feature explored, I’ve seen nothing related to The Decalogue. That’s not to say that Black Mirror in any way rips off The Decalogue, because it doesn’t at all, but from the first moment I felt currents running from Kieslowski’s 1989 retelling of aspects of the ten commandments via heartbreaking means to the six (and one Christmas special) episodes we now have of Black Mirror. I only mention this because, oddly, Stanley Kubrick’s foreword to the screenplay of Kieslowski’s miniseries seems to lend itself perfectly to one’s first viewing of Black Mirror, and thus I offer it here in closing:
“I am always reluctant to single out some particular feature of the work of a major filmmaker because it tends inevitably to simplify and reduce the work. But in this book of screenplays by Krzysztof Kieslowski and his co-author, Krzysztof Piesiewicz, it should not be out of place to observe that they have the very rare ability to dramatize their ideas rather than just talking about them. By making their points through the dramatic action of the story they gain the added power of allowing the audience to discover what’s really going on rather than being told. They do this with such dazzling skill, you never see the ideas coming and don’t realize until much later how profoundly they have reached your heart.” (Stanley Kubrick January 1991)
Grant Maierhofer is the author of various things. All of them should largely be accounted for here