Black Mirror, a show that regularly applies imagined technology from the not-so-distant future against the cracks of human weakness. In Charlie Brooker’s dystopian British Christmas special, extrapolates how Google Glass and implanted tech might dilute our sense of humanity in the most disturbing of fashion. Black Mirror episodes usually run around forty-five minutes; just enough time to introduce characters, and delve deeply and thoroughly into one central concept. At nearly twice that length, “White Christmas” has more space to kill. splitting up the running time into three interlocking tales and a frame story. All of which ultimately connect together to tell one big story. We learn the consequences of humans using technology to reform how we see the world and to force those closest to us into new roles or contexts. This special is supremely disturbing but necessary holiday viewing.
As sad-sack Joe wakes up, dazed, in a snowbound cottage, with the radio and Jon Hamm (Mad Men’s Don Draper) preparing Christmas lunch. You want to know what on earth is going on?
Seems these two people have been stuck with each other in a desolate place of the earth. There uncomfortable body language and dull conversation gives a sense that they have both done something wrong if their former lives. Being Christmas Matt (Jon Hamm) a good-looking man with charisma. Feels they need to open up and conversate more. Joe is hesitant about making conversation at all. So Matt open up first proceedings , explaining that he used to have a hobby helping men attract women, counselling them in real time. This segment introduces augmented Google Glass. People now have Z-Eye implants let them control and share what they see.
It’s in this kind of technological advance - one that doesn’t seem far off in the realm of possibility but that has the potential to shatter human relationships. We learn that Matt is a dubious character, he is a seedy pickup artist, who coaches loser into getting woman. All while conducting to a voyeuristic choir of online pervs. Yet one of his clients, upon meeting a glamorous but severely disturbed woman at a Christmas office party, had unwittingly persuaded her to kill both him and herself – to silence the voices in their heads. We saw the fellow vainly insisting that the voice in his bonce was real. “No one understands what that’s like!” she smiled, as her fatally spiked drinks claimed them both.
Hamm gives Matt this atmosphere of being all nice, friendly and good-natured. Both those facts make you want to trust him. He is also has this perfect kind of swaggering, smug Yank. That first story helps breakdown his character. You become invested in this story. Like Joe you become more intrigued about this what this handsome man has done. Where lured into his story web. As he asked Joe “What do you think my real job was ?”
The next interwoven story. Tell us of his previous actual job. Starts of in a hospital with what seem like a simple procedure. Then turns all kind of dark and twisted. We are introduced to a beautiful porcelain-skinned spoilt brat. That has make a cookie of herself in order to run her digitally controlled house. Trouble is the copy is completely sentient. Matt job is to break this digital doppelgangers into obedient slaves. Forever trapped in the dwelling’s circuitry with nothing to do but draw blinds and make toast. What are our responsibilities to the people who provide our consumer luxury? And is digital enslavement something we should be signing a petition about anytime soon? You’ll never again take your phone’s “intelligent personal assistant” for granted again. This was the darkest of the 3 stories. At this point in proceedings, Matt is the villain of the piece. He’s manipulative, deceitful and views people by category.
We jump back to the cabin in the snow. With Matt confessing all this horrible sins. Joe finally open up about what he did. Turns out that the former’s girlfriend fell pregnant, had permanently blocked him and vanished. Why? Because, as he eventually learnt, in an appallingly tense scene, the baby wasn’t his. Joe kills the grandfather and left the tot to freeze, he had been found by police, unwilling to talk. The slack is quickly picked up by the final segment, which ties all the elements of the previous hour with deft efficiency, twist and unblinking bleakness.
If you thought there was something fishy about Matt and Joe confines, you were right. This was in fact an artificial construct. As Matt being digitally sent in by police to tease a confession out of Joe’s cookie. Like an episode of any procedural cop drama. Matt was only helping to gain freedom. Although he might have gain it, he’s still being punished for his previous, illicit hobby. Now being universally blocked, reducing the rest of humanity to indistinct, inaudible pixels. But, as the real Joe languished in jail, his cookie had a yet worse deal, incarcerated for millennia in the digital snow-globe in which it had been all along, with I Wish it Could Be Christmas Everyday playing on a never-ending loop.
It was thrilling stuff: escapist entertainment with a very real-world sting in its tail. Like the stronger of the previous Black Mirrors, it exaggerated present-day technology and obsessions to subtle but infernal effect, a nightmare-before-Christmas reminder that to revere our digital gizmos is to become their pathetic slave
5 out of 5 dystopian Christmas waffles
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