Black Mirror (Part 1)

The Entire History of You 

Let me preface this with a warning that I've been providing to just about everyone I've spoken to over the last few weeks: I'm going to tell you to watch Black Mirror, and then I'm going to tell you to stop watching it and never watch it again. Black Mirror is a British television show which began running in 2011. You can think of it as a contemporary Twilight Zone. Each episode stands by itself and serves to mess with your mind as best it can. 

The series taps into our uneasiness around technology, something that this project has explored with other stories told in film. Every episode introduces a technology that range between improbable and quite possible, along with everywhere in between. Regardless of the feasibility of these technologies, when you stop to think about an individual episode of Black Mirror, you consider the technology used in it as something that you may want to use for yourself someday. The episode introduces you to this technology, allows you to fall into a sense of complacency thinking that the technology is cool or may be useful, and then proceeds to hit you over the head with why it's not and make you feel bad for ever entertaining the idea.

Hyperbole aside, Black Mirror's writers do an incredible job of connecting you with their characters in a short ~1 hour episode. And through the advanced technologies they employ, you get to see yourself in these characters as well. This will be the first of four entries about Black Mirror, and I had to limit myself to that, lest this project become solely focused on that series.

"The Entire History of You" is the series' first season finale. You can watch the trailer, which gives a brief overview of the premise, here:

The technology employed in this episode allows you to rewatch memories. Our main character, Liam, uses it to play over a job interview he has at the beginning of the episode. Other characters talk about how they can show other people their memories. Want to share pictures of your vacation with your family without lugging around a camera? Just project your memories onto the television and you can show them everything.

The memory device has some practical applications to it as well. Liam is told to rewind his previous 48 hours of memories when he goes through airport security, for example.

And while the ability to rewind and review our memories seems enticing, Black Mirror decides to show us why we're wrong. It breeds paranoia. Even in the initial conversation about his job interview, Liam goes back and analyzes the interviewers' mannerisms and listens to their words over and over and over again, trying to convince himself that they were not as interested in him as he might have thought if he didn't dwell on those memories.

Perhaps, without this device, Liam could still be self-conscious about his interview skills and constantly replay them in his head (to the best of his organic ability). But this machine sits, implanted in his head, tacitly begging him to use it. His dinner party guests try to make a game of sitting around and watching Liam's interview so that he can receive feedback.

Liam finds himself watching his wife interact with their guest, Jonas. He replays their interactions over and over and over and over and over again, convinced that he's seeing something unusual in how they behave around one another. He sees a light in her eyes, and a brightness to her smile when she looks at him that he sees disappearing when she looks back to him. He starts to wonder about Jonas's relationship with his wife. 

He digs deeper, accusing her of lying to him about her real relationship with him. Jonas's comment over dinner bugs him--that he sometimes goes back and looks at certain sexual experiences he's had with past partners when he needs a pickmeup, or even when he's with other women. After uncovering that Jonas dated his wife, Liam's paranoia drives him to confront Jonas over the memories he's certain to be rewatching.

Black Mirror is forcing us to consider that this memory technology is not the convenience it seems to be. When your memories aren't secret, nothing is. Liam had the ability to find the truth to his suspicions, but we're left wondering whether it was all worth it in the end? He's certainly not satisfied to learn the truth. The memory device ruins his life, where he could have continued on in blissful ignorance otherwise.

This kind of personal augmentation has Anthropocene written all over it. We can change ourselves, and how we function as biological creatures, with the tiniest of machines. Is technology solely a good thing? What are the moral implications of it all? More Black Mirror to come....