Black Mirror - 'White Bear' : Review

The second installment of Black Mirror’s eagerly anticipated follow-up series is a confusing, sprawling and horrific thriller. Desperately bleak in contrast to the episode that preceded it, ‘White Bear’ takes inspiration from zombie horror and spins an imaginative satire of communication technology and capital punishment.

We follow a young woman, waking up in a strange bedroom with a splitting headache and no recollection of how she got there. Fun as that may sound, our ‘protagonist’ apprehensively meanders around the house desperately looking for clues as to her whereabouts. As she leaves the house and wanders the encompassing estate, her movements are stalked by unresponsive voyeurs armed to the teeth with iphones. This serves as a blunt comment on the social media apparatus that have provided yet more barriers between us and the real world. These iphone zombies are herded by a set of masked hunters with video-game comical weaponry, from a hunting rifle to a baseball bat (typical Brooker), who have taken it upon themselves to hunt down those that are immune to the pseudo-zombification that has befallen the rest of mankind. 

The episode goes on to play out as any other horror flick would do, the woman and her accomplices getting into some jeopardy with their hunters and striving to knock out the zombifying radio signal that is responsible for all the stalking masses. It feels like a B-Movie, and so it should given the context. Unremarkable dialogue, with strange pacing and some odd camerawork, make the first half an hour slow watching, as though it were building to a crescendo. And crescendo it does, with a twist as unexpected as Bruce Willis being dead on The One Show.

It turns out that the leading lady is being punished for a Myra Hindley-esque role in the murder of a young child, of which brief glimpses had been seen in flashbacks throughout the episode. The entire plot up until this point has been an elaborate fiction, her accomplices and tormentors just actors. Inside the radio tower, the blinking lights of electrical equipment rotate and reveal an audience of people recording her confusion on their iphones. As she is strapped to a chair, the woman is told of her crime by an irish justicar and led through a cackling canyon of incensed citizens, the very zombies who had pervaded her fictitious adventure. The mob want to punish the ‘murderer’, whose crime was to film her boyfriend as he torched the young girl to death. It makes for extremely uncomfortable watching.

So, it turns out the entire episode had taken place in a sort of ‘punishment theme park’, where people can pay to interact with the groundhog-day justice system. An endless loop of allegorical torture is painted as a fate worse than death, and one would be inclined to agree. I certainly found it sickening, but couldn’t be certain that it was Brooker’s intention. I don’t think he intended any message convincingly either way, rather I would imagine his only intention was to paint an absurd parody of what capital punishment could become. He succeeds, and despite its flaws this series stands as some of the most imaginative and enthralling television I have ever seen. Long may it continue.

Review: Black Mirror - 'Be Right Back'

Black Mirror is back for a second series. Back to enthrall, disturb and forebode with macabre allegory and technophobic satire. It would be safe to say that there is nothing else like it on modern television, certainly nothing that manages to weave such disturbing thematic overtones into such a tangible science fiction. It is precisely this reality, with only minor futuristic perversions, that renders watching it such a brutally engaging experience. 

The first installment of this subsequent series epitomises the artistic depth that such a method can achieve. Charlie Brooker’s dialogue in this episode has surprised many critics through its sheer innocence and believability, his characters - a young couple deeply in love - converse in a natural and endearing manner. So subtle is the dialogue, that only on second watching are the foreboding hints noticed: Martha questions Ash as he ignores her while poring over his mobile phone, ‘Are you still solid?’.

Quite predictably, Ash is killed off within the first 15 minutes. Martha’s apprehensive wait when he does not return home, and the consequent blue lights that appear on the driveway, are typical of every spouse’s worst paranoia. Ash returns, however, through an app that allows a deceased user’s voice and mannerisms to be amalgamated into an automaton that lives inside Martha’s phone. This leads to an unsettling relationship between Martha and her phone, culminating in Martha’s hysterics after she accidentally breaks her phone on the floor. The acting is fantastic, the emotions tender and universal, the trauma crisp and captivating. 

Brooker does not stop there. Ash explains that there is ‘another level’ to the artificial resurrection. The body comes shipped in a cellophane bag, and must be left to stew in the bathtub before activation. When Ash is restored, just a computer program inside a robotic body, the confusion and revulsion are profound. Martha is so pleased to have Ash back, yet slowly discovers that there is something more to a human being which the computer program cannot capture, an autonomy and spontaneity that makes human relationships worthwhile. 

In this moral we find the underlying motivation for the series itself. Something can be so convincing, yet with one slight defect or mutation can be considered abhorrent. There is something human to society that Black Mirror perverts, much like Ash’s digital persona does not quite appease Martha’s grief. However, the difference is that this sinister effect is the purpose of Black Mirror’s exercise. The revulsion we experience can enable us to question how we might act in a similarly tragic scenario. Not only that, it reveals something about the subtleties of human nature which melodrama ignores, which in this instance is the necessity of grief when mourning someone you love, and the strength that confronting loss can provide. Fascinating and cathartic, brilliant television.