Forum Overview :: The Netflix Instant Forum :: There's more to Black Mirror, but you gotta want it. Want that pig, Fabio.

[quote name="serial malcontent"][quote]Black Mirror [is] stories of "our unease with the modern world."In the second story, the youth are put on stationary bikes to create energy for the world, and are paid in, essentially, Facebook credits that serve also as money. The only way out of this enslavement is to get on Hot Spot-- i.e. to become famous. One young black man rises up against the system with the only violence he has available: he goes on Hot Spot and threatens to stab himself in the neck with a shard of glass unless he's allowed to rage against the machine. But rather than gas the theatre or send in the snipers-- they give him his own weekly talk show where he is safely allowed to rage against the system, in between commercials. However, the true import of that episode is only revealed when considered with the first episode, in which the Princess (e.g. of Wales) is kidnapped, with a single ransom demand: the Prime Minister must have sex with a pig, on live TV. Is the Princess's life worth it? Should they negotiate with terrorists? But all of this is cover for the real conflict: if he does it, he'll be disgraced, most certainly not re-elected. He does it: it takes over an hour, some tranquilizers and some Viagra. It is moving, because as he cries through the sex act, all of England is watching from pubs, cheering and jeering. However, the final post-credits scene reveals the secondary consequence of the always-on, broadcast world: after a year, the Prime Minister is happily re-elected. No one even remembers the pig incident. <b>Together, the two episodes suggest that not only does appearing on TV trivialize events, but it temporizes them. When everything is recorded, nothing is remembered.</b>[/quote] Before you come at me about how this is obvious and there's nothing new under the sun, consider that for less perceptive people it ain't and that for smarter ones even the sight of a grown man doing some pigfucking put to aaron sorkin dialogue is a breath of fresh air. The content is exactly as bad as you say, but it's only a distillation of the kind of shit everyone praised in the Sopranos. One act of bestiality forced on by some Machiavellian asshole isn't much different to me than a thousand graphic acts of violence, especially when the same guys try to create a novel commentary on Network by episode three. Besides, Black Mirror is from 2012 and your eeyore-like depressed braying tells us nothing novel here. Nearly all of television is a charnel house for thought. It largely numbs the fucking mind. Your capslock criticism doesn't give me some new truth and ever since Sorkin went bad after Studio 60 there has been precious little to call watchable except for nature documentaries. In the meantime this at least has some aspects that won't make me throw my television out a fifth story window above a crowded street like I do when I'm watching utter hackwork. At least it's thinkpiece TV rather than takedown TV.[/quote]