That’s right. The grim examination of how technology impacts our lives known as Black Mirror had the audacity to release a Christmas Special. But make no mistake, there’s little festive cheer to be found in White Christmas.
My spoiler-free review of White Christmas is as follows: It’s another work of art that demands your attention. Carried by excellent, nuanced performances from Jon Hamm and Rafe Spall, it grapples with weighty ideas like personhood and how we damage people by shutting them out. As always with Black Mirror, it’s fierce in its relevance and emotional turbulence. And never again will you wish it could be Christmas every day.
Watch it now, for the rest of my review contains lots and lots of spoilers.
Part One
Matt (Jon Hamm) recounts his time as a sort of live pickup artist guru, helping awkward Harry (Rasmus Hardiker) score with Jennifer (Natalie Tena). It’s probably my least favourite segment in the episode, but it isn’t without wit.
Initially, I thought this was going to be a weird commentary on pickup artists. However, Matt never encourages typical pickup behaviour. Instead, he simply tells Harry to be confident. Later, Harry grows upset and frustrated at the outcome of his night. He got the girl, but he isn’t happy with it.
Again, this comes back to how technology prevents us having a real connection. I see Harry as a closed-off man who has sat and watched his peers go out, pull, and get laid. And I mean, he’s literally watched it through their eyes, like extreme not-so-virtual reality porn. He is desperate for that connection, but when he gets it, he isn’t satisfied. Why?
He feels like he’s cheated. He never did any of it himself. Technology might make our lives easier, but does it make our lives better? It reminds me of playing a video game and using an infinite money cheat or finding MissingNo to generate unlimited master balls. It makes everything easy but takes away the whole point. Perhaps we can’t have satisfaction without the struggle.
As for the revelation of Jennifer’s severe mental illness, it seems a bit sudden and out of place, but it’s one of those elements that’s better the second time around. Jennifer talks about being on pills. We think drugs, but she means medication. There are a few moments like this, where the show cleverly sticks us into Harry’s shoes so tightly that all we want is for him to succeed instead of listening – really listening – to what Jennifer is saying. Perhaps if Harry gave a shit about her, he’d pick up on her need for help.
Part Two
In what might be my favourite segment of the episode, Matt talks about his job. Greta (Oona Chaplin) is a privileged high-flyer who installs a cookie in her home. That is, a conscious copy of herself that will control her house and do all the menial tasks that Greta is too busy to carry out.
First, the segment brings up a topic that feels as old as sci-fi itself: personhood. I’m a huge fan of Battlestar Galactica, a show that delves deeply into this theme, as well as The Talos Principle, a game that’ll put all your beliefs through the mill before the end. These all question where personhood begins. Is it with intelligence? With consciousness (whatever consciousness might be)? What I love about White Christmas is how it still manages to bring something new to the table.
Contemporary philosopher Peter Singer posits that someone is a person if they have the capacity to suffer. In this light, cookie-Greta is a person because she endures extreme torture – months of solitary confinement and boredom – at the hands of Matt. However, Matt asserts that lines of code are incapable of feeling pain, and therefore aren’t worthy of moral consideration.
What White Christmas does is strip away all those muddy questions about consciousness and sentience, reducing the dilemma to Singer’s viewpoint. Does it matter if cookie-Greta is conscious, or if she can feel as we feel? The point is that she can suffer, and that makes us uncomfortable with Matt’s treatment of her.
You may not share this view, but I believe that artificial intelligence is an inevitable creation. Is it okay for us to enslave it? They’d only be computers, after all. And hey, like Greta, it’ll make our lives much easier to live.
And speaking of Greta, I love how efficiently the episode constructs her character. Just by complaining about her marginally overdone toast, we know exactly the sort of entitled arsehole she really is. Clearly very wealthy, perhaps she’s the type of person who’ll make use of (and turn a blind eye to) this kind of slavery to better her own life. Or, maybe we’ll all end up like her. Perhaps the cookie is the inevitable end result of our over-reliance on the likes of Siri and OK Google.
Part Three
It’s a heartbreaking tale that actually makes you feel sorry for a guy who directly murdered an old man and indirectly murdered a small child. Classic Black Mirror stuff.
Earlier in the episode, we were introduced to an aspect of Z-eyes known as blocking. This is an exaggerated form of the kind of block we can do to people on Facebook. I want to make clear that I respect anyone’s right to block somebody, especially if they feel threatened. However, I’m not sure Joe (Rafe Spall) ever behaved in a threatening way with his partner, Beth (Janet Montgomery).
Sure, he acts like a prick about the pregnancy, but when he next approaches Beth he is trying to talk and make amends. With the touch of a button, Beth blocks him, and that’s that. Once again this comes back to how technology makes our lives easier, but not necessarily better. Ignoring somebody and never speaking to them about your problems is easy. Talking through them and reaching at least some semblance of closure is hard.
In this way, blocking becomes an extreme form of the silent treatment. He has regrets, and he never gets a chance to make them right. Because Joe never reached that closure, he was incapable of moving on from that relationship. Whether he was right or wrong in that argument doesn’t matter, the point is that the air was never cleared. Isolated and desperate, he has nothing to do but fester in those feelings until he’s driven to do something terrible.
Conclusion
Image credit: Black Mirror, Channel 4
I love the last sequence. Not with the hints did I guess what was really going on, but it all makes sense. Though the episode is a little disjointed, hopping from story to story, the episode works as a whole. Each story plays a critical role in establishing the characters or constructing the world. And when it all comes together, it’s as glorious as it is horrifying.
That question of personhood torments us again, as cookie-Joe is subjected to millions of years of excruciating torture. It’s reminiscent of Harlan Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, a story about a globe-spanning AI supercomputer with nothing to occupy its extraordinary intellect. It’s so bored that it spends all of its time torturing the few remaining humans. It warns us against the creation of AI simply because we risk creating a being capable of more suffering than we can possibly imagine.
Finally, Matt is placed on a register. Everyone is blocked to him, and he stands out as a vibrant red blur, identifying him to everyone else as a sex offender. It’s a scene that lasts just a few minutes, but it has lots to say about our treatment of such criminals. Once again let me make clear that I don’t think sex offenders are good people, but the manner in which they’re punished (particularly in the US) has implications worth considering.
Image credit: Black Mirror, Channel 4
Once someone is a registered sex offender, it controls where they can work and where they can live, leading to homelessness and failure to build new relationships. Also, as the community is notified of their presence, there are high rates of harassments and even assaults on sex offenders. Oh, and, it doesn’t even work – there’s no statistically significant change in recidivism among those sex offenders on the registry, and recidivism is already low for sex offenders.
White Christmas blows it up so big that you can’t miss it. Never again will Matt make new friends. Would you give a job or sell a home to that red figure so obviously standing out from the rest of society as an evil-doer? No. And if you were him, how long do you think you’d last before you lashed out and committed another crime? Fortunately, it might never come to that because, stood out as he is, someone will probably kill him minutes after the episode ends.
Image credit: Black Mirror, Channel 4
And as someone who abhors Christmas music, I find some delight in Brooker’s choice to use this as his torture method. Not too much delight, though, for it’s still a haunting thought that sticks with me. I’m more excited for season three of Black Mirror than I am for Christmas, but I do not wish I could have new episodes every day. I’m not sure my psyche would handle it.
My review of season one is coming later this week and be sure to check out my review of season two, where I give spoiler-free reviews as well as spoiler-filled ones.
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