What I Watched:
Black Mirror S3.E4&5: "San Junipero" and "Men Against Fire"What I Saw:
If you haven't seen it, Black Mirror is an anthology series, meaning each episode tells its own self contained story. These two episodes had similar themes going on, so I will talk about the ideas within them interchangeably.Both episodes touched on the idea of metaphysics, where reality itself is brought into question. Think of the scene in The Matrix where Morpheus is explaining to Neo what the matrix really is. In Black Mirror, "San Junipero" discussed a not too distant future where people can pay to pass on to this virtual reality (VR) world after they die. They can preview it for a few hours a week to become accustomed to it and relive their youth. The other episode "Men Against Fire" deals with the military's use of augmented reality (AR), where an implant is put into soldiers' brains and virtual information is placed in addition to their normal senses. They are still interacting with the real (in this case, physical) world, but virtual information is added to it.
The implications with San Junipero's VR are that you can essentially live forever even after your physical body dies. Not only that, but the main character Yorkie is in a coma like state, where she cannot move or engage in the physical world but her mind is still active. In this sense, the VR world is the only world she could ever hope to experience, which makes it more real than the physical world where her body is. This goes contrary to what most people think of as reality, which is where the other main character, Kelly, initially starts off with. She only thinks of the VR world as a game, where her consequences don't matter because she will return to the "real" physical world. This is shown in the scene where she crashes her car in a fit of anger, because she cannot die in that world so the consequence of flying through the windshield is meaningless.
Since the two characters fell in love, and Yorkie can only really interact and therefore exist in the VR world, Kelly has to make a choice as to what reality she wants to exist in. Does she want to continue to treat San Junipero as a playground with no consequence? Or does she want to to accept it as another form of reality and therefore treat her relationship with Yorkie as a real relationship too? In what I've read in comments as the only happy ending of the series, Kelly chooses to accept it, and Yorkie, as a real part of her life (aww!).
The episode "Men Against Fire" questions our sense of reality when we are interacting and observing the physical world. It focuses on a squad of some kind of peacekeeping mission in what sounds and looks like Eastern Europe. There are these humanoid beings called roaches which seem to be plaguing a village. A rookie takes out two roaches on his own, but not without coming across a device which causes his VR chip, or "mask" as its called in the show, to start glitching.
He later learns the VR mask was not only giving him tactical data while in combat, but it actually changed what his perception of the world was. His sense of smell was being dulled, but more menacingly the roaches he saw were not humanoid monsters, but just normal humans. His VR chip simply masked their face to look like monsters, and to distort their pleas for mercy.
Our perception dictates the reality we live in. What the rookie perceived through his "mask" were monsters, and his reality was his killing was justified because he was defending humanity from some type of invading species. Without it, the reality became he was a soldier who was complicitly committing genocide on a race of people. That's some f***ed up shit right there.
Just like in the other episode, the protagonist has a choice to make with what reality he wants to live in. Only the difference is there is no good waiting at either road. Morality wise, he could opt out and not kill anymore, but he will be imprisoned where his new daily reality will be reliving the moment he killed two unarmed civilians over and over again. Or, he can choose to return to the old reality and have his memories erased so that he won't even remember they are actually human. In this case, ignorance is bliss.
One other idea that was introduced was the concept of selective breeding in humans. The "roaches" were being targeted because genetic testing identified the group as having higher rates if cancer, disease, mental illness, lower IQ, basically everything negative that can be linked to genetics. But to their core, they are still human beings. The social construct of race and what it means to be human was presented. It was especially fitting that the protagonist was a black man, who's ancestors at one point were considered to be less than human too.
Lastly, the concept of war being an inherit trait of humanity was challenged as well. See the reason why the military needed their soldiers to use masks was because human beings don't like to kill each other. The psychiatrist character gave examples that the majority of soldiers in WWI and WWII either missed on purpose or refused to fire their weapons. And then in Vietnam where they learned to condition soldiers to kill, they suffered from PTSD afterwards. This shows that while war is definitely a human concept (although chimpanzees wage war too when resources are scarce), humans are not naturally inclined to kill or fight each other. And when they kill, there are severe consequences.
So that's my post for this week. Lots of deep stuff in that show and look forward to watching more. Tell me guys, what do you think defines reality? And do you think war is more natural to people than the show lets on? Let me know in the comments below!
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