Black Mirror is well-known for its
controversial way to picture the future. Meanwhile there are some people trying
to forget that disturbing episode with the pig, there are others who tend to
say Black Mirror has become quite predictable. How can Charlie Brooker keep
creating revolutionary stories when everything seems to have been invented?
It seems very simple. Incorporating something
widely used by videogames and books: an interactive choose-your-own- adventure
experience. Needless to say how original this is to the point that it may
change the way we conceive tv shows from now on. After all, it is another way
to use technology in our daily basis. The options start banally as choosing
whether to have Sugar Puffs or Frosties for breakfast, but get ever more bleak,
one path leading you to the no-good-outcome question of whether to bury a body
or chop it up.
There will be several reviews these days about
the innovative way to design the episode and also commenting the five different
endings you can obtain depending on the decisions made. However, I feel it is
more interesting to discuss the psychological implications of Bandersnatch, and
there are quite a few.
First of all, we need to reintroduce season two
second episode: White Bear in which reality everything is controlled by a tv
satellite and it criticizes the conception that our society has about violence.
A society where everything is televised and gives people the entertainment and
curiosity they are waiting for. There are several references to White Bear in
Bandersnatch but the most notorious one is this symbol.
In this society, people are willing to see
violence and to witness a person receiving their punishment for something they
have done. Surprisingly, it isn’t that different from what the most part of the
audience was waiting to see in Bandersnatch. That was probably Stefan
punishment but this time we were the crowd seeing his torture as entertainment,
so it reflects that Black Mirror is not as unreal as it seems.
Psychology has studied human behavior for so long;
they are also particularly interested in situations where people are forced to
push their moral values aside in order to decide something. We have watched several
tv shows with this premise, the difference is that in Bandersnatch you are the
one in charge and it will make you end up choosing immoral things.
It is also greatly common that people make
riskier decisions when it only affects another person. If you evaluate the
choices you made watching Black Mirror, they would be highly different from the
ones you would have chosen if it was your real life.
“It’s not a happy game, it is a fucking
nightmare world”
