The first two episodes of the second series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, as a number of critics noted, were distinctly different from one another. Where the opening episode, Be Right Back, was melancholic and elegiac, the following episode, White Bear, was violent and scathing. However, despite these overt differences in terms of tone and style there was nevertheless an intriguing point of similarity in the way that the problem of memory and how it is used and abused by modern technology and media was placed at the forefront of both episodes. Both episodes portrayed lives and societies where technology and media radically effect the way that memory and loss is experienced and understood. Memory’s importance in relation to our identity and our desires is manipulated by the technology used to experience it. Yet even more significant, and ultimately horrifying, is the way that the relationship between memory and justice, memory and redemption, becomes problematic in both episodes. If memory or remembrance ordinarily hints at some form of redemption, possessing something akin to wisdom or insight, in these two episodes this promise is laid to rest by the way that memory becomes perverse or grotesque in the hands of certain technology and media. Subsequently, we are left with pessimistic visions at the ending of both Be Right Back and White Bear, the future marked by the perversion of loss, trapped in the glare of grotesque and monstrous memories.
In White Bear, the public memory of the murder of a young girl is played out through the performed persecution of the woman, Victoria Skillane (Lenora Critchlow), involved in her murder. Be Right Back, meanwhile, begins with a sense of personal injustice, as a young woman’s boyfriend is killed in a car accident. In both episodes, then, memory becomes a way of reclaiming something that has been lost. Yet the way that memory is used to reclaim the past, to redeem us of the injustice that appears to be located at its heart, is not shown to be liberating, but instead self-defeating. In both cases what we are left with is a compulsion to repeat and an inability to ever move beyond the past. Perhaps it is unsurprising that the real horror of both episodes emerges in their final moments. Like a satirical punchline, the stories leave the viewer in a real state of discomfort after the final credits have rolled.
At the end of Be Right Back, for example, we learn that Martha (Hayley Atwell) has kept the robotic replica of her boyfriend Ash in her attic. The future (Martha’s future) literally contains a mark of the past, Martha possessing a strange trophy of her loss and grief. This point a might seem unremarkable and glib, yet it seems to play against the digital world with which the story begins. Where we begin with a clean digital world, everything in its right place in cyberspace, we end with a real material burden, literally taking up space in Martha’s home. Despite the clear indications of futuristic technologies, which suggest the episode is clearly in the science fiction genre, there is a real return to the past in terms of the storytelling, the robotic replica of Ash a modern version of Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre. The technology that enables Martha to relive her life with her boyfriend gradually emerges, rupturing the illusion that it was supposed to produce: that her loss was not real. It is not simply that this robotic replica is monstrous, but also that the technology itself has become monstrous, exceeding the boundaries of the digital world, software becoming hardware.
Meanwhile, in White Bear, the episode’s climax upends what we have been watching for the previous forty minutes. The terrifying thrills and persistent threat of violence that relentlessly follows Victoria dissolves into the banality that what we have been watching was nothing more than a television show. The real stroke of genius in the episode is playing the entire set up and construction of the episode over the closing credits, the episode repeated, revealing the illusion that had initially captivated the viewer. Just as the technology that is able to produce a robotic replica of Ash reveals itself through its deficiencies, the tiny details that mark it as a fraudulent copy of Ash rather than the real deal, here the construction of the television programme is revealed at the end, the very thing that captivated us as a Good TV Thriller, emerging as distasteful and completely perverse. Yet whereas Martha’s future is left suspended, albeit burdened with her robot boyfriend, the future of Victoria, and by implication, the viewer, is even more bleak. As Victoria is placed back into the room where the episode began, there is a suggestion that everything is about to begin again; her punishment is nothing more than a continual repetition of the same.
Yet what is more striking, and indeed bleak, is that this repetition involves the viewer too. The implication is that not only is Victoria locked in these cyclical repetitions, but that we are too. The viewer is thus placed in disturbing positions, inculcated in the perversity of the show in the very act of watching it. For much of the episode the viewer must identify with Victoria. Her confusion is our confusion as she awakens in an unknown room, and finds herself pursued by what appear to be masked maniacs. Only on the final reveal, however, do we realise that not only have we been led to identify with a child killer, but we have also been voyeuristically involved with her punishment. We become involved in the very process of producing public memory (and, indeed, implementing punishment), but this is not an active involvement, but rather one that we must passively sit and watch, dumb witnesses to justice and the correction of the past.
This emphasis on witnessing in relation to memory and technology is absolutely key here. It can also be seen in Be Right Back. Note, for example, the way that the technology used by Martha to ‘retrieve’ Ash continually changes along with her own increasing desire to recreate their life in a way that is more and more ‘real,’ for the simulation of her boyfriend to become increasingly more life-like. What begins with email exchanges between the ‘Ash’ created by software (which has ‘recreated’ him using the traces of his online life), moves on to telephone calls, ending finally with a material reproduction of her deceased boyfriend. It seems that the true supplement to her loss is to bear witness to the presence of her boyfriend, to see him and to touch him, even to fuck him again. Just as White Bear portrays a world where we need to bear witness to Victoria’s punishment, to see a past relived, albeit inflicted on another, Be Right Back portrays a life whereby loss transmutes into a need to relive, to repeat.
It is not so much that memory is mutated by the media and technologies present in these episodes of Black Mirror, but rather that it has left it insufficient, that memory is no longer enough; we are called upon to desire more, to retrieve the losses experienced either individually or as a society. It is this need to retrieve and repeat our losses that is shown to be destructive, marking our future as always-already lost.
Cryptic Murmurs 