The uncanny in ‘Black Mirror S7’

Tantalising, troubling, terrifying … tooth-pulling?

To say that the latest installment of Black Mirror broke the internet would be a no-brainer. When the show’s first season dropped in 2011, it forever changed the landscape of sci-fi story-telling on the small screen, if not also the silver screen, infinitely extending the boundaries of what cinema can do and what its lovers can expect.

So when Black Mirror Season 7 dropped on Netflix on April 10, it didn’t just break the internet -— it dissected it, uploaded its consciousness, and sold it back to us as a subscription bundle. And in an exquisitely genre-defying turn, it’s hard to say if this new season is sci-fi or horror because either seems too reductionist for what the six episodes actually offer: an uncanny feeling that stays from beginning to end, never waxing or waning, never teetering away. Creator Charlie Brooker promised a return to the show’s darker, more unsettling roots, and he delivered.

Too real for us commoners

Like every other set of episodes, this latest season stays with its audience because it never wanders too far away from what us commoners (read: everyone who’s not Charlie Brooker, Charlie Kaufman or David Lynch) can perceive to be true at some point in our existence.

Black Mirror coddles our humble capacity for suspension of disbelief by keeping real-world issues at the heart of each story: debates surrounding rogue technology, environmental degradation, fertility, high school bullying, the invention and imagination of God’s messenger, ideas of death and infinity, coupled with everyday annoyances that ail human existence: long-distance love, relentless ads, shitty breakups and losing very (I emphasise, very) important USBs.

A wide variety of devices function in tandem during the course of the six episodes, weaving together the thick, suffocating fabric of strangeness that envelops Black Mirror’s viewership. Of them, some are as overt as the references to the dark web in Common People, through which the ever-so-tired blue-collared Mike tries to earn some extra cash to afford his beloved wife’s Rivermind subscription, which keeps her alive. If that means setting a mousetrap loose on his tongue or drinking his own urine in a dingy room for a sick digital audience, so be it. The horror one feels watching someone pull out a perfectly good tooth by sheer force on-screen is often inexplicably more complex than watching a full-blown murder, perhaps because the former seems so much closer to us, and it is this phenomenon that this section of the episode monetises on. Add to the mix entirely believable characters we have all personally witnessed: overworked and desperate labourers trying to make ends meet, high school computer geeks who befriend no one (or the other way around), furious ‘nice guys’ and the likes, and you’ve got yourself the crawling feeling that you’ll run into one of these characters soon.

Here and there, very obviously uncomfortable things happen nonchalantly for just a blip in the Black Mirror universe. Blue spit and blue blood in USS Callister tops this chart by a mile, though of course, one cannot forget frowning at the randomly appearing thick Scottish accent on a planet one has just laid eyes on. And while appearing briefly and matter-of-factly, Brooker does not waste a single moment of plot development to fluff, so in the case of USS Callister, the normalcy of blue bodily fluids causes discovery of rogue elements in the game who bleed red (big, big surprise.)

Are we overreacting?

And then there are things that Brooker places onto the screen so subliminally that the feeling of unease catches you before you can put reason to it. There are the faces that change so quickly in real time, it’s hard to tell if it’s incredible acting or a body double. A

t the end of USS Calister, when Robert finally descends into his penultimate insanity after 500 years of hard labour as God of Infinity, his face goes from actually-a-nice-guy to a not-so-nice-guy so fast, one has to blink twice to know that the throbbing temple veins really do belong to the same character who was in his place five seconds ago.

There’s also something deeply off about the way people stare in Black Mirror Season 7, a gaze that makes a small incision in some tender part of your skin, crawls under it and stitches the wound back up. It’s the too-long, too-unblinking, too-knowing gaze that drills into your spine. In Common People, Amanda stares blankly as ads hijack her eyeballs, irrespective of how steamy the situation; in Bête Noire, Verity’s coy side-eyes are almost serpentine in their slyness. The girl’s eyes go from naive and teary to hard as stone like it’s not a problem.

But then, you’d learn that much if you’d lived a million lives, one of them as Empress of the Universe. Eulogy ramps it up with a daughter’s glassy-eyed glare as her mother’s affair is dissected across the table and it’s the switch-up that’s hard to swallow: sympathetic eyes, investigative eyes, infuriated eyes in no time. And then there’s Robert in USS Callister – smiling, staring, saying nothing – making you feel like you’re the program bug. Forget the Stanley Stare; every gaze in Black Mirror is a unique glitch in the human code.

Brooker does not spin his magic in a vacuum. He is accompanied by equally competent and creative directors who create worlds element by element, so nothing seems out of place. In Eulogy, the restaurant’s soft lighting turns harsh as emotional tension spikes and colour becomes confrontation. Throughout the season, palettes shift with mood: sterile whites, shadowy blues, garish neons. Pair that with an unnerving sound design – hums, static, silence stretched too thin, Thronglet sounds that will never leave our minds (rest in peace) – and the atmosphere does the storytelling before characters even speak.

Mind-numbing madness

Black Mirror has done this before with Bandersnatch (and is looking forward to doing it again with Banderstruck) but this time, Brooker has taken it too far (or has he?) Various viewers and outlets have caught on to the many easter eggs scattered throughout the six episodes, the most noticeable one being references to Juniper. On top of that, viewers are reporting that they are seeing different versions of Bête Noire on their screens, and for an episode that utilises the Mandela Effect to an unhealthy level, that is as spooky as it gets. Whether this is gossip, mischief or the truth, demanding this kind of interactive viewership turns the viewer into a participant, blurring boundaries between fiction and reality. It’s disorienting – like the show knows you. That unpredictability, that sense of being watched back, adds a chilling layer to the already uncanny experience.