Recognition and the image of mastery as themes in Black Mirror (Channel 4, 2011–present): an eco-Jungian approach to ‘always-on’ culture

Abstract

There are plenty of examples in moving image culture, following quite distinct and innovative traditions in science fiction literature, where the role of technology seems to have afforded a utopian society; a society where all is clean and free of crime, where we need not worry about hunger, disease, or even the messy business of reproduction through physical intimacy. All needs catered for, all tastes accounted for; and in the middle of it all, a single, solitary human subject wondering that perhaps this is not the way that things were meant to be. In Black Mirror (Channel 4, Zeppotron, 2011–present), Charlie Brooker has managed to craft some of the darkest visions of ‘always-on’ lifestyle to be aired on British television for some time. In this article, I discuss how themes of recognition and reflection in this series provide for us the opportunity to examine the cultural complex of what might be described as ‘negative affordance’, where the various characters misrecognise the relationships they have with other people. This occurs through intensification of the psychic image of mastery brought on through an amplification of pressure to engage in contemporary practices of ‘connectivity’. Black Mirror's deft representations of social media use, and its implications for interpersonal relationships in our ‘always-on’ culture, allow us to rethink how such ‘negative affordance’ operates in relation to our online selves.

Hyperreality in the Black Mirror Episode Shut Up and Dance

“…According to Singh (2014), Black Mirror's world is a distortion of image controlling society and individuals to the highest degree that individuals can no longer differentiate which is reality and which is just a representation of an object in reality. He has also added that most of the main protagonists in the Black Mirror universe are so immersed in the myth and symbols as presented by the technology, leading them to misrecognize relationships and purpose of individuals as proposed by Baudrillard theory of Hyperreality in his book Simulation and HYPERREALITY IN THE BLACK MIRROR 42 Simulacra (1981).…”

Thinking (with) the unconscious in media and communication studies: Introduction to the special issue

“…In his own approach to psychoanalysis, which he subsequently unfolded, Jung emphasised the existence of a collective unconscious made up of commonly held memories and ideas transmitted from generation to generation. The notion of the archetype as the basic form of those transmissions became central to Jung's work and it is not surprising that film scholars over the years have drawn on Jungian ideas in their works (Hauke & Alister, 2000;Hockley, 2007;Singh, 2009Singh, , 2014Hauke & Hockley, 2011;Izod & Dovalis, 2015). There are, however, few works on contemporary digital culture that make use of Jungian theory (Balick, 2014).…”

Jungian screen studies – ‘Everything is Awesome…’?

“…Alternatively, the viewer can distress the garment, creating tears in apparent materiality of its representations. What I want to suggest is that Singh (2014) sees the psychological experience of audiovisual media as something that is bound into our experience of them as interconnected texts and paratexts. These are the ideas the underpin his analysis of the television series Black Mirror (volume 6, issue 1, p. 120).…”

“…In so doing, they implicitly point to work by both Singh (2014) and by Hockley (2014), in which the focus is on more than the text. This decentring of the text in theory is important for a Jungian-informed approach.…”