The Mediocrity of Black Mirror
“Arkangel” sums up everything wrong with the anthology series.
Black Mirror is the clickbait of quality television. The anthology science-fiction series is widely lauded for its bleak near future vision of a world in which slightly advanced tech makes everyone’s life exponentially worse. But the truth is that for the most part its episodes are built around the equivalent of high concept moral panic. “Social Media Shaming Is Getting Out of Hand”. “Facebook Likes Are Corrupting Our Society”. It’s a shallow show that hacks the media economy for shares by bemoaning the shallowness of the media economy driven by shares.
“Arkangel,” the second episode of the just-released fourth season, sums up the formula with wearisome predictability. The episode is about a new experimental bit of future tech (Arkangel). Doctors inject some sort of ill-defined sensors into a child’s skull, and this allows parents to monitor their kid’s every move. Parents can locate their child on a map and see through their child’s eyes. They can even put in place parental controls, so that whenever a child sees something disturbing—barking dogs, blood, porn—the parent can blur it out. If the episode had been an Atlantic cover story, it would have been called “Has Helicopter Parenting Gone Too Far?”
Of course, the answer to that question has to be “yes” or why even bother asking? And so, writer Charlie Brooke and director Jodie Foster give us an over protective single mother (single mothers are always overprotective of course) who hooks her daughter Sara up with Arkangel. Kept from violent stimulus, the daughter is inevitably attracted to violence, sex, and drugs. Marie, the mom (Rosemarie Dewitt) becomes more and more frantic and controlling as her daughter, Sara, (Brenna Harding) has sex and does cocaine, until finally daughter rebels in the expected crescendo of violence.
The moralistic script is as predictable as a holiday special, though, in theory, the message is supposed to be the opposite of the usual television conclusion. Black Mirror is supposedly edgy, so instead of hectoring you to be nice, “Arkangel” hectors you not to be too nice. Smothering censorship is lazily conflated with mothering via the usual misogynist calculus. Marie’s crusty old father provides the dose of male patriarchal common sense as he expresses skepticism of Arkangel. When he has a heart attack while teaching Sara to paint, the child’s parental controls cause him to blur out; she can’t see him as she dies. Arkangel is meant to keep Sara safe, but it can’t protect her from tragedy. That’s irony. Black Mirror loves irony.
Irony is, unfortunately, all that “Arkangel” has going for it. The characters—overprotective mom, rebellious daughter, wise old grumpy grandpa, ineffectual boyfriend—aren’t people so much as familiar chits which move about the screen in the interest of the lesson of the hour. If this was a feature length thinkpiece in a major magazine, it would presumably have statistics and expert testimony—do kids actually have less unsupervised time alone now? Is there any evidence that this causes developmental problems? Is this a function of overprotective moms, or maybe is it something being enforced by our ugly paranoid policing regime? (I’ve had police try to scare me because they didn’t think my parenting style is sufficiently authoritarian.)
But “Arkangel” deftly sidesteps both the imaginative commitments of fiction and the intellectual obligations of reporting. Shorn of aesthetics or research, it exists as pure parental shaming. The episode might just as well repeat “Kids these days have gone soft!” over and over for fifty minutes. Except that would be sort of avant garde and weird, and so would take more gumption than Black Mirror has ever shown.
I don’t necessarily even disagree with the broad point the episode makes. My parents gave me a key to our house and would leave me alone when I was seven; no harm came to me and, no, I don’t think they were negligent. My wife and I don’t put restrictions on my own 14-year-old’s social media or viewing habits, and we don’t invade her privacy. Our society doesn’t treat children with enough respect. I agree with that.
So it’s not the message in “Arkangel” I object to. It’s the condescending smugness. “Arkangel” feels like being stuck in a comments thread with that nattering blowhard, who runs through the same tired talking points over and over, without ever pausing to listen, or, for that matter, to think. “Parents these days! Am I right? They’re turning kids into little snowflakes; why back in my day…” And on and on. Some Black Mirror episodes are better (”USS Callister” is pretty good) and some are worse. But that preening monologue is almost always somewhere in there, not far below the surface. When you look into the black mirror, you just see some asshole, who thinks telling kids to get off his lawn makes him dark.
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This first ran on Splice Today.
I definitely think the milk carton kids in the late 80s and all the true crime shows in the 90s made people think the world is unsafe. I mean, it is, none of us are getting out alive. But if young people have some sense and a decent relationship with the adults around them, they are going to be fine. It’s been my experience that young people don’t take on more independence than they are ready for. When we were kids, we were prepared at a younger age for that independence- I can’t imagine putting a nine year old on a city bus and sending them to gymnastics in todays world- someone would call child protective services. But I already knew how to navigate the world at that point from walking home from school and biking to the grocery store.
The BM episode sounds like being bludgeoned by a very obvious point, which tends to not be fun. Like you said, some episodes are better. When they first started, it seemed like a “Twilight Zone” for today’s world. But the overemphasis on tech has ruined that for me.
Nailed it. If you've read some of Charlie Brooker's columns, the didactic Black Mirror episodes (which is, sadly, most of them) are even more tiresome as they recapitulate familiar points without the pith and humor of his essay writing.