Black Mirror- Netflix [ Spoilers ]

jill_valentine · 04-12-2011 11:52pm

Basq wrote: »

I was worried that it was just gonna throw in lines about various social networking for the sake of it, and lines like "it's all over my timeline" and "it's trending on Twitter" didn't help..

I actually thought that was really nicely judged. A lot of writers have a tin ear for that stuff, but I think Brooker's day job stood him in good stead. The tension between the conventional media types who have to sit back and talk about "indecent acts", and the freely Tweeting public who know full well what the act is, was very well drawn and rang very true. It felt very much like a conversation Channel 4 News has probably had to have over and over again over the last few months.

Colm! · 05-12-2011 12:18am

That was some of the most interesting and entertaining television I've ever seen.

jill_valentine · 05-12-2011 12:27am

The more I think about it, the more I'm inclined to agree.

Not perfect and like I say, I think it's going to age very quickly, but I can't think of any other hour of television this year that had me as compelled and engaged as this one.

kwalshe · 05-12-2011 12:27am

My better half has just went to bed as she felt so tense and sick after watching it!. Very good television!

crushproof · 05-12-2011 12:31am

Fantastic television, cannot wait for next weeks episode!

Doge · 05-12-2011 12:36am

Pffft.....

looks like immaturity got the better of Charlie again.

An act like that is just too unconvincing, no matter what you do to to push it!

There's no way in hell any sane man would let the world pressure him into doing that!

Not going to deny it was very original though, and reaction provoking.

But to me it was just a sad joke that got the better of the writer, and made the story too unbelievable!

Basq · 05-12-2011 12:44am

waveform wrote: »

There's no way in hell any sane man would let the world pressure him into doing that!

He wasn't just "any sane man" - he was a man of power.. ultimately faced with losing all respect of his voters, being viewed as having blood of the nation's sweetheart on his hands and living the rest of his life with all that hanging over his head.

It was a horrid decision to have to make.. but it showed us how important people in power see themselves, and how far they'd go to keep that respect... even hearing he was now more popular than ever despite going through with the act.

jill_valentine · 05-12-2011 12:51am

There was a suggestion too that his family would be in danger too, and the timeframe added a certain amount of pressure. I thought it was quite well done actually, I found it very easy to buy the guy's decision. Contrivances of television aside, bearing an individual responsibility for somebody else's life has to be a fairly daunting thing.

Doge · 05-12-2011 1:08am

Basq wrote: »

He wasn't just "any sane man" - he was a man of power.. ultimately faced with losing all respect of his voters, being viewed as having blood of the nation's sweetheart on his hands and living the rest of his life with all that hanging over his head.

It was a horrid decision to have to make.. but it showed us how important people in power see themselves, and how far they'd go to keep that respect... even hearing he was now more popular than ever despite going through with the act.

Even still, I found that outcome as far from reality as the story of Xenu in Scientology!

By doing the request, he would have lost all the respect you mentioned regardless,
and any citizen who saw him as having the blood on his hands would be an idiotic - but obviously there are some idiots out there to view it that way!

He would also have lost his family to some extent, (his wife would not be able look at him the same way again, and would probably ditch him due to the trauma).

The psychological effects would prevent him from ever being able to stand as prime minister in public again, we certainly would not have seen him one year later as if nothing happened!

Now to make it more convincing lets ditch the "nations sweetheart" that a lot of people couldnt give a f**k about....

and make the Queen herself the person that was kidnapped.

It would instantly make it 100 times more plausible!

But even then,
people would know that if you gave into terrorist demands that easily,
there would be no end to the power they would have over the world.

In fact I think the queen would be defiant, as she would view her death as a worthy sacrifice to the pride of her nation, and as a strong act of will in the face of terror.

I'd imagine the royal family are mentally trained somewhat to be defiant in a terrorist situation like this.

That's an interesting thing to think about.

And also there's a big portion of the British public who couldn't care about the monarchy and view it as draconian and redundant in this age.
Who view the queen merely as another human being with too much money and power.

Especially with the financial crisis, and the Occupy /Anti 1% movement going on at the moment.

With all that said, maybe I should just shut up and try to enjoy the fiction!

Doge · 05-12-2011 1:20am

waveform wrote: »

and make the Queen herself the person that was kidnapped.

It would instantly make it 100 times more plausible!

I forgot to mention the fact that there would certainly be politicians out there,

that would be more than willing to go through that for their Queen,

the ones that are brainwashed into thinking that she is some kind of superior human being.

- Just to keep my post balanced.

johnny_ultimate · 05-12-2011 2:27am

Interesting but flawed.

There's definitely an engaging, well considered theme in there, and while it was pretty clear what the moral would be from early on, it worked well for the most part.

But there where times it was far too blunt. As Basq said, a lot of 'youtube this, twitter that' references that could easily have been toned down somewhat. And what was potentially the most sly joke in the show - "It's like Dogma 95" - was ruined when the characters explained the punchline two or three times. If you're going to throw a reference like that in there, let those who get it get it, and don't feel the need to explain it in great detail for those who don't! Over-explaining the joke is the easiest way to ruin the joke.

But yeah, overall I liked it. Despite its flaws it was offbeat and unusual television, and trying something different is always to be admired. I'm assuming the next two installments are going to be thematically connected more than anything?

Fysh · 05-12-2011 10:32am

Am I the only one who found this unconvincing?

There were two big problems with this for me:

1) A population that has long known its government has a "no negotiation with kidnappers/terrorists" policies rolls over in less than 12 hours because of a (fairly tame) kidnapping video and threats to the "facebook princess?"? The same population that saw Ken Bigley's death on video less than a decade ago? Give me a break. (Or at least, make her popularity more believable - if this was "Imagine Ken Bigley was Princess Diana", it wasn't presented very well)

2) The elected leader of the ruling political party goes along with a blatant exercise in undermining his authority and retains power? You're kidding me. No matter how much "he did what was necessary to save the princess" spin is released, from the second that broadcast started, that PM was forever doomed to be The Man Who Made Love To A Pig On Television. If a bit of extra-marital rumpy-pumpy can ruin a political career, there's no hope in hell that porcine penetration is survivable.

It doesn't help that most of the investigation team were a bumbling bunch of twits - when it's one of your SWAT team telling you that the kidnapper used a proxy for the file upload, that's a good sign someone's doing it wrong. And we never did get an explanation for how this Turner-prize-winning Damien-Hirst-alike managed to sedate two security agents from the Royal security team, get information in damn-near realtime from within a government team set up to respond to the kidnapping, or any of the rest of it. As villains go, he was about as convincing as Jason Voorhees.

The social-commentary was interesting, but I thought this was weaker than Dead Set by a long way. It wasn't as nasty as it could have been, and far too many people just seemed to go along with the idea as soon as it was mentioned without really thinking about it.

Seren_ · 05-12-2011 11:18am

I thought it was great! I think the end of it showed that the PM was putting on a face in public, but he and his family had been severely affected by what happened. The juxtaposition of traditional and new media and their responses to what happened also made it interesting. I don't think you can accurately compare it to how something like that would progress in reality, because it's impossible to imagine it happening.

mike65 · 05-12-2011 11:37am

Its a satire a la Jonathon Swifts "Modest Proposal" (eating dead babies as a solution to hunger). Its not intended to be realistic/plausible.

Fysh · 05-12-2011 11:49am

I like my satire jet black, with its humour to match.

For the concept at the heart of this piece, the humour wasn't nasty enough and the plot wasn't considered enough - and Brooker has written stronger material in the past.

Oddly enough I think it's the attempt to present the material seriously that lets it down - it suffers badly in contrast with the likes of Brasseye. Had it adopted more of a darkly farcical tone it would've worked much better, I think. Hell, even having had a final sting like revealing that the PM is now unable to get it up unless his wife dresses up in a pink latex pig outfit would have been better than the damp squib of an ending we got. Maybe the "and then, shuddering slightly, everyone got on with their lives" ending was meant to be a metatextual comment of some sort, but it just wasn't a very good one.

iguana · 05-12-2011 11:58am

I thought it was pretty awful and I've just read a huge amount of criticism for it on another board, so I'm shocked to see how well this went down here. I found it utterly unengaging, about a third of the way in I found myself absently playing chase the LED fish with my dogs.

Nothing in it felt remotely real. The newsroom stuff was all laughably bad, absolutely nothing like what happens in a big station where a section D notice has been handed down on a huge story. It was so far off base it was a parody of itself rather than what it was trying to parody. The whole thing played out like an extremely wanky student film that's meant to be deep but is really just shíte.

There might have been ways to make it good engaging television but they were never touched upon. Perhaps if the kidnap victim had been a child, one who'd been missing for a couple of weeks prompting a media frenzy like that of Maddie or Holly and Jessica. The public outcry that a video of the child crying and pleading for it's life, followed by a press conference with the hysterical parents would have prompted could have been the type needed to prompt the PM to seriously consider doing what was demanded but some fake 'wonderful' princess was not.

And then maybe an actual exploration of what that would cost him on every level. I find it unbelievable that a whole hour about the use of violence to coerce someone into having sex drew absolutely no rape comparisons. The most interesting story in that whole scenario could have been if a parallel was drawn between his wife's angry rejection of him and the rejection that some women face from their partners following a rape. Along with the psychological damage done to the PM both from the act itself, his wife's rejection of him and the complete humiliation due to the amount of witnesses.

mike65 · 05-12-2011 12:18pm

iguana are you female by any chance?

I think you must have been expecting an entirely different extended "hand-wringing" human drama of the kind of thing that Brooker would trash in a review. The final moment said all that needed to be said. Its satire not Ingmar Bergmans Face to Face

iguana · 05-12-2011 12:24pm

mike65 wrote: »

I think you must have been expecting an entirely different extended "hand-wringing" human drama of the kind of thing that Brooker would trash in a review. The final moment said all that needed to be said. Its satire not Ingmar Bergmans Face to Face

It might have been satire but it was shíte satire. It wasn't at all believable, it wasn't funny and the only thing it made me think of was how much better it should have been if the least bit of thought had gone into it.

mike65 · 05-12-2011 12:33pm

Satire can be straight faced you know, its not all In the Thick of it.

Fysh · 05-12-2011 12:33pm

It may be satire, but it wasn't very good or in any way deep.

It set itself up for this kind of criticism by presenting itself as a serious drama, but all it really had to say was "Wow, social networks are so prevalent that politicians concerned about public opinions expressed there could be compelled by them to go at it with a pig in the right circumstances". That's not enough to serve as an underpinning for a straight-faced satire.

There was no understanding that social networks are just tools, and that as with all tools they can be used to good or ill intent. There was little examination of the tensions that can arise in a constitutional monarchy. There was hardly any interesting commentary on how, exactly, a Prime Minister is beholden to the electorate at large.

As a result, the PM's decision to go ahead with Operation: Porking Peppa felt utterly ridiculous, because in a country whose PMs have ignored marches of millions of people against going to war or cutting public sector funding, the notion that "public opinion" would be enough to force a PM to do that is just ridiculous. Between that and the Omniscient Artist Of Doom as the villain of the piece, I found it marginally less believable than Jason 2013: Jason Voorhees In Space.

mike65 · 05-12-2011 12:51pm

Public opinion didn't force him, it forced his grubby handlers. Because the PM in question was clearly shown as a decent person (shock) he knew that if push came to shove he'd do it to save a life. A life that in the event was already saved.

Which leads me to why the artist killed himself - he was testing the public and when they failed the test and gathered to watch a man **** a pig live he decided that was enough of this life.

Doge · 05-12-2011 2:36pm

mike65 wrote: »

Public opinion didn't force him, it forced his grubby handlers. Because the PM in question was clearly shown as a decent person (shock) he knew that if push came to shove he'd do it to save a life. A life that in the event was already saved.

Which leads me to why the artist killed himself - he was testing the public and when they failed the test and gathered to watch a man **** a pig live he decided that was enough of this life.

Exactly! It was that old bitch advisor of his, that he should have knocked out earlier in the show when he threatened it!

I was thinking there must be some kind of act to protect people from having to do this with no choice.*

And of course there is.

One of the most important human rights of all:

The right to say no.

*not that he was completely without choice in the show, he still made the choice to do it.

IsMiseJoe · 05-12-2011 3:24pm

Is it going to be repeated during the week?

Basq · 05-12-2011 3:54pm

IsMiseJoe wrote: »

Is it going to be repeated during the week?

Doesn't appear to be..

.. probably on 4OD though.

EDIT: A-ha.. here we go:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS9vz2h0PEc

jill_valentine · 05-12-2011 4:08pm

Fysh wrote: »

There was no understanding that social networks are just tools, and that as with all tools they can be used to good or ill intent.

I thought there was a very clear understanding of that. The people watching felt divorced enough from the concept when it was still just a concept, but when confronted inescapably with the fact that ultimately, they were complicit in something awful being done to another human being, they were ashamed.

This film wasn't, to me, a rant about what technology and social networks have done to us, but a play about what human nature will do with that technology and those networks.

Brooker has been part of, and victim to, plenty of Twitter mobs in his time, this is not a subject he's writing about from an ignorant distance like Aaron Sorkin.

ricero · 05-12-2011 4:23pm

neils dad from inbetweeners :pac:

Basq · 05-12-2011 4:28pm

ricero wrote: »

neils dad from inbetweeners :pac:

Yup, spotted him.

Also both the "tech girl" (who came in with the location of the warehouse) and the main actor in next week's episode are both stars of the excellent BBC3 series 'The Fades'.

Fysh · 05-12-2011 4:34pm

jill_valentine wrote: »

I thought there was a very clear understanding of that. The people watching felt divorced enough from the concept when it was still just a concept, but when confronted inescapably with the fact that ultimately, they were complicit in something awful being done to another human being, they were ashamed.

This film wasn't, to me, a rant about what technology and social networks have done to us, but a play about what human nature will do with that technology and those networks.

Brooker has been part of, and victim to, plenty of Twitter mobs in his time, this is not a subject he's writing about from an ignorant distance like Aaron Sorkin.

TBH if people felt that awful about it they wouldn't have still been watching, jaws agape, after an hour. They didn't seem to feel complicit in anything as far as I could see, certainly not enough to feel bad about it. And with the Prime Minister's "brave face" one year on, the impression I was left with was that nobody had learned much of a lesson of any sort, including the PM.

Which would have been a much bleaker ending if getting there hadn't involved so many bloody stupid plot contrivances.

Seren_ · 05-12-2011 4:43pm

ricero wrote: »

neils dad from inbetweeners :pac:

I knew I knew that actor from somewhere!

jill_valentine · 05-12-2011 6:01pm

Fysh wrote: »

TBH if people felt that awful about it they wouldn't have still been watching, jaws agape, after an hour.

The timeframe did seem like a bit of a stretch, but the fact that people kept watching didn't. There's a powerful fascination to that kind of communal horror, complicit or not. We know that people like Anders Breivik only do the things they do because they want to be validated by our attention, but we still give it to them.

I can't pretend I don't think I'd watch.

Black Mirror- Netflix [** Spoilers **]

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Black Mirror- Netflix [ Spoilers ]