Black Mirror Isn't Just Bad Satire — It's Also Just Bad

[justira]

So the thing is: exaggerated reproduction of oppression is not in and of itself a critique. It is merely reproduction. To make it a critique, you have to actually engage with the mechanisms of oppression.

This is another way of saying: I hate Black Mirror. It is cynical without being smart; shallow while pretending to be deep; and is racist, ableist, and misogynistic even when evaluated within its framework as dystopian media. It's an endless stream of gotchas that bludgeons you with mockery if you have the temerity or — as far as the show seems to think — low taste to enjoy it. It's media that hates you for liking it. The show has nothing but contempt for its own audience.

But its greatest sin in my eyes is that it parrots back the faults in our society, magnified by technology, without interrogating what is it about either the technology or our society that makes these scenarios possible. In the vein of Daniel M. Lavery's immortal episode summary — "what if phones, but too much" — Black Mirror exaggerates social ills thoughtlessly and without examination, straight out refusing to engage with who would be impacted by technological advancement and why. One of the damaging hallmarks of dystopia written by white people, particularly cis white men, is that it tends to take issues that have disproportionately impacted people of colour, women, and people with disabilities — slave labour, eugenics, rape, forced pregnancy — and imagines them onto a magically even playing field, often accomplished by simply not having POC or PWD in the story, ignoring the very real roots of these issues in our actual world. It takes questions marginalized people have grappled with for centuries and poses them as edgy what-ifs for able-bodied white people, and acts like these thoughts are new and, god help us, exciting.

This is the most fantastical element of Black Mirror: Not the gadgets and future-tech ethical issues but that this technology and the issues surrounding it exist in a demographic vacuum. The show is about the impact of technology on society, but it has absolutely nothing to say about who has access to this technology and why, or how the technology impacts different groups differently. In short, Black Mirror is a show about technology and society that has absolutely no understanding of or interest in engaging with society and technology. I think that could fairly be considered an utter failure.

Dystopia is not a "get out of jail free" card for telling negative or morally complex stories, particularly when the supposedly morally complex parts so often just reiterate existing biases and tropes in very unconsidered ways. Neither is "it's satire" some sort of catch-all defense against criticism. The basic insincerity of the show makes it nearly impossible to criticize because anything I say the show has failed to be thoughtful about is inevitably defended as part of the satire. But it's not good satire. Good satire is thoughtful and engages with implications and reasons. Good dystopia examines the means and mechanisms of the negative experiences it portrays. Black Mirror does neither.

And it's not just that Black Mirror fails to write marginalized experiences into its worldbuilding and storytelling. It also fails to cast marginalized actors intelligently, seeming to have no clue what impact an actor's background has on the story they're telling. It matters who we see bad things happening to, who we see perpetrating bad acts. It matters when your heroes are white and your victims and villains are people of colour. Casting your story impacts your story. There's no way around this, and the only solution is to write and cast with awareness.

Self-awareness is not a particularly standout quality of Black Mirror.

I want to just go over some things portrayed on the show, going episode by episode and focusing on the representation choices Black Mirror makes and how those replicate harmful narratives about marginalized people. This will be purposefully out of context, because Black Mirror itself does not care about context. I just want to list what Black Mirror deems necessary to enter your ears and eyeballs while it's doing its thing, sticking to the framing of the episode itself where relevant and using the episode summaries provided on Netflix. I expect this list to be incomplete.

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Season 1

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Season 2

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Season 3

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Season 4

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Season 5

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