Proper Gander: Night Of The Living Tweet (2013)

The Proper Gander Column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes, when channel-hopping through the desert of reality TV and costume dramas, you can still find a rewarding oasis of originality. Charlie Brooker’s sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror (Channel  4) has returned to challenge and unnerve the viewer. Although its stories are set in the future, Black Mirror itself also reflects the past. In the 60s and 70s, sombre one-off plays exploring the implications  of science appeared on our screens as often as kipper ties did. Now, programme makers prefer to play safer than this kind of speculative drama. The future’s not what it used to be.

We’re introduced to Martha and Ash, a happy couple living in a few years’ time. When Ash is killed in an accident, Martha is distraught. A friend suggests ‘something that helps’, and signs Martha up to an online service for the bereaved. Its software gathers up all Ash’s Facebook updates, tweets and website postings, and uses them to recreate a virtual version of his personality. ‘The more it has, the more it’s him’. Martha cautiously starts swapping online messages with the artificial Ash. By uploading his private messages and voicemails, she can even talk with the software as it mimics his speech. Then, ‘Ash’ suggests the next level, which ‘might sound a bit creepy’. Martha’s soon taking delivery of a mannequin, waiting to be brought to simulated life by data from Ash’s appearance on any saved videos. And their relationship resumes, until she realises that ‘he’ can’t take Ash’s place.

Like Martha, the viewer is drawn in by what initially sounds like plausible technology. Surely, software which can analyse our online footprint and use it to mimic what we could say isn’t too far off? We’re already halfway there with Facebook timelines and targeted online adverts which use our internet history to guess what we might want to buy. Lured in, the drama makes us accept this software as the thin end  of an increasingly unsettling wedge. But despite our doubts, how many of us would be tempted to bring back something of a lost loved one?

Brooker’s drama makes us think about how much we share our identities using technology. He doesn’t dwell on the potential threats to our already-restricted liberties which come with our online presence. Instead, he makes us question how accurate are the personas we create through our tweets, texts and Facebook updates. If anything, though, Ash’s resurrected persona is more level-headed than how many of us portray ourselves online!

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Reflections on Black Mirror (2012)

The Proper Gander TV column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

A video is posted onto YouTube showing Britain’s beautiful new Princess tied up and crying. She struggles to read out loud a message from her kidnapper: she will be killed unless the Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on television. The first story in Charlie Brooker’s trilogy of state-of-the-nation dramas – Black Mirror – wasn’t going to be easy viewing. The bizarre, nightmarish scenario was acted and directed with thorough seriousness, making the programme feel more like a fly-on-the-wall documentary, drawing the viewer in.

Brooker is savvy enough about the media to make the viral spread of the threat across the internet central to the plot. The kidnapper’s message zooms through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter without the traditional methods of communication – press releases, newspapers and television news – being able to keep up. The new types of media are changing how we relate to the world. Information is open directly to more people, to interpret, spread and act upon. According to Brooker, this turns us into social-networked, YouTube-sharing voyeurs, for whom everything is titillation. He’s saying that reducing events to tweets and facebook updates cheapens them, and robs them of their real meaning.

Back in the drama, the government’s improvised back-up plans fail, and the situation for the Prime Minister and the Princess gets fist-clenchingly desperate. The kidnapper’s deadline for the live bestiality broadcast is approaching. Like the crowds gathering in front of their screens, the viewer is both appalled and dragged into watching, thinking, ‘will they really show it?’

Brooker succeeded in crafting an intelligent, challenging drama. Anyone hearing about the premise and tuning in for a PM-on-porcine-action trashfest would have found themselves to be the target of Brooker’s bile. The final scenes shifted the blame for the horrible situation to the gawping masses. This is where Brooker is perhaps too cynical about our lust for what we watch on our screens, whether on a television, computer or smartphone. So, Black Mirror is best watched as a warning of the risks of alienation by the share-and-spread immediacy of modern media.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Brooker's Bile (2011)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television is a “flickering fibbing machine”, according to uber-critic Charlie Brooker in How TV Ruined Your Life (BBC2). Using a snappily-edited mix of archive clips, flippant sketches and scalpel-sharp observations, his six-part polemic describes how manipulating and distorted television has become.

Brooker bases his argument on ‘Cultivation Theory’. This claims that if we spend too much time gawping at the goggle-box, then our expectations, morals and fears are more likely to be influenced by what we see on screen than what we experience in real life. For example, television has conditioned us to be frightened of dark city streets because this is the setting for so much televised violence. And, he argues, production companies have got away with this by presenting violence in a glossy, titillating way through public information films (“government-approved mini horror movies designed to fear you into not going all dead”) and scare-fests like Crimewatch and Wire In The Blood.

In his second episode, Brooker focuses on how different demographic groups are portrayed on television. Young adults are “mindless jigging gits”, dads are “tragic shuffling pitiful individuals”, and older people are “hilarious irrelevances”. TV encourages us to perpetually look youthful – and makes us feel inadequate if we don’t – through dross like the “devastatingly mean makeover show” Ten Years Younger. This trend manifests itself as ‘aspirational television’, where Brooker’s bile is focused in episode three. The theory behind aspirational programming is that “if you watch beautiful fun-loving people on TV you’ll somehow feel like they’re your friends, whereas in reality of course you’re essentially just a tramp staring at them from the other side of the room”. Some of his examples are jaw-droppingly unedifying, like My Super Sweet 16 UK. This docu-soap follows slappably-spoilt brats, including one who stages an X-Factor-style audition to judge which of his sparkly-eyed acquaintances are fit enough to attend his birthday party. How our relationships are influenced by television is the target of Brooker’s next episode. With hilarious bitterness, he shows us how television perpetuates the myth of ‘the perfect relationship’ through adverts that turn toothpaste into an aphrodisiac.

On first impression, it’s easy to dismiss Charlie Brooker as misanthropic and sneering. But his acerbic tone is really just a way of filtering out those viewers he would consider too shallow to appreciate his arguments. Buy into his style, and Brooker’s work is refreshingly perceptive, even exhilarating.

Mike Foster