There’s already a thread for Season 4, but I thought I’d start one for this episode. (In my opinion, it’s be worth starting one for each episode — they’re each dense and different enough that they’re worth discussing one at a time.)
Three things I found interesting/worth discussing about this episode:
Callbacks to previous episodes — not just from this season. (I spotted references to “White Bear” and “15 Million Merits” from Season 1, and from “White Christmas” and “San Junipero” as well, on first watch — I’m sure there are more.)
The Black Museum is a synecdoche for Black Mirror as a whole, right?
Race. The second and third stories — and the umbrella story about Nish and Rolo — contain (but are not limited to) racial allegories IMHO. This is especially obvious in the third and umbrella stories, which reminded me strongly of Tarantino’s movies Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds. I mean, she burns the place down at the end!
I’ll link to this thread in the series thread, and if there’s interest I could start more episode threads. I think all of the episodes deserve some deep dives. (I think there’s a racial angle to “Crocodile,” for instance, that needs unpacking.)
I don’t know about the racial angle. I could be wrong here but I’ve got the impression that black Brits are more regarded as just Brits by whites there than black Americans are regarded as just Americans by whites here. You had interracial pairings in both that episode and “Kill the DJ”. I noticed that fact without investing into it any special significance.
I know it’s a British series, but all the stories in “Black Museum” take place right here in the USA. Nish’s fake accent is kind of a signal that we should think of this as an American story, isn’t it?
In “Kill The DJ,” on the other hand, we have a story where both protagonists are British, and the interracial thing is, as you say, not an issue (that I noticed). Interesting.
It’s pretty explicit that torturing the (maybe wrongly) convicted murderer has a racial component. All the people pulling the lever were white, right? And once the protests take their toll on attendance, Rolo’s customers are pretty much full-on racists who get off (sometimes literally) on inflicting harm on a black man. (Assuming we can trust Nish’s recap of the Black Museum’s history.)
EDIT: the “souveniers” are totally references to the old lynching postcards!
I even wondered if the title of the episode was a racial reference. Obviously the show itself is called “Black Mirror”, but the themes explored in the third story of “Black Museum” were very directly related to the racial history of America, especially with the lynching postcards mentioned upthread, and the racial injustice of the application of the death penalty. And I have absolutely no doubt that, right now, in 2018, there are thousands of people who would visit that exhibit if it existed, and pull the lever with glee.
Thanks for linking to those reviews! I just finished the series, so I haven’t seen much of what’s been written. I’m glad to see I’m not alone in seeing race as a key aspect of this episode.
I do think tbere’s something of a “racial angle” to the story about Carrie and Jack, but I’m not sure how to read/understand it. It’s not a simple story in terms of good/bad people, and the metaphors are hard to break down.
Is the story “really” talking about divorced parents? About the black man/white woman dynamic, and how that bothers some black women? How much should we blame Carrie, Jack, and Jack’s new lady friend for their selfish behaviors? (Carrie’s set up as a sympathetic figure, but I can totally see why Jack & company have trouble seeing her as a full-fledged person, and find her backseat driving annoying.)
…I didn’t see any black man/white woman dynamic in the episode: I think it was deliberately played that way as well. There were no “bad guys” in that story. (apart from Rolo.) Two people met, they had a baby, fell in love, she tragically died, he didn’t want to let her go, he committed to something where he didn’t fully grasp the implications. Things worked out for a while, but then (understandably) they didn’t.
He met someone new. They started a relationship. His new partner understandably was jealous and annoyed with the arrangement. When Rolo suggests they terminate Carrie: its important to note that Jack says no and his new partner doesn’t argue. Its like the family who bring their sick father home to look after him and find out in short order that looking after him is not as easy or as simple as they thought it would be. They struggle along for a while. But find out that they just can’t keep doing it: the emotional toll is too much, so they organize him to stay in a managed care facility instead.
The family wasn’t wrong to put the dad in care. And Jack isn’t wrong to both decide to take Claire out of his head and put her into a bear. (Although the argument could be made that Jack should have given Claire the option of either going into the bear or something else. But she didn’t have the right to insist on staying in Jack.) Nobody is being selfish. Shit happens. Thats kinda the point of the story.
I agree there was no racial element at all to that storyline. Black Mirror is very good about avoiding racial tokenism. It has an extremely diverse cast, and that’s that. There’s never any agenda or plot device related to the characters’ ethnic backgrounds, except in the final storyline of “Black Museum.”
I agree he wasn’t wrong to want her out of his head. It was pretty apparent from the get-go that the concept of having someone else’s consciousness inside your own mind was doomed to be a disaster. Any reasonable person could have guessed that.
I felt that putting her into the stuffed animal (a monkey, not a bear, actually), was horrifically cruel. I think a reasonably empathetic person, under those circumstances, would inquire if there was some other option in between “deletion” and transferring her into a pathetic inanimate object capable of only communicating two phrases. I know exactly what I would be asking the doctor in that situation.
“Can we put her mind inside something that lets her speak in normal speech, or at least gives her the ability to type out text? Can it be some object that’s sturdier and more substantive than a stuffed monkey? If not at this time, will this be possible in the near future? Is this transition into the monkey irreversible?”
I felt that Jack’s decision to put her in the monkey lacked the proper degree of ethical consideration.
She ended up in a stuffed monkey, only able to communicate on a primitive level (akin to what she could do in the coma). Yes/No, monkey loves you/monkey needs a hug.
I agree she didn’t have the right to stay in Jack’s head unwelcomed, but sticking her consciousness in the monkey without her consent is … messed up.
I felt race played a big role, a foreign looking black guy and a dead, attractive, famous white woman? That has racial tensions all over it.
Also the fact that he was innocent, and nobody cared. It harkens back to the Scottsboro boys and lynchings in the south from 100 years ago.
As I mentioned in the other thread, ‘pain doctor’ was written by Penn Jillette. I had no idea he wrote fiction, but it was an interesting story and fit in with the other stories.
I may be wrong in dimly seeing a racial element to the Jack/Carrie story — curious about POC’s takes on it. (Nobody in either thread so far has identified as such, I don’t think.)
As I said, I have trouble seeing clearly just how race relates to the overall Jack/Carrie story. I just can’t help thinking it’s an element, given the umbrella story as related by Rolo.
But to your larger point — I think the show’s smart enough about the world we live in that I don’t think it’s “race-blind” generally. Not to sidetrack, but “Crocodile” this season works in part as a parable about the disparate favor white people receive in the justice system. IMHO. Mia may not personally be a racist or anything, but her willingness to murder an entire Desi (?) family to cover up her crimes is resonant of … something. (Especially in her confidence that she’d get away with it.)
As I recall, their initial roadkill victim was a white guy, and her friend that she murdered was a white guy. And she was confident she would get away with those. Do you have some evidence that she was more confident after she’d killed the entire family that she would get away with that? Because it looked like she was even more wrecked after doing so.
I was trying to make a more nuanced (hence tenuous) point.
It’s a white privilege thing — as I see it. The idea that you can commit murder to cover up a youthful offense and thereby preserve your comfortable lifestyle acquired in the years since then — and then commit three more murders to cover THAT up … and still show up at your kid’s performance, wrecked though you may be? That takes a level of confidence in one’s safety within the justice system that comes straight out of having white skin.
Contrast that with the Desi (?) woman, a new mother, who scrambled to finish this case in 24 hours to get a bonus. She ignores embarrassing, even (if I remember her scene while bound and gagged correctly) incriminating things she sees when interviewing people.
“Crocodile” may not have race as a central theme, like the umbrella story in “Black Museum” does, but there are racial overtones running all through it — I think.
…but Claire got stuck in Jack’s head without (her) consent as well. From Jack’s POV there is little difference between one procedure and another. I’m not saying the transfer was the ethically correct decision. I’m saying Jack wasn’t in the right emotional place to make the “ethically correct” decision and Rolo should never have put him in that position in the first place. Its why Rolo got fired, its why the law got changed. Its situations like this in the real world that prompt changes in regulations and the law. Jack was put in a horrible position and he made what he thought was the best choice from the options Rolo gave him. It turns out Rolo is an idiot. Who knew? But we trust our professionals.
…I’m Samoan/Maori, and I don’t see anything except here, although YMMV. I think Brooker isn’t afraid of taking risks as a writer, but I don’t think he was attempting to say anything at all about the “black man/white woman” dynamic here. That isn’t his story to tell: its such a layered nuanced minefield of a story that Brooker is smart enough not to attempt it. If you can’t see any subtext in the story its because it isn’t there. Two people fell in love and got married. Thats it. IMHO of course.
Fair enough :). Thanks for your perspective as a POC. As a white guy in an interracial relationship, I may have hyper-sensitive radar/antennae on this, because to me interracial relationships are still pretty fraught in US culture. (Doesn’t even have to involve white people — see Mississippi Masala etc.)
Re your previous post: I’m pretty sure Carrie gave consent to the implant in Jack’s head using the primitive “Red light/green light” device (back when she was in the coma). It’s kind of a “Flowers for Algernon” story arc for her, isn’t it?
Trapped in a comatose human body, unable to communicate more than binary -> piggy- backing on a “real” human, able to speak to one perso -> same, but subject to a pause function -> in a monkey, unable to communicate more than binary.
As a piece of storytelling, I think “Black Museum” is cleverly structured. Each vignette ups Rolo’s culpability — and each “artifact” in the museum is more and more human-like. We go from the blue hairnet to the sentient monkey (who can’t talk) to the holographic prisoner (who also can’t talk). The stories also make sense as chronologically successive stages in Rolo’s progressively awful career.
The dude deserved what he got — although I hope Nish and her mom squish that souvenir pretty soon.