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PaperclipPerfector
1d ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
It's been a slow week in work, so I've been binging the master AAQC roundup of the last ~8 years. I haven't been reading the posts exhaustively, but just clicking on any that sound interesting to me. I happened upon a comment explaining the difference between good and bad satire, and arguing that good satire doesn't just attack the outgroup but also forces the audience to confront things about themselves they don't like. To illustrate his point, the commenter cited S1E3 of Black Mirror, "The Entire History of You".
For those unfamiliar, Black Mirror is an anthology sci-fi series created by Charlie Brooker. Each episode imagines some hypothetical near-future technology and the societal impacts thereof: the results tend to be bleak, if not a bit darkly amusing. I had previously seen "Nosedive", "Playtest" and "Arkangel": of these, the latter is the only one I could really say I like without major qualifications. The premise of "The Entire History of You" (and the context in which the comment above brought it up) sounded intriguing, so I watched it this evening.
The episode's premise is very similar to Ted Chiang's short story "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling", although this episode came out two years prior. In the near future, a technology has been invented called "Grain" which entails installing a microchip in one's brain which records audiovisual inputs from your optic nerve and ear canal. This allows you to revisit objective records of your own experiences (which the characters refer to as "re-dos") and even cast them to smart TVs.
Our protagonist, Liam, is invited to a dinner party of some of his wife Ffion's old college friends. Almost immediately, Liam becomes suspicious of Ffion's friend Jonas, a brazen cad who has recently broken off his engagement with his fiancée. After the dinner party, Ffion admits that she had been romantically involved with Jonas years ago, but that she'd omitted key details for the sake of Liam's feelings. The confession only provokes Liam's jealousy further, and he spends the following day getting drunk and obsessively re-doing memories from the dinner party, hunting for micro-expressions or body language which might indicate Ffion still holds a candle for Jonas.
Right off the bat, this episode was a very different breed from the previous episodes of Black Mirror I'd watched. The first few seasons were produced by the UK's Channel 4, after which the show migrated to Netflix: this pre-migration episode features an entirely British cast and a distinctly English approach to social awkwardness and discomfort. (Hardly surprising that this episode was written by one of the creators of Peep Show: if Mark Corrigan had access to this technology, this is exactly how he'd behave.) It's also wonderfully concise at under 50 minutes, when my understanding is that later episodes have been criticised for being unnecessarily padded. Just as the AAQC comment suggested, I recognised myself in some of Liam's harmful mental habits. (Even more shamefully, I recognised myself in Jonas a little bit too.) For the first two acts of the episode I was on the edge of my seat, eyes fixed to the screen. I thought it was making a clever point about how technology enables and aggravates our most neurotic and obsessive tendencies. Liam's endlessly re-doing of the last night's dinner party, even forcing the babysitter to express an opinion on whether Jonas's joke was funny enough to warrant such an uproarious reaction from Ffion, is pathetic and destructive – but it's only a difference in degree from people rereading WhatsApp messages and hunting for subtext in the emojis, not a difference in kind. Sharply observed.
That is, until the climax.In a drunken, jealous rage, Liam confronts Jonas and forces him to show Liam all the memories he's collected of Ffion. Included among these is a memory of Jonas in bed with Ffion eighteen months prior. Liam confronts Ffion, who admits to the affair. Their marriage collapses, and Liam elects to remove his microchip, unable to bear being confronted with happy memories of Ffion whenever he walks through his home.
Whew. As I said above, I thought the point of the episode was to highlight how this near-future technology aggravates and exacerbates Liam's negative character traits, specificallyconvincing him that he's being cuckolded when he isn't. But in point of fact, he really had been cuckolded, and he was entirely right to be jealous and suspicious of Jonas! If not for this technology, he never would have discovered he'd been made a cuckold. The episode even floats the idea that Jonas may be the biological father of Ffion's baby. From Liam's point of view, there really is no downside to this technology: without it, his wife would have gotten away with cheating on him, and he might well have invested resources into raising a child which wasn't his own without his knowledge. So, I'm a bit confused about what the takeaway was meant to be here. It certainly can't be a story about Othello syndrome if your wife really is being unfaithful to you.
Mixed messages aside, an exceptionally well-made, well-acted, thought-provoking piece of TV, and the best episode of Black Mirror I've seen by a country mile. Highly recommended.
I think the episode's "lesson" is pretty simple -being able to replay your own trauma in perfect fidelity, over and over again, isn't valuable. In fact, it's dangerous enough to outweigh the benefits of reliving previously enjoyable memories.
I loved/hated the episode as well. I'll confess that I've dug deep into old facebook messages every once in a while, imagining the hard disks that store the data creaking back to life as I do so, a blip on their user metrics and behavior pattterns so exotic it's a rounding error in every dashboard.
It's an unhealthy habit, but thank Christ I deleted the threads I needed to more than a decade ago, and SMS backups weren't a thing until I grew up. Black mirror indeed.
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