Agreed on
San Junipero – easily the best episode of this season, and it ranks alongside the best of Black Mirror (for me, that’s
Be Right Back,
White Bear and
15 Million Merits). Like other episodes, it leaves you with such a complex mess of thoughts and emotions. Is it uplifting or horrifying, or a bit of both? It had the same director as
Be Right Back, and the same level of emotional and psychological maturity.
I liked most of the other episodes too, although they all had their problems – often, as many reviewers have pointed out, when it comes to the endings.
Men Against Fire would have been about twice as good if they had just cut out all that clunky exposition in the last few minutes.
For instance, Catarina could have been unable to speak a word of English, then the other soldier just comes in and shoots her and the kid; and then in the cell, Arquette could have just walked in and played the video, then offered Stripe the ultimatum. It’s a shame that Brooker forgot the ‘show don’t tell’ principle here, and didn’t just let the audience figure out the backstory for themselves.
, despite some good moments, really didn’t work for me at all. I agree that the MeowMeowBeenz episode of Community did this exact idea with far more wit and bite, and, strange to say, more convincingly as well.
Interesting comments on
Shut Up and Dance. It left me feeling quite sick and depressed for a while after I finished it, which I've come to expect from this series. I think I know what people mean by ‘unearned moral superiority’, but correct me if what I’m about to say gets the wrong end of stick. Have you seen the earlier episodes? I’m talking specifically about (even naming them in this context constitutes a major spoiler):
White Bear and White Christmas. I'm venturing nervously into controversial territory now, but here goes...
One of Charlie Brooker’s major interests is how we as a culture treat people who have done something wrong, and especially how quick we are to write people off as undeserving of empathy – as Colin put it on the previous page, how we pigeon-hole someone into a single category, and fix them in that state forever. In the UK, the prime objects of such demonisation are of course paedophiles.
Brooker was one of the writers on the ‘Paedogeddon’ episode of Brass Eye, which targeted the media’s confused and conflicted attitude to these issues. Its most insightful point was that the tabloids’ campaign of fury against paedophiles is not motivated by genuine moral indignation, or by a genuine concern to see that justice is done, or by a real understanding of the damaging impact sexual abuse has on children, but by its own and its readers’ un-addressed sexual hang-ups.
This was hilariously reinforced by the tabloids themselves during the inevitable furore after the episode was broadcast: the Sun ran a piece condemning the show, while just a few inches to the left, on the facing page, you could see a delightful article about how Charlotte Church had just turned 15 (they even had some sort of creepy ‘countdown’ going, I think) and was starting to develop breasts. Elsewhere in the same issue they had photos of ‘bikini princesses’ Eugenie and Beatrice, who were about 11 and 13 at the time.
The media is quite happy to sexualise and exploit underage girls, and to invade their privacy, in order to sate their audience’s presumed (and actual) desire to see such things. Not to mention all the ways in which they exploit women ‘of age’, perpetuating misogynist stereotypes, rape culture, blaming and victimising the victims they are allegedly standing up for when they go on the offensive; not to mention their vilification of the poor, support of homophobia, racism, war, etc., etc.... When they vilify ‘vile, monstrous’ paedophiles, that’s part of the same thing, and it caters to similar tendencies in the audience: our presumed desire to fuck and/or kill our fellow human beings, and to be told that we don’t have to feel guilty for doing so (because the rest of the mob is doing it too).
A few years ago, a columnist called Jan Moir wrote a hateful, homophobic article, and Brooker himself joined in the backlash against it. He said that afterwards he felt as though he had joined a lynch mob. (Obviously, this is a central issue in Hated in the Nation as well.) I think it’s one of the most important issues he deals with: the way we treat ‘the worst’ amongst us, and what that says about who we are, collectively and individually.
What these Black Mirror episodes do so brilliantly is to give us sympathetic characters, and then slot them into those widely vilified roles, confronting us with the really difficult question, how do we feel about these people now? I know someone – not a bad person at all, but he does read and largely agree with the Daily Mail – who cheered at the end of White Bear, and thought it was ‘a great idea’. He might feel the same way about the punishments meted out at the end of White Christmas as well. I’ve seen online reviews of Shut Up and Dance which say that we’re supposed to abandon any sympathy for Kenny at the end. I read one comment saying something like ‘When I found out what he’d done, I was screaming at the TV hoping he would get what he deserved’. Like the earlier episodes, it’s designed so that you can react to it like that if you want to, which for me is what makes it so disturbing.
Here’s how I see it, though. Kenny is built up as an extremely sympathetic character. He’s obviously troubled and shy, his father is mysteriously absent, his mother seems nice but kind of distant and oblivious, he lives in a poor area, he has a shitty job, and his colleagues bully him. He’s also nice to children, although of course this takes on an extra layer of meaning in the wake of the final revelations. For most of the episode, we assume that the blackmailers are just malevolent bastards who get a kick out of seeing people suffer. At the end, we find out that all the targets are ‘deserving’ of punishment to some extent: a racist politician, a man cheating on his wife with a prostitute, a peeping tom. And Kenny is singled out for the worst punishment – he will now be tried for looking at child porn, robbing a bank, and killing a man – because he is the worst offender.
So these blackmailers are actually moral vigilantes, an extension of stuff like WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and especially ‘The Impact Team’ who hacked the notorious Ashley Madison website, exposing thousands of philandering bastards in the process. When I heard about that story, I couldn’t help thinking that some of the users involved, however small a proportion, must have been sad lonely people trapped in loveless marriages, who had finally found some straw of happiness to cling to – for all that I participated in the schadenfreude this story was greeted with, I also felt conflicted about it.
At the end of this episode, I still felt sorry for Kenny. Looking at child porn is terrible, because it helps to support and perpetuate the sexual abuse of children, and Kenny is morally culpable for looking at those photos. He shouldn’t be able to get away with it, and some kind of punishment is appropriate. But he’s still the confused, tormented kid we’ve come to know in the course of the episode, even if that one crucial piece of information was withheld from us. This isn’t one of those lame twisty thrillers where the hero turns out to be the bad guy, and puts on an evil face and evil voice at the end. It’s important that, when we sort of find out what Kenny has done, we also see that he would rather kill himself than kill another human being; he doesn’t just pull the gun out and cold-bloodedly try to shoot his opponent. That tells us that he isn’t simply an evil, conscience-less person; on the contrary, he obviously feels genuine guilt and self-loathing for what he has done.
But to reiterate, in our culture today, if someone has done something wrong, and especially if they’re found to have paedophilic desires, they are instantly and automatically an inherently bad person, undeserving of empathy, deserving of the most extreme punishment – and it’s clear that Kenny, if he doesn’t manage to kill himself, now faces a lifelong Hell-on-Earth – and whatever else you thought you knew about them needs to be dismissed and forgotten. I’m actually quite nervous about even writing this post, because I’m afraid that someone might respond by saying, ‘How can you sympathise with a paedophile? Are you a paedo yourself or something?’ I wish I lived in a society that was able to see these issues in a balanced, measured, responsible way, and that could see Kenny the way I see him: as someone who has committed a crime and should be brought to justice, but who is also a human being in need of care and sympathy.
Having looked at this issue from the angle of the media (in White Bear, which is basically a Daily Mail comments page come to life) and in terms of state-run torture and punishment (in White Christmas), Shut Up and Dance considers the role that vigilante hackers might play in a society as de-humanising as ours. As Brooker said in one of his yearly review shows, ‘We’re getting better at dismissing people’. For all that this was a flawed episode – I wish they’d been able to get the same director as for White Bear, as then it might have had better pacing and momentum – I love that this show is courageous enough to suggest that there is a serious problem with a culture that defines its morality in terms of how much it can hate and punish ‘bad people’. It isn’t one-sided, and to some extent it’s undoubtedly a good thing that such acts are now easier to expose, harder to get away with. But the spirit in which they are exposed and punished matters a great deal, and it’s horrifying that we might be in danger of losing sight of that fact.