Blog Project #1-Topic 2 (Television Show)

Description

I watched the first episode of the third and current season of Black Mirror, a show that for its first two seasons aired on Channel Four in the U.K. but was picked up for its third season by Netflix, titled “Nosedive”. I watched it on Tuesday, July 18th, 2017 and it was released (along with all of Season 3) by Netflix on October 21st, 2016 (I started the episode at 3:54 pm).

Black Mirror is a drama anthology series, set in the near future, which examines how easily technology and current societal trends could lead us into a dystopia. While there’s this common theme, the show is a true anthology, with completely different casts, crews, settings, and storylines each episode.

In “Nosedive”, our protagonist is Lacie Pound, played by Bryce Dallas Howard. As with most episodes of Black Mirror, the setting is our world, just slightly into the future. In this reality, everyone is logged into a social media app that seems to be a mixture of Facebook and Instagram. Through this app, people rank each other with a star system (with five stars being the highest), based on their interactions. We soon learn that these rankings aren’t just a frivolous social detail: like a credit score, the rankings determine where you can live, what kind of car you can drive, and-if the score drops low enough-whether or not you can get into your workplace. Lacie, in an effort to raise her ranking from a 4.2 to a 4.5 so she can get a discount on rent in a swanky community, enlists the help of a consultant in a firm, who tells her that in order to get the boost she wants, she needs to impress “quality” people-people with high 4s. In what seems to be a stroke of good luck, a childhood friend of Lacie’s, Naomi (played by Alice Eve) –a high 4, asks her to be maid of honor at her wedding, the guest list of which is filled with just the kind of people Lacie needs to like her. Her fanatical focus on getting to the wedding and impressing the guests starts a downward spiral of mistakes and bad interactions, which has a disastrous effect on her ranking. She encounters a truck driver (played by Cherry Jones), who has a startling 1.8 ranking, the driver says she was once like Lacie but when tragedy struck she started to see how meaningless the rankings were and started being honest with people, which caused most to dislike her. Lacie continues to plummet towards rock bottom before finally making it to the wedding, where she is no longer welcome due to her low rank, so she crashes the wedding and has a meltdown-revealing that Naomi was more of a “frenemy” than a real friend. Lacie is arrested and thrown in prison. The episode ends on an oddly hopeful note: Lacie starts trading insults with another prisoner (played by Sope Dirisu), at first in anger but then, carried away by the freedom from always having to be “nice”, they both start laughing and seem to form a bond.

The episode was written by Rashida Jones and Michael Schur and directed by Joe Wright.

In a piece written by the series creator, Charlie Brooker, for the Guardian on December 1st, 2011, he explains about the concept behind the show: 

“I coo over gadgets, take delight in each new miracle app. Like an addict, I check my Twitter timeline the moment I wake up. And often I wonder: is all this really good for me? For us? None of these things have been foisted upon humankind – we've merrily embraced them. But where is it all leading? If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side-effects? (Full Article Here)

This area – between delight and discomfort – is where Black Mirror, my new drama series, is set. The "black mirror" of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.”

It was interesting to me to learn the meaning behind the name, as I had personally interpreted “Black Mirror” as representing the show’s reflecting our own world at us but with a focus on the ‘darker’ aspects of where we might be headed. 

Critic Benjamin Lee, also for the Guardian, on September 16th, 2016, writes:

“Co-written by Rashida Jones and directed by Joe Wright, Nosedive manages to create a believable and aesthetically impressive mini-universe without the need for tiresome exposition. As with most episodes, it’s an extension of our world with the excessive reliance on social media popularity and the dull preponderance of sweetly inane personalities winning out. Your rating increases with every nice thing you say and do, even if you’re lying through your teeth, which makes the tension slowly escalate throughout. Howard expertly nails a woman trying to be liked but masking a set of negative, or even just honest, reactions and emotions that threaten to bubble over.”(Full Review Here)

Bryce Dallas Howard was nominated for the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Miniseries or Television Movie for her portrayal of Lacie Pound in this episode.

Here's a short (1-minute) featurette about the episode: 

 Analysis

The episode begins with a very light, clean aesthetic. Lacie wears pink throughout the entire episode and everything has an “Instagram-able” pastel palette. We see more grit, mud, and shabbiness as Lacie’s rank drops, until she winds up in prison, which is cold and gray.  The show has always been very well done, both stylistically and in terms of cast and crew, but the extra injection of cash from Netflix’s helming of the show definitely shows.

The show is making a point about how concern over how other’s see and rank us leads to inauthenticity, so the attitude starts out with a sheen of unconvincing “niceness” to it. As Lacie’s life spirals out of control, the people and conversation become more ‘real’, and profanity, which had been absent, becomes frequent.

The show appears to have been shot mostly on set.

The obvious comparison is to The Twilight Zone, which partially inspired Black Mirror, largely because both are anthologies that have a dark or ironic viewpoint.

The way that Black Mirror seems to be a series of cautionary fables about our modern way of life feels new and different to me. The show isn’t just a series of heavy-handed “technology is bad” morality play, some episodes, such as season two’s “Be Right Back” grapple with the dangers of technology but ultimately see it as positive, if we can learn how to handle it correctly. Even in the more hopeless episodes (of which there are plenty), the sense is conveyed that the real problems lie with us and technology-especially social media-‘s way of focusing and amplifying our darker natures is the danger.

 Interpretation

This episode does rely on character tropes: from Lacie herself (the eager go-getter looking for everyone’s approval), to her “slacker” brother Ryan (played by James Norton), to the wise older figure who pops up to give advice (the truck driver). However, most of these characters are shown to have a duality-Lacie is actually full of pent up rage and Ryan seems to have a healthier outlook on life than most-I feel like Naomi is the closest thing to a straight-up stereotype in this show, the woman who is seemingly near perfect and very nice but who is actually quite cruel. However, Ryan at one point remarks that all of the people Lacie is aspiring to be like and be liked by, such as Naomi, are all “probably miserable” and when we see how brutal society and the ranking system is to Lacie, it’s easy to see that that’s probably true.

I think the target audience probably is “Millennials” of both genders (probably with higher education), though due to the message of this episode, the potential audience is quite broad. My father has also watched and enjoyed this series, so the appeal of the show seems to appeal to at least some “Gen-Xers”.

“Nosedive” seems to be set in America, although Black Mirror is originally a British show and there are many British actors in it (such as James Norton, Alice Eve, and Michaela Coel), albeit doing American accents, and the director is British. However, in regards to social media and technology, the two cultures are very similar, and both writers of this episode (Jones and Schur) are American. 

While I think the picture a visitor would form of American culture from this show would be pretty negative, I think it wouldn’t necessarily be inaccurate. The episode argues that our fixation with trying to appear perfect and nice at all times makes us miserable and that our lives can be pretty well wrecked by social media and the judgments of others. I found myself thinking of the TED talk by Sherry Turkle where she talked about how social media has caused us to have fewer authentic interactions and interestingly enough, I actually appreciated her message more after watching this episode. In a sense, there’s nothing new here: gossip and mob mentalities have always been dangerous and harmful. I repeatedly thought of the class system of Victorian England while watching “Nosedive”, where those of higher class reaped the benefits of the system, but at the price of having to closely adhere to the strict social expectations of the day. Social media has just brought this problem to the 21st century. While (for now) our social media popularity (or lack thereof)’s sphere of influence is largely limited to the social realm and not the “real world”, already this is changing: stories are now in the news about American border agents demanding to see the social media pages of people trying to enter the country, and many employers look at the social media profiles of potential employees (and are suspicious or less likely to hire people who don’t have one).

Evaluation 

Black Mirror is a satire, albeit a fairly grim one overall. The show is frequently described as being set “ten minutes in the future” since it deals with technologies and issues that we’re already starting to deal with today. The show has a lot of strengths, largely because of the high quality talent, both onscreen and off, it employs. It frequently incorporates a number of societal issues into each episode (a particularly devastating episode from the first season, “15 Million Merits”, tackles reality show “idol” culture, media sensationalism, fat-shaming, the corporate co-opting of social movements, and digital consumerism in the span of an hour). I think the biggest weakness of the show is its generally bleak outlook on our future and a tendency to oversimplify complex issues. 

I enjoy the show because it almost always leaves me pondering our current state and how one might move forward whilst avoiding the pitfalls Black Mirror imagines. It’s a hard show for me to “binge” since it has such a harsh outlook on where we’re headed and sometimes hits so close to home (watching the second season episode, “The Waldo Moment” which was about entertainment and politics blending together, to disastrous effect during the 2016 election was a bit rough). 

The third season of Black Mirror has a 93% score on Rotten Tomatoes, or near universal critical acclaim.  As previously mentioned, Bryce Dallas Howard was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for her work in “Nosedive”.

In an overall positive review published October 31st, 2016, Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone writes:

“The day after Walter Mondale lost the 1984 presidential race, he blamed it on microphones, saying, "I don't like these things. I like to look someone in the eye." It’s not so different from Dante in The Divine Comedy warning that too much chivalric romance literature can corrode your soul – if technology has been dehumanizing us since the 13th century, maybe we're not all that human in the first place.

That's the whole point of Black Mirror, and that's why it hits home right now. Technology is never the trap in these vignettes – the truly deadly trap is the human brain. And at any level of tech sophistication, we find ways to jump in.” (Full Review Here)

Eric Deggans, in his October 21st, 2016 review for NPR, writes:

“This season's batch of Black Mirror episodes are more consistently compelling than ever. It's tough to say exactly why, because so much of the shocking energy in each episode comes from plot twists it would be criminal to reveal in advance.

But Brooker and his collaborators have raised their game this season, aided by the bigger budgets and creative leeway of Netflix. The result is a half-dozen new episodes which poke at our dependence on and fascination with technology in bold new ways.” (Full Review Here)

Jenna Wortham wrote in her January 30, 2015 review for the New York Times:

““Black Mirror” resonates because the show manages to exhibit caution about the role of technology without diminishing its importance and novelty, functioning as a twisted View-Master of many different future universes where things have strayed horribly off-course. (This is an advantage it has over the movies: a blockbuster must settle on one convincing outcome and stick with it.)” (Full Review Here)

However, Margaret Lyons, also for the New York Times, had this to say about the new season (and singles out “Nosedive”) on October 21st, 2016:

“The biggest issue facing these new episodes is bloat. They’re all too long, which destroys any possible sense of urgency. “Nosedive,” for example, starring Bryce Dallas Howard and written by Rashida Jones and Mike Schur (the creator of “Parks and Recreation”), has not quite 40 minutes worth of story; the episodes is a full 60.” (Full Article Here)

Engagement

I watched the first two seasons of Black Mirror and really enjoyed it, it was a fortunate coincidence that I hadn’t seen any episodes of the current season yet. A few of my friends watch the show and my father watched it before me and gave it rave reviews. 

I don’t follow it on social media, since I never follow shows that are currently airing, for fear of ‘spoilers’.

I checked out the show’s official Facebook page and found it quite clever. In addition to news stories and posts about the show, they also post news relating to science and technology which is similar (or nearly identical) to what is portrayed on the show. There’s quite a lot of activity on the page, with 797,777 ‘likes’ and 795,826 followers. The show has a 4.9 star rating from Facebook users (so if it were a person in “Nosedive”, it’d be living a very privileged life!).

They also have a similar Twitter page.

Conclusion 

Since I’ve only become aware of Black Mirror since it came onto Netflix, I was surprised to learn that the first two seasons originally aired on television and that Netflix picked it up. I also was surprised to learn the meaning of the show’s title, which had not occurred to me.

Here's a great clip of a scene in an airport that really kicks off Lacie's titular "Nosedive" (warning: quite a lot of profanity): 

Bonus: Here's a trailer for Black Mirror's entire third season (some profanity):