Cloudy Mirrors

I finally got around to watching the second episode of Black Mirror yesterday, over a decade after watching the first episode. I temporarily have a Netflix subscription again. I was trying to watch RRR, which Google told me was streaming on Netflix, but I guess the algorithm doesn't know me as well as it thinks it does because it turns out I'm in Japan where RRR is not airing on Netflix.

So that puts a damper on my dystopian daydream. Not that I'd find the cynicism on Black Mirror especially effective otherwise. It took me so long to watch the second episode because I thought the first was dumb, the "pig fucker episode", as a friend of mine referred to it. The same friend told me the show gets better so maybe I'll keep going. I suppose the second episode, "Fifteen Million Merits", was a little better. I liked the first five minutes or so in which we meet a protagonist played by Daniel Kaluuya, going through his daily routine in a technological, Orwellian future. But then it becomes a parody of American Idol which really dated it. Not that I've ever watched American Idol so for all I know it's still popular. Naturally I never hear anyone talking about it in Japan.

The episode is from 2011 and seems to have been inspired by Howard Stern becoming a judge on American Idol. So we have the judges aggressively forcing an innocent contestant into doing porn. Which is the kind of thing people think Stern did who never listened to Stern.

I was listening to The Howard Stern Show at the time. It's strange, such a popular show listened to by millions of Americans mostly exists only in memories now. There are random clips from older episodes but none of them give a real impression of the iconic New York radio show. Stern recently conducted an hour long interview with President Biden. The idea of Stern interviewing a sitting president back in the '90s would've seemed absurd. It certainly would've made headlines. But what the Black Mirror episode failed to understand would be the dystopia would take the form of increasingly sanitised content, not the other way around. Stern's loss of popularity, and access to more respectable public figures, coincided with him toning down the raunchiness.

The cynicism of "Fifteen Million Merits", though, extends to self hatred. The protagonist ends up raging against the system and the system gives him a show to do it on, the implication is that the oppression feeds on the voice of dissent. I'm by no means convinced this is the case. Ideas strike deeper in the human spirit than the cold hands of coordinated or mindless oppression could ever touch. When someone says something everyone knows is true in an environment in which everyone is used to constant lies it tends to leave an impact that lasts a lifetime. You can kill the people but, short of total lobotomy, you can't really change their reality, even if you can occasionally fool them. "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time," as the quote often attributed to Abraham Lincoln goes. I suppose the fact that we know no-one's actually sure now where the quote came from proves the point of it.