Contrary to what you may have heard — or thought for yourself, after waking up from that re-occurring nightmare where your life is destroyed by a smartphone app — “Black Mirror” is not anti-technology. It has been likened to the “The Twilight Zone,” often by creator and writer Charlie Brooker himself, and in that comparison the use of gadgetry on Britain’s Channel 4 anthology is most clear. Where Rod Serling worked with supernatural objects and plot devices, Brooker uses current technology “cranked up 5 percent” as his magic.
That sweaty fear you feel while watching, say, the post-credits scene for the episode entitled “White Bear,” is exactly what Brooker intended. “I want to actively unsettle people,” he told HuffPost in a recent interview, while walking the streets of London and trying to hail a cab.
“Just generally, that’s not my life mission statement, do you know what I mean? I’ve done other shows, comedy shows, that sort of thing, where the goal primarily is laughter. So, unsettling people isn’t my raison d’être.” And, as would happen repeatedly throughout the conversation, Brooker said that last bit with a mix of drama and concealed giggling, clearly just as amused by his own sardonic playfulness as you might be on the other end of the line.
Brooker at the BAFTA Television awards in 2012.
He gathered himself, and grew serious again, his tone almost a warning he’d put all kidding aside. “It’s more that I felt a lot of drama exists to kind of reassure people,” he said. Certainly, reassurance is not the point of “Black Mirror.” Like “The Twilight Zone” before it, Brooker’s show hacks into anxieties and exacerbates them where other series seek to assuage.
“Even with crime drama, usually the bad guy is caught,” he said. “There are a lot of series where shocking events happen, but they’re not usually tethered to the real world. They’re irrelevant to the real world.”
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“The design team had a field day with that easel,” he said. “They were like, ‘Let’s create something we love!’ With the technology, we have tendency to sort of fetishize that. They were also, when they were working on the design for that, like, ‘Oh, we should copyright this. It’d be brilliant if this existed.'”
A pig (and Rory Kinnear) in Season 1, Episode 1, “The National Anthem.”
In that sentence lies a wholly frightening thought, inextricably linked to watching the show: Just as Brooker follows what-if ideas to create these scenarios and the tech they require, the audience must also ask themselves, “What if any of this were to happen?”
“Oh, God, all of the episodes terrify me to some respect,” he exclaimed, when asked which he found most upsetting. “In particular, ‘White Bear.’ We bottled a nightmare there.” That episode combines elements of “The Truman Show” with criminal justice. “That’s truly frightening,” Brooker said, “because it ultimately pulls out to reveal an insane society.”
Seasons 1 and 2 of “Black Mirror” are currently available on Netflix.
