Over the past two years, stories from Black Mirror have been eerily echoed in real life. First, there were claims that British prime minister David Cameron inserted his penis into the mouth of a dead pig as part of a university club hazing ritual—eerily similar to the first Black Mirror episode, 2011's "The National Anthem." Then this past May, a Russian-born San Francisco-based journalist and entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda designed a chatbot imitating the conversational style of her recently deceased best friend, inspired by the 2013 episode "Be Right Back." While some high-tech futures of other episodes are still impossible, their questions about the social consequences of technology have proven themselves germane provocations.
With Black Mirror's latest six-episode season season, the satirical show follows the format of past seasons: Each episode has an entirely new cast of characters and totally different near-future reality, from soldiers aided by an augmented-reality implant to a single white female determined to improve her social media rating in an effort to qualify for a private real estate community. Some episodes tell stories possible with our current webcams and smartphones, while others look further into the future, speculating what might be possible with new technologies.
There's also a theme of reality being gamified in every story, for better or worse, which makes sense considering Black Mirror creator and showrunner Charlie Brooker started his career writing about video games. In addition to penning reviews in the mid 90s, he also wrote a comic strip for PC Zone called Cybertwats, which suggested an early penchant for societal critique. Working in both print journalism and broadcast TV over the past decades, Brooker's career has been extremely varied, from writing TV reviews and a what-if style column called "Supposing" for the Guardian to broadcast writing for the brilliant satireNathan Barley, the faux-news comedy series The Brass Eye, and the zombie-thriller Big Brother–parody Dead Set. All these endeavors showcase a cynical intelligence that's on full view in Black Mirror.
We talked to Brooker about reimagining what the show could be this season, his influences from The Twilight Zone to Monty Python, and how technology doesn't frighten him at all.
VICE: How did you feel that some of the episodes have come true to some degree? There was Piggate, of course, but did you also read about that Russian woman who used a Black Mirror episode as inspiration to create a chatbot based on her dead friend's messaging history?
Charlie Brooker: That was pretty mind-blowing. I kind of feel like if we predicted things that then come true, we kind of got lucky. Basically, we are trying to extrapolate from things that exist now, so in a way that's bound to happen. Some of the ideas strike me as inevitable. We probably get more credit from that than we deserve, but I'm happy to take it. Obviously, Piggate was just bizarre. That was the weirdest one of all by far. But when you're trying to predict the future, sometimes you're going to get lucky. Luckily, people don't notice all the stuff we got wrong.
It's kind of just using different muscles. This season, we sort of approached each episode like a different genre. Even within the season, "Hated in the Nation" is a police procedural and then "San Junipero" is a romance, coming-of-age story. I've got a short attention span, so I like a lot of variety. When we were shooting the first-ever season of Black Mirror, at the same time, I was working on a show that was effectively a Naked Gun–spoof , it's going to be technology.
Follow Whitney Mallett on Twitter.
from VICE http://ift.tt/2eZuwsR
via cheap web hosting
No comments:
Post a Comment