White Christmas, The Blackness in the Black Mirror

How to effectively ruin Christmas? Watch "Black Mirror: White Christmas" with your family and friends. This British TV show's Christmas special continued the same uneasy atmosphere as the series. No matter how warm and fresh the holiday atmosphere you create, it will be destroyed in an hour of watching the show.

The "Black Mirror" writer Charlie Brooker once explained the title to The Guardian:

If technology is a drug – and it does feel like a drug – then what, precisely, are the side effects? This area – between delight and discomfort – is where Black Mirror, my new drama series, is set. The 'black mirror' of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.

This episode of Black Mirror may not be the most outstanding story in the series, but it is still a solid and ingenious good story. "White Christmas" is divided into five parts. The prologue sets up suspense and anticipation. The story begins with "I wish it could be Christmas every day," in which Rafe Spall's anxious and silent Joe and Jon Hamm's confident and talkative Matt start their uneven conversation in a small house in a snowstorm. The dialogues in the conversation, such as "this is work, not jail" and "this is not interrogation," will make you realize it at the end of the story just like the opening song.

The first part tells the story of Matt helping a friend chase after a girl, but indirectly leads to his friend's death. This establishes Matt's image and, more importantly, introduces the audience to the future implantable device Z-eye and its crucial function - shielding.

The second part features Oona Chaplin (the granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin), who plays Greta. This part showcases the second key technology in the story - simulating and copying someone's brain using code by implanting a device called a cookie and taking it out after a week. The end of the story sees Joe expressing sympathy for what happened to the code inside the cookie, prompting Matt to judge him as "an honest man who did bad things."

In the third part, Joe finally starts to tell his own story. Fortunately, the ending is quite successful. Both technological advances lead to tragic fates for the two protagonists. The climax, emotional outbursts, and the song "I wish every day could be Christmas" all feel appropriate. As a result, the audience's Christmas spirit is ruined.

Look back at these five paragraphs, except for the prologue and epilogue, the first part tells a story of a handsome and wealthy guy who uses technology to help his friends reverse their fortunes (eventually without success) with a clean and neat style that can stand alone as an article. The story in the third part is still complete but somewhat clichéd and overly sentimental. The practically functional second part sandwiched between them feels quite stiff and almost as if it's an advertisement inserted, and Greta, the character who breaks away from the main plotline, seems unnecessary.

However, when not considering the story, just looking at the irony and metaphor in "White Christmas", it is ambitious even among the "Black Mirror" series. Contrary to what many people understand, the core of the "Black Mirror" series so far is not about the anxiety of the future, but rather about the portrayal of the present. Even for episodes set in near-future settings, they do not focus on the sci-fi elements like "The National Anthem" in Season 1 or "The Waldo Moment" in Season 2.

"Fifteen Million Merits" will not make you believe that one day people will really have to run on treadmills to earn points, but you will recall possibly the variety shows you watched the night before and how entertainment devalues values. Nor will "White Bears" make you worry that one day people will build sick theme parks like those in the show, but you will realize that distortionary justice occurs constantly in the Internet era. The technology in "The Entire History of You" and "Coming Back Soon" may be more realistic, but the alienation of technology from humans also happens not in the future, but at this very moment when you are making videos and scrolling through social networks.

This is exactly why the "Black Mirror" series is so successful. It does not tell you, "If things continue like this, humans may become fools in the future", but rather it slaps you right in the face with the fact that "we are already fools". This is also where it focuses on reflecting on technology.

"White Christmas" is the same way. Rather than Z-eye's shield function predicting the future evolution of devices such as Google Glass from "wearable" to "implantable", it is more like an exaggerated and concrete manifestation of how social networks distort people's ways of communication.

On the other hand, the technology of cerebral replication provokes reflection from another level. Firstly, the cookie container in the play resembles Amazon Echo, and secondly, the scene where Greta is awakened in Rossini's opera music "The Thieving Magpie" (Listening to this music, you may think of Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange", and I may even remember my discomfort when I first watched "A Clockwork Orange").

This scene is a satire of various concepts popular in the technology field in recent years, such as smart homes, Internet of Things, etc. As for this technology itself, it can be traced back to the thought experiment of "Cerebral Implant" (Epistemology, Scepticism, Solipsism), and then to the end-of-century Cyberpunk Culture ("Ghost in the Shell", "The Matrix").

How do you determine that you are a living person with limbs and not a brain filled with nutrients receiving various nerve signals or a piece of code in a highly realistic virtual reality? One problem derived from "White Christmas" is that if you are a brain or a piece of code, what morality do you apply? Cloning people is considered unethical. Robots have Asimov's Three Laws, so does cloning of cerebral thought/robots without an entity because they are less "like" humans. Can they be used for enslavement/abuse/torture?

Last but not least, Merry Christmas everyone!