Three Media Conversations That Piss Me Off (Patreon)

Hey everyone. Today I’m writing this: a video. This video is a video, not any of my usual three things. Usually I make essays, mini-essays, and shitposts. This isn’t a shitpost, but it also isn’t any kind of essay. This video is a video.

So what is this video about? Well, it’s about three conversations that I keep having that really piss me off. These three things aren’t really linked together by any theme, except that they are all conversations that I keep having that frustrate me, and they are all about media that I like. I guess I’ll try to talk about something that they might have in common at the end, but that isn’t really the utility of this video, it’s not the point. I really want to get across to you that the point of this video is to air my grievances. So with that in mind, let the airing of the grievances begin.

1. Black Mirror

Black mirror is a science fiction show generally about how society functions. I say “how society functions” because of the common adage: science fiction is descriptive, not predictive. Sci-Fi isn’t about the future, or a long time ago in a galaxy far far away, or an alternate dimension. It is, pretty much always, about the real world that we live in now. 

What I see from a lot of people is a complaint that Black Mirror pretty formulaically creates stories in which new technology is bad and will fuck us all up and that’s all the show really does. Usually this take supposes that there is an audience who kind of blankly enjoy Black Mirror, getting a bit creeped out by how spooky technology is and how technology might eventually kill us all, and then shutting off their watch-screen-box and never thinking about it again. If this picture of the world is to be believed, there are two kinds of people: People who like Black Mirror because it says phones are bad, and people who hate Black Mirror because it says phones are bad.

Why this upsets me is pretty simple: I am an SJW snowflake and I love to be offended I like Black Mirror because it says phones are good, and people are bad. Maybe more accurately it says that phones are there and people are people.

Let’s just run through some episodes of Black Mirror and talk about what’s going on. This is the Black-Mirror-Sudden-Death-Quickfire-Aroo…

And I want to make it clear that I don’t like all these episodes. I like some of them, but some of them I think are trash for various reasons, and I’ll try to include a quick assessment along those lines so you know where I’m coming from.

The Wasp Episode - In this episode killer robot wasps kill people who are being harassed online and that is kind of good until it is bad, and then the wasps kill everyone who ever harassed someone online. This episode, in my opinion, is total dogshit. It enacts a weird revenge fantasy against online hate-mobs, but just to be clear, the episode isn’t about how tiny robot wasps are bad, it’s about how online hate-mobs are bad. I don’t like it because it doesn’t really say anything I find interesting.

Man Against Fire - in this episode a soldier discovers that the inhuman monsters he has been exterminating are actually just ordinary people - refugees even. He has a neural implant that is altering his perception of everything. When he challenges the chain of command over this he is shown himself consenting to this situation in the past. This episode, pretty clearly is only about how armies and nationalistic systems more generally propagandise people into believing the world is a way that it isn’t and dehumanising people of other ethnicities or nationalities. The scene where he is shown consenting to this treatment is really there to get us to confront that we can’t consent to having our perspectives warped by propaganda. This episode was written at the height of the refugee crisis. In the last scene he is living an imaginary life where he has a loving wife and a nice house, but none of that is real, and that to me is pretty clearly a metaphor for the way that nationalist propaganda makes us accept shittier lives with the mental picture that we are living the “[INSERT YOUR COUNTRY NAME HERE] dream”.

I think this episode is pretty good. Yup.

Nosedive - I don’t like this episode much, it didn’t really have a lot to say about its subject matter, cancel culture and social clout, and everything it did have to say I either already knew or already saw in that one episode of Community with the meowmeowbeanz.

San Junipero - excellent episode, I cry evrtim. 10/10, best Black Mirror episode. Fine, this one doesn’t have a lot going on subtextually, but I really wanted to mention it because it shows that the writers of the show can envision an optimistic picture of the future where technology makes our lives better.

The episode with the robot dog whose name I refuse to learn - wow I really don’t like this episode. I know some people do and it certainly is an interesting little thriller, but it just did not grab me. Full subjectivity alert here, it’s just not to my taste, and I don’t think anyone else is wrong or bad for liking it. That’s true for all of the episodes I dislike though, of course. But I hate it.

However, there is an interesting social commentary going on here. If you weren’t already aware, the police literally exist under capitalism to protect the interests of capital and capitalism. If you live in a large city, like I do, you will regularly see police and private security trying to stop homeless people from sleeping in areas owned by rich private sector people and companies. Quick story: I once was washing out a plastic cup in a water fountain near King’s Cross, and a security guard came over to see what I was doing. He was fine with me cleaning my cup, but it was instantly apparent that if I had been dirtier, less well groomed, obviously sleep deprived, or in any way signifying homelessness, I would have been asked to move on. The public resources are available to people who can afford their own resources already, and not available to the people who desperately need them.

That’s what this episode is about. Some people who desperately need something - toys for their children - can’t afford it, but breaking the rules of the system will result in them being brutally hunted down and killed. By a dog. A dog with a kitchen knife for a hand… um

Black Museum - A lot of people dislike this episode but it’s actually maybe my second favourite after San Junipero. I like this episode because of the meta-commentary that it makes on the show, and the audience of the show, and also because it stars Letitia Wright and she’s just the best. This one warrants a bit more talking about, so here goes:

In this episode we are presented with a few different stories, and they sort of build off each other, subtextually. First there is a doctor who becomes addicted to pain, because it makes him cum experience extreme pleasure instead, and so he connects himself via a neural interface to another person and tortures them for his own pleasure. This story, to me, is talking about television and media and storytelling generally. We are the doctor. We empathise with characters in a story and then when they suffer we get a kind of rush from their suffering that gives us pleasure even though we feel bad for them.

Next there’s a woman whose consciousness is transferred from her comatose body into her husband, but she’s not in any kind of control and he ends up putting her “on pause” for increasingly long periods of time and ultimately is transferred inside a plush toy, where she can’t do anything except express that she is happy or sad for the benefit of her daughter who doesn’t understand the significance of the toy. This story kind of gives me chills. I find it really haunting. You need to consider it as a progression. First this woman has agency and gets to experience life, and then she is put in the passenger seat and someone controls what she sees and what she misses out on, and then finally she is trapped in this passive role, only able to like and dislike things. To me, this is pretty clearly showing a fear about the progression of the way people engage with media that talks about systemic problems, in the way Black Mirror does. At first you are fully engaged, then you let yourself just become a voice and they show you what they want you to see, and then eventually you’re trapped with only the most basic illusion of agency and control.

The last story shows a man who allegedly committed a horrible crime, who instead of simply being given the death sentence has his consciousness copied so that it can be infinitely tortured, executed over and over again by tourists. I think it’s not ridiculous to say that this is a metaphor for the way we watch something like Black Mirror that shows us suffering and pain and problems with the world, and we just consume it as entertainment without doing anything about the pain and suffering.
After the last story, the framing device, the titular Black Museum, really becomes the focus. Letitia Wright’s character, revealed to be the daughter of the man, who was wrongfully convicted, kills the museum man and burns down the museum. The guy who has been presenting these stories, profiting off us being passive viewers who like watching other people suffer, is punished and the Black Museum - allegorically the show itself - is destroyed. This seems to me to be a radical attack on everything the show has done so far, and surely enough the next Black Mirror thing that came out was kind of radically different. It was an interactive game/episode of the show. I see Black Museum as declaring that the way the show lets people passively enjoy characters suffering and either not pick up on the problems it’s trying to talk about or do nothing about them isn’t good enough. The show is telling us to go do something about it.

2. Us

Us, Jordan Peele’s second film after Get Out, is absolutely fantastic. I, as a horror wimp, was very relieved that the horror is offset by a lot of humour. The performances were absolutely incredible, especially considering everyone has to play two characters in the film. There was a lot of small attention to detail that I really enjoyed, and ultimately I thought it was a fantastically well put together film. I guess I quite like films that work if you see the metaphor and if you don’t they’re just like the fuck just happened, I think they’re fun.

So what’s going on in Us? Well, in 1986 Adelaide is a little girl and she wanders off at a carnival and gets spooked seeing a little girl who looks just like her. Later… now even, in the present day, she is grown up and has a family, and they’re holidaying at the beach with a white family they’re friends with. When they go back home Adelaide tells her husband Gabe about her trauma from before but just then the power goes out and there’s a family standing in their driveway, and the family looks just like them… and then the family starts attacking the house, and Adelaide’s family. The mother of this second family, Red starts explaining that she is Adelaide’s Shadow - that she has lived a life perfectly parallel to Adelaide’s with no choice but to go along with everything Adelaide chose to do.
By this point I was already feeling strong themes of class, like literally this family looks just like them but have just had shittier lives. It felt like a really clever extension of the home-invasion horror genre, which always focuses on that age-old theme “the duality of man”. In home-invasion horror your protagonist is attacked by someone scarier and more monstrous than them, and to succeed and defend themselves they’ll need to become more of a monster too. Us takes that to a new level by having the protagonists fight off literal copies of themselves.

But THEN, and it’s a big “but then” because the trailer doesn’t even really give a hint of this, they discover that everyone else in the country is being attacked by creepy clones bent on killing and replacing them as well. All the clones wear red boiler-suits and carry scissors and some have scars from horrible experiences in their shitty lives, but otherwise they look just like their counterparts… but creepier.

Adelaide’s family are able to kill their shadow family, and also the shadow family of their white friends, but otherwise it looks like the invasion by “the tethered” went according to plan and most of America seems to have gotten replaced. The tethered - the shadow people, the clones - all hold hands across America, forming a human chain from coast to coast. Also it is revealed that Adelaide and Red were swapped as children, so Adelaide was really one of them all along, but she still flees with her family.

So to me, this film is an allegory to the Trump supporting MAGA movement, viewed from a systemic perspective instead of an individualistic one. It also contains a lot of themes like those laid out in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks, but more related to class than race. In case this comparison to MAGA people confuses you or seems out of the blue, let me run through some sort of textual evidence for this reading.

The tethered all wear a distinctive piece of red clothing. They lived underground, as a sort of second class… a sort of lower class… of people. Red, when asked who they are, replies “we are Americans” which incidentally ties into the film being called “Us”, which is also “US”. The “hands across america” thing, the tethered forming a human chain across the country, comes from the Hands Across America movement to stop homelessness established in the first shot of the film back in 1986. So they’re rising up wearing distinctive red clothing to replace the people who have taken the status positions they feel they deserve, so they can repeat a symbolic gesture from the 1980s that didn’t work the first time. Are you getting the MAGA comparisons now?

There are other smaller details, like how the VHS tape of C.H.U.D. is on the shelf in the establishing shot of the film. C.H.U.D. - Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground dweller - is a good parallel for the tethered in this film but also “chud” has become a common insult for Trump supporters.

So now we get to the conversation that annoys me. Right away I’ve seen people of various different political perspectives say that the uprising in this film looks like a socialist or communist uprising - They’re wearing red, they’re an underclass - but the thing is, the film doesn’t really work very well if you read it that way. I’m gonna disregard Breitbart reading the film that way because I don’t really take Breitbart as a very credible source for film criticism, but where I’ve seen people on the left talking about this, it’s like they want to see representation of a communist revolution, so they’re aggressively reading it into the film, but the film doesn’t paint the uprising as a good thing. It doesn’t show the tethered as sympathetic. It shows them as a terrifying group of people who are revolting in a misguided way, killing the people they are jealous of instead of the people who actually enforced the system that made their lives shitty. 

I can kind of see where the confusion can creep in, to be fair: MAGA chuds are white. That’s a crucial thing, Trump’s support is a white nationalist fascist movement. Furthermore this film is looking at a metaphorical working class, and Trump’s support came from white people of all classes. The chuds in the film are a metaphorical underclass of people just like everyone above ground so are reflective of the american population, but that’s because this film is reflecting on the dialectics of class.

There isn’t any allegorical Trump, but there is still a populist leader - the real Adelaide after she was swapped and trapped underground was considered special and treated as a messiah by the tethered. She is the lightning rod for them to organise around, and it’s because she’s one of them - she’s from the world above, so the underclass view her as someone who will know how to improve their status.

The tethered are very obviously a metaphorical working class - it is directly explained that at some point in the past they were created to control the people above ground by the people in charge, but it didn’t entirely work and they were abandoned, and the actions of those above ground control them instead. This is a pretty good, nuanced allegory for the way that the working class was politically created as an incentive to the middle class to stay in line, to do as they were told so they wouldn’t become one of them instead, but also the ways that the actions of the middle and upper classes do control societal pressures and structures that force working class people to live certain lives.

I’m not arguing that the tethered aren’t the working class, just that the film is much more closely looking at the MAGA movement than any other kind of uprising or revolution. It is more generally than just MAGA chuds, comparing the tethered to a misguided populist revolution that is ultimately set up to achieve nothing. The final shot of the film shows the tethered holding hands, forming their human chain with smoke billowing in the background from their destruction, and triumphant music playing over the top of this scene. The film ends by strongly and cuttingly asking “Now what?”

3. Star Trek Discovery

The last conversation I keep having that troubles me is about Star Trek Discovery. More accurately, it’s a conversation about Star Trek Discovery and The Orville. Discovery and Orville are both effectively derivatives of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Discovery, despite being set before the Original Series can’t help but be hugely influenced by TNG, like all Star Trek media since its release. The Orville is, essentially, a knock-off TNG with jokes. I haven’t that much interest in watching The Orville, especially as it’s written by and stars Seth Macfarlane, creator and writer of Family Guy. I don’t doubt Macfarlane’s ability to write jokes, in fact from the little bits I have seen so far the show is funny. The problem is, every time someone recommends the Orville to me, I get set back from watching it by about ten thousand years, and the reason is that every time it gets recommended it’s recommended in competition with Discovery.

I think there are problems with Discovery, I think it’s kinda contrived, I think it can be clunky and bad, but I think it boils down to this: Discovery is TNG with plot, and The Orville is TNG with jokes. I don’t really need TNG with jokes, because I think the charm and humour and campness of TNG is still fresh and enjoyable enough. The plot and characters of Discovery are compelling to me, if I give it trust and benefit of the doubt to look past its flaws, and it’s a show that I’ve connected with enough that it’s honestly made me cry on multiple occasions.. And that’s why telling me Discovery is garbage is the most repulsive way that you can possibly try to pitch me The Orville.

And in that, I think we can start to get at what might link together these three conversations that have been annoying me recently. I think there’s a common thread to do with how much trust people give media they consume. As I’ve already said, these three conversations are mostly just linked by being things I’ve seen a lot recently and wanted to moan about, but it’s possible also to look at these issues as all arising from people not trusting these pieces of media.

When we engage with something, how much we trust the perceived author of the piece hugely affects how we consume it.

A good example would be Zack Snyder. I don’t trust that shady motherfucker as far as I can throw a copy of The Fountainhead, and that has in the past led me to read his work kinda lazily. I’ve sometimes just looked at his stuff as confusing trash that says nothing, but when I came back to really analyse what was going on in his films I realised that it’s actually confusing trash that says a lot. Did you know there’s an anti-drone-warfare theme in Batman v Superman? It’s actually really clever, and I like it a lot, it’s just a bad film through a whole tonne of other different lenses, and as ever, it does promote Libertarian nonsense.

I just think we should give things trust when we choose to engage with them, otherwise we can miss out on some good stuff. If I go watch The Orville, in approximately sixty-thousand years at this current pace, I’ll try to give it trust too, and not just compare it with the similar show that started at the same time.

So that’s my weird rant about opinions I think are bad. I hope you liked it. Um.