Black Mirror

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
Just watched the first ep and found it rather harrowing which is to say I very much enjoyed it. The basic premise of the storyline was, well, unheard of until now and the scriptwriting and general production of the show were just incredibly clever. Not to mention the sheer suspense of it all. Casually introducing the whodunnit aspect in the epilogue and with it the greater allegoric implications of the story seemed especially masterful to me. I must say, this show impressed and affectively resonated with me a great deal more than any piece of fiction I've come across in a long while.

(Of course, one's own depravity and mass media-saturated voyeurism notwithstanding, a guy like Cameron would still be deserving of everything happening to the PM in this episode.)
 

sssluke

Member
no way... ep1 was a masterful modern satire. i loved how you were kept so full of suspense with such a ridiculous premise... but then again its not that ridiculous and in some ways the genius of it is that it could be plausible...

ep2 was not enjoyable to watch, in fact it made me really really sad but i think in some ways it was more genius in its shrill construction and satire... i think he really got across a disease of our age... an addiction to 'buying crap' over all else and how anything precious is packaged and portioned... if you think how far this type of culture has come in the last 20 years,, and the exponential nature of technology it is not that far out to envision our culture similar to that on some levels... particularily with porn. soon the websites to view porn on now will seem as twee as vintage postcards.. its a huge industry and addiction to cyber relationships with sex will increase and genuine human intamcy decrease...

i think people will look back at 15 million credits in 10 years and be really haunted by its accurate prophecy... and even if not it shows a way in which we could turn if we are not carefull...
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I just watched the first episode and (despite enjoying it much more than expected) I thought that it was surprisingly reactionary in the way that it seemed to lament the loss of the government's ability to control the media. Anyone else read it that way?
 

e/y

Well-known member
I really liked episode 3, my favourite so far. was actually pretty shaken by it, needed a smoke afterwards.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Episode 2 was much more subtle than the first (as is 300), until the end at least. I liked the repackaging of authenticity as an image. Which of course happens now but not quite so explicitly.
After the first two episodes he's attacked I'm a Celebrity and X-Factor which are maybe disappointingly easy targets that were much more effectively dealt with in The Year of the Sex Olympics which was made forty years before they were; but to me it's the things to the side which are much more interesting, the apps and doppels, first person shooters and pornification. I still feel that it's a bit reactionary though - things are presented as almost an inevitable result of technology when surely it's not only the fault of technology that these things are occuring - aren't there also positive results from these black mirrors everywhere?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Same comments as above really.

2 was disappointing, 3 was the best.

I think 2 fell flat by grappling with the obvious shouty bits of popular culture and being too long doing it. But the series as a whole really works and is as good an attempt as any to satirise where culture is right now.

So thumbs up really.

Interesting to watch 3 episodes of Vices' "Dalston Superstars" after having seen Black Mirror. The former is really only where Brooker was 6 years ago with Nathan Barley but without the sickness.

People still namedrop "Mick Hucknalls Pink Pancakes" from TVGOHOME, in the same way that irritating ppl quote monty python or black adder.

Perhaps the comparison is unjustified but who else is there apart from Chris Morris who we can look back on in list programmes of the future and celebrate as being good comedy for the nougthies/this decade?
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Yeah Dalston Superstars is an unashamed rip-off of Nathan Barley (and Shoreditch Twat if you ever read that magazine, I think they tried to make a tv show of that once but the pilot was obviously not popular enough) but I still find it quite funny, it's spot on, a lot of people wondered if it was real.
One thing I forgot to say, you have to say that Brooker has been fairly brave after years of savage criticism of television, to go to the other side of the camera. There must be a fair few people waiting for him to fuck up. How much input does he have into the shows though - he doesn't seem to have written or directed them, just come up with the general idea maybe?
 

lanugo

von Verfall erzittern
I actually thought that the third episode was even worse than the second. Wasn't it a fairly conventional tale of a cheated husband finding out about the affair of his wife, while the memory storing and rewinding angle of the story was but a mere gimmick? Didn't like it.

Rich, did you really think that the second episode was more subtle than the first one? I felt like the whole scenario was rather contrived and overly bent on allegorising the worst aspect of contemporary (digital) culture - would a fitness-obsessed underground society really spend all day on these trainers rather than, say, stick to a very balanced and thought-out exercise regiment when shaping their worshipped bodies? Wouldn't there be more advanced ego-shooters than what looks like the first DOOM game from the early 90's? And wouldn't the pornography have become more extreme to still be interesting to the blunted masses?

What I liked about the first episode was the love for the detail, e.g. the deafening bleep right before the transmission, the advisor speaking about promptly illegalising the footage after its airing, or how the PM dropped a few Viagras to brace himself for the lovemaking - that's exactly how they would pull it off, I assume. The plot worked on a very literal level as a thriller but also raised profound questions concerning the modern-day perversion of heroism and the impossibility of art in the age of mass media.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Oh I meant that the second was slower really. The points took longer to be raised whereas the first one was all right in your face. That wasn't really a negative point though, I really liked it, no messing about just straight into the action. Although it was a slight cheat to use a guy who was so like Tony Blair that you could get away without having to give him a back story.
In the third one I'm not really sure what he was getting at - memory storage means that you discover more cimes, well yeah that's obvious, but is he saying that some crimes are better not discovered? And the ones that are best not discovered are the ones that are most likely to be revealved by the evil technology which Brooker fears we are about to invent?
 

UFO over easy

online mahjong
the satire of the 2nd was hackneyed i thought, or at the very least, quite traditional and predictable

thought its presentation of porn/violence/voyeurism was interesting though. haven't seen much tv that grapples with that

looking forward to watching the third
 

you

Well-known member
I just caught the 3rd episode, decent tv, nothing special but decent - guess that counts as above average nowadays - the casting was pretty good.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Also, I thought there was something a bit scattergun about his approach (and my responses unfortunately) - the bit about making the villain in the first piece a Turner Prize Winning artist seemed a bit tacked on - so Charlie doesn't like the Turner Prize? Or was he arguing that the TP (and by extension art) is just part of the media circus now? If so he may have a point - when I went to the twenty years of Turner Prize exhibition I was very surprised how much they wrote about the effect of all-woman (and all-man) shortlists on the media relative to the amount they wrote about the art that had supposedly generated those lists.
 

gumdrops

Well-known member
not seen the last one, but episode 2 didnt feel that far fetched really. biking to produce energy, popups you cant avoid, huge screens as walls, that doesnt seem that far off. was a bit too obvious in a way, but still felt good to have someone make drama reflecting the inherent crapness of a lot of modern culture.
 
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muser

Well-known member
I thought they were all conceptually pretty good, slightly oddly filmed and a bit corny in a way.

I actually liked the second one, even if it was maybe a bit obvious. He was taking all the things alot of people are completely buying into and then pushing them to their theoretical extremes. Its grim and depressing to watch because most people probably have a bit of discontent/ fear of where it is going, and are mostly sort of trapped in it anyway now. Or at least feel trapped in it. As someone mentioned the little touches were what made it salvageable really, beyond a pretty basic concept/storyline. and it was refreshing to see someone try and attempt a decent futuristic piece that is atleast relevant not playing on old clichés.

The last one was maybe the best conceptually I think, allthough it didn't really use it for anything interesting. Clear paralells between things like Facebook recording every conversation you had, every image you take etc, being instantly retrievable at anytime. So again I think he was taking that to the next logical extreme and showing all the problems that it could cause. I'm not talking about privacy here by the way, but the sort of extra highly accurate memory funtion we now have due to the internet. Its just a pity he didn't go deeper with it, I guess the choice of them all being well-off elite lawyers etc, was purposeful.
 
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