[No spoilers!]
The sixth season of Black Mirror was released on Netflix recently. Since it started on Channel 4 in 2011, Charlie Brooker’s portmanteau drama series has provided a distinctive commentary on the role of technology in our lives. Issues such as AI, robotics and surveillance – which we increasingly take for granted in the postmodern world – turn out to be nightmarish threats to the human condition. Worse still, no sooner can Brooker’s fevered brain come up with new nightmares, than they seem to come true.
Because it is science fiction, Black Mirror tends to be set in the near future, or an alternative version of the present. The technologies portrayed are usually a bit more advanced than those we have currently, but not unimaginably so: there is a sense that this is where things are going. So current phenomena like social media or reality TV are taken a step further, usually in a way that has horrifying consequences for the people involved. In imagining a future in order to comment on the present, it is classic dystopian fiction.
The current batch of episodes felt different to their predecessors, however. Many of the usual elements were present and correct: the dark tone, the Kafkaesque sense of not being able to escape something, the plot twist at the end. But in most cases, technology was not the main cause of the problem. And this was related to the other key difference: most of the episodes were set in the past.
Season six is the first time that Black Mirror has gone historical, and it has done so in a big way. With the exception of the first, all the episodes are set in the recent past and highlight social issues from the time. Mazey Day is about a paparazzi photographer, and is set in the 2000s when celebrity papping was probably at its height. Loch Henry is set in the present day, but concerns events that unfolded in the 1980s that have echoes of the ‘video nasty’ panic. Demon 79 concerns an immigrant shopworker in the 1970s, against the background of the National Front and the rightward shift of the Tory party. And Beyond the Sea presents an alternative version of the 1960s, where astronauts used technologies that were not available at the time.
Doing science fiction in the past is a challenge, as it is difficult to account for the presence of advanced technologies there. (Unless you incorporate time travel, which breaks all the rules of chronology, or create alternate universes.) With the exception of Beyond the Sea, all the technologies used in these episodes were of the time. And while they were less crucial to the plot, they all played their part, and indeed highlighted concerns from the time.
The paparazzi photographer was using mobile phones, laptops and a digital camera: only a decade or two before, these would not have been available to them. Home video is an important feature of the 1980s episode, and whereas Demon 79 was probably the least ‘technological’ of the lot, colour TV and audio tape played a role.
It is possible that Brooker is pivoting away from the ‘dystopian tech’ theme. After all, once you have commented on all of the current technological trends, you need somewhere else to go, and perhaps that place is the past. I would love to see more episodes with historical settings and ones that go further back in time, focusing on technologies that caused concerns in their era.
For example, the arrival of the telegraph in the Victorian period provoked alarm, since this provided an entirely new way of communicating quickly over great distances: some modern commentators have compared this to the arrival of the internet. Or how about the Mechanical Turk, the supposedly robotic chess player of the 1770s? Now that would be a great Black Mirror episode.
Matthew McCormack
HISTORY AT NORTHAMPTON 