Black Mirror Explained: How To Spot the Twists | Video Essay

Charlie Brooker’s “Black Mirror” is full of twists. Here are a few ways to spot them before they happen. Support ScreenPrism on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=7792695

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Transcript provided by Youtube:

00:03
“Black Mirror” is all about the twists —
00:05
twists on twists on twist, fake twists, horrible twists,
00:09
twists that you really don’t see coming but that make perfect sense when they happen.
00:13
So let’s get inside the mind of evil genius Charlie Brooker and try to anticipate his
00:18
next steps.
00:19
Here are some of the ways to spot a “Black Mirror” twist before it’s revealed:
00:24
Notice the things that seem off or disproportionate.
00:27
Don’t brush them off.
00:29
We have a deeply ingrained tendency to latch onto what we’re told at the start of any
00:33
story
00:34
and explain away things that don’t quite fit.
00:37
It’s what we do in our lives all the time, so conveniently for Brooker,
00:41
we’re trained to ignore what seems dissonant or contradictory.
00:44
But actually these little “off” moments are hints he’s dropping for us.
00:49
So later when we look back, we go, oh yeah, we were told something weird was going on.
00:55
In “Shut Up and Dance,” it seems odd after a while that Kenny is willing to continue
01:00
doing
01:01
the extreme things he’s being blackmailed into,
01:03
just because this mysterious operation has a recording of him masturbating.
01:07
“Everyone does that.”
01:09
But we make up an explanation, like well, I guess he’s just that terrified of humiliation.
01:14
“You’ve been looking at kids!”
01:16
In the end, it turns out Kenny was actually looking at pictures of little kids,
01:21
and that’s the humiliation he’ll even kill to cover up.
01:25
In “Black Mirror” and in life, if you want to foresee the twist,
01:28
don’t explain away the crack — look into that crack.
01:32
In “White Christmas,” the girlfriend Beth seems a little unhappy with the narrator Joe,
01:37
but we’re not sure why apart from his being a little annoying.
01:41
When she says she’s not keeping her baby, Joe yells at her — and she leaves and blocks
01:45
him forever.
01:46
Again this strikes us as disproportionate.
01:49
To block him, refuse to talk to him ever again, and not let him meet his child because he
01:54
lost his temper one night?
01:56
Again, our impulse is to find an explanation — I guess she’s just the type who overreacts.
02:01
But no, there’s a reason, we discover later.
02:04
The baby wasn’t his.
02:06
Looking back, Beth’s interactions with the other couple at dinner were also strange.
02:10
“What was your tip for winning her over again?”
02:12
“Not to let you hear me snore.”
02:13
Why would she know he snores?
02:14
And why was she drinking so much?
02:17
In “San Junipero,” Kelly says she was married for a long time —
02:21
“Long time I was married.”
02:23
but we’re looking at a young woman.
02:25
So we briefly wonder, how is this possible?
02:27
And then we forget about it, but we shouldn’t.
02:30
We also get an early line that we can feel is loaded with symbolism.
02:33
“It’s, eh, got different endings, depending on if you’re one- or two-player.”
02:39
So from this we sense we’re dealing with simulated game worlds
02:43
and this is going to be a story about whether there are one or two players at the end of
02:47
this game.
02:48
So we get plenty of clues along the way, but the episodes often contain red herrings —
02:52
that’s one reason why we miss the real clues, because we follow false ones that are there
02:57
to distract us.
02:58
In “Playtest” we get twists to the point of utter exhaustion —
03:08
but most of what we witness is all red herrings.
03:10
Cooper sneaks his phone into the room to take photos of the top secret augmented reality
03:15
technology he’s testing.
03:16
He misses a call from his mother.
03:19
“You’re qualified to do this, right?”
03:22
“I haven’t killed anyone yet.
03:24
May I?”
03:26
These words become ironic because Cooper dies almost immediately after them.
03:32
It turns out that the call messed with the software,
03:35
and the whole horror only took 0.04 second in real life before he died.
03:40
A good way to avoid the red herrings is to zero in on the problem at hand.
03:45
Ask ourselves: what’s the meat of the thought experiment in this one?
03:49
What issue might the story be trying to get at, what might it be critiquing or trying
03:53
to say?
03:54
So in “White Christmas,” almost from the start we get examples of people treating others
03:58
as less than human,
03:59
“Please, stop screaming.
04:00
Are you going to stop screaming?
04:02
Are you going to stop screaming?
04:03
No?
04:04
Okay.
04:05
I’m sorry, I had to mute you.”
04:07
using them, writing them off, erasing them.
04:10
Everything that we see, and every twist that’s revealed, is exploring that same question
04:14
—
04:15
how do we treat others we consider to be “less than human” or deserving of punishment?
04:21
The final twist is that Jon Hamm’s Matt, who just manipulated the copy of the criminal
04:25
to confess,
04:26
has been blocked through the zed-eyes technology by everyone.
04:30
And this is the perfect representation of the moral of “White Christmas” which boils
04:34
down to the golden rule.
04:36
If you treat others as inhuman, that treatment is going to come back to you.
04:40
Because you’ve shown yourself to be less than human.
04:43
This same moral is executed powerfully in “Most Hated in the Nation.”
04:46
The bees end up attacking not the people that were targeted by the deathto hashtag
04:51
but the hundreds of thousands of people who used the hashtag.
04:55
As we’re watching we can probably predict at least that this is not going to be a story
04:59
about how cyber-bullying is a harmless, no-big-deal thing.
05:03
“It’s half-hate, they don’t mean it.
05:06
Hate in a marriage, that’s in 3d.”
05:09
Don’t trust the main character.
05:11
Coming into a story we tend to implicitly trust our main character —
05:15
we don’t necessarily think they’re perfect or special.
05:18
But we imagine that they’re being straight with us.
05:20
We assume we know everything that’s important to know about this person.
05:24
But in “Black Mirror,” the story is not being straight with us.
05:27
It’s withholding.
05:28
So the secrets don’t just come from without, they come from within the character
05:32
we’ve been following and subtly identifying with.
05:35
Telling a story from a person’s point of view is amazingly effective at
05:39
making us care about and project ourselves onto a person.
05:45
So it’s as if the secrets come from inside our selves.
05:48
At a certain point in the story we flip and find out how the world sees our character.
05:53
That’s when we might learn the writers have sneakily aligned us with a “bad guy,”
05:58
a child murderer, a pedophile, one of the worst offenders of society.
06:02
But we enter the story without knowing that, so we can’t help still seeing this character
06:06
as a human being.
06:08
And that’s maybe one of Brooker’s points — that we should pity and feel for even the
06:12
most wretched,
06:13
that no one should be treated as less than human.
06:16
Likewise, a person the main character trusts is probably lying about something major.
06:21
“The Entire History of You” we feel like the main character is being paranoid and unreasonable.
06:26
Surely he’s blowing this stuff out of proportion about her ex.
06:29
But his wife actually was unfaithful and his child was fathered by another man.
06:33
“San Junipero” is a brighter romance, but they’re still hiding key parts of themselves
06:38
—
06:39
Kelly that she was married, and Yorkie that she’s spent most of her life in a coma.
06:43
Both Matt and Beth are lying to Joe in “White Christmas.”
06:46
In “White Bear” the heroine’s only ally, Jem,
06:49
turns out to be a hired actress playing a part in Victoria Spillane’s punishment.
06:53
So in there’s usually no such thing as being “too paranoid” in “Black Mirror.”
06:57
Don’t trust the first twist.
06:59
There’s probably more where that came from.
07:01
When we sit down to watch an episode, we know there’s a twist coming —
07:04
we’re waiting for it, we’ll be disappointed if there isn’t one.
07:08
This actually makes it challenging for the writers —
07:10
look at the trap M. Night Shyamalan made for himself by getting known as the twist guy
07:14
and having to outdo himself for an audience that’s expecting surprises.
07:18
“I see dead people.”
07:20
One of the ways “Black Mirror” gets around this problem is by giving us a series of escalating
07:26
twists.
07:27
We might get a twist that involves our main character, one that involves a side character,
07:31
and one that opens up the dark underbelly of the society we’re looking at —
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at least one of these twists is the mega world-morphing-twist,
07:38
the one that tells us we’re in is fundamentally different world from the one
07:41
we thought we were in when we started the story.
07:44
But all of the twists, large and small, are connected thematically and add up to something
07:48
unified —
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that’s what makes them so satisfying.
07:52
The great pleasure of “Black Mirror” is that the twists feel justified because they follow
07:56
logically —
07:57
they’re the answer to the question that’s set up by the premise or “what if?” of
08:02
the episode.
08:03
Watch for Repetitions.
08:04
One way the twists are made to feel inevitable is through the technique of priming —
08:10
adding in small recurring elements, repeating details, that will end up being important.
08:15
In “Playtest,” Cooper’s mom keeps calling him.
08:18
“The best way to stop her from calling is, I don’t know, answer it?”
08:24
“Yeah, this is kinda like a can of worms that I just don’t want to open.”
08:27
Of course, it feels plausible that a mom would call her kid a lot,
08:30
but we learn that Cooper’s mom’s call sets off the events of hus death,
08:35
so the repetition had a totally different significance than we assumed.
08:39
This is often how we get tricked.
08:41
We notice the repetitions, but we miss the point of them.
08:44
Look at the people, not the tech.
08:46
We tend to focus on the new technology or cyber practice that’s often introduced in
08:52
an episode.
08:53
But we should be focusing more on the people.
08:56
More often the secret that’s going to be revealed isn’t really in the tech;
09:00
it’s coming from within the people.
09:02
Meanwhile, “Black Mirror” makes it clear that all of these kinds of technologies can make
09:06
it easier to be evil.
09:08
“There’s no cure for the internet.
09:09
It will never go away.”
09:11
It’s not that the technology itself is necessarily bad,
09:14
but advanced technology can make it less messy or unpleasant for humans to do inhuman things.
09:20
So we should look for the human danger in the tech.
09:23
“Even in World War II, in a firefight, only 15-20% of the men would pull the trigger.
09:31
It tells me that that war would have been over a whole lot quicker if the military got
09:36
its shit together.”
09:37
The MASS implant in “Men Against Fire” makes the soldiers’ targets appear to be so-called
09:42
“roaches,”
09:43
so it’s a lot easier to kill.
09:44
Throughout series, people use tech to torture, erase each other, block each other out,
09:49
designate each other as lesser, re-watch memories instead of looking at each other while they’re
09:54
having sex.
09:55
It’s always people who are doing these things to other people.
09:58
But their technology is an enabler.
10:01
It lets them not see the person on the receiving end of their actions —
10:06
and that is really dangerous.
10:08
Don’t buy into the social hierarchy.
10:10
The societies in these stories quickly make it clear which kinds of people are admired
10:14
or revered,
10:16
and which are rejected and looked down on.
10:18
But the society’s values are usually revealed to be all messed up.
10:22
In “Nosedive,” Lacie’s old friend Naomi has a super high social rating,
10:25
while Lacie’s embarrassed of her brother’s low rating.
10:28
But what’s wrong with her brother besides that he’s not particularly ambitious or
10:32
fake?
10:33
Naomi is only being nice to her as a mathematical calculation to increase her rating even more.
10:38
“When I asked you to speak, you were a 4.2, okay?
10:42
And the authenticity of a vintage bond low four at a gathering of this calibre
10:44
played fantastically on all the stimulations we ran.
10:48
Forecast was a prestige bounce of 2 minimum.
10:50
But now you’re a sub three.”
10:52
Finally when Lacie gets a zero rating she’s liberated from the prison of social expectation.
10:59
If you think, well, gee, that was a lot of bad stuff that just happened,
11:03
I bet Brooker has probably had enough for today — think again.
11:06
Think instead, what fresh hell could still be coming?
11:10
The notable exception to the general punishing bleakness of “Black Mirror” is “San Junipero,”
11:15
where the happy ending is the probably the most brilliant twist yet in “Black Mirror”
11:20
—
11:21
we’re so conditioned to expect the worst from this show, that it’s genuinely a shock.
11:25
Some viewers have doubted it — they asked
11:27
what if Yorkie has only imagined Kelly as part of her perfect reality, in a one-player
11:32
game?
11:33
But Brooker directly disputed this — he said Kelly and Yorkie are definitely together.
11:34
“It’s, er, got different endings, depending on whether you’re in one- or two-player.”
11:37
But Brooker himself directly disputed this.
11:39
So just when think we know what to expect, we get tricked again — proving that we should
11:44
never assume anything.
11:46
Finally, as you’re watching, ask yourself:
11:49
Where’s the humanity?
11:51
Follow the humanity.
11:52
“They’re human beings.”
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“Black Mirror” presents increasingly tech-driven worlds in which humanity is becoming scarcer
11:59
and more devalued.
12:00
It warns us to look before we leap,
12:02
to be cautious about what we sign up to without thinking through the human costs.
12:07
Our technology is, like the title says, a “black mirror” — it has the power to
12:12
reflect and magnify our worst traits.
12:15
So by giving us these cautionary tales, Brooker and his collaborators are telling us
12:20
don’t forget what’s always most important:
12:23
being humane to each other and creating a future in which humanity still comes first.
12:29
“Anyone who knows what love is will understand.”
12:41
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12:42
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12:47
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12:51
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12:55
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This post was previously published on Youtube.
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