Jim and I have been watching a series on Netflix called Black Mirror. It’s an anthology series set in the very near future where technology is not your friend and you can’t swing a cat without hitting a dystopia.
Now, I love me a good dystopia – Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Logan’s Run – but I wouldn’t want to live in one.
Make Oceania Great Again?
Anyway, the series is dark. Like, really really dark. So well written, well acted, great production. And really really dark. Like “Holy shit, they went there!”
I’m eating this up and really enjoying the show, but the last episode we watched – and it might really be the last episode since it’s Jim’s Netflix account – was the darkest yet.
I could see where it was going and was thinking it was one of the most probable of the near futures. And I was enjoying the thought provoking nature of the show.
Jim, however, was not enjoying it. I could tell he wanted to stop watching at one point, but also wanted to see how it played out.
And when the ending was even darker than he expected, well, he was troubled. As the ending credits rolled, he turned off the TV and said he didn’t want to watch the show anymore. We talked about it for a few minutes and he tried to re-write the ending to make it a little less terrible.
Instead of calling it a night, he sat up with the puppies and looked at Facebook and Youtube for a while. And when he did go to sleep, he said he didn’t sleep well and had nightmares.
As for me? I thought about it for about 2 minutes and determined how I would react if put in the situation of the characters, and then dismissed it. Totally unphased – and I didn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.
Kind-hearted Jim doesn’t want to watch anymore. And I’m hoping the next episode is even darker – figuring that “people are terrible” and “technology makes people worse”. Bring it!
And I’m maybe a little worried at how little this bothered me. Does my immunity and enjoyment of this kind of dark fiction mean that…ummm… maybe things aren’t quite so rosy in my cranium?
I mean, we’ve already figured that I’ve got the “fun” parts of a Schizotypal Personality Disorder – the unconventional thinking, unusual attire, peculiar speech patterns…while still being grounded in the real world and being able to interact socially with other people. Mostly.
Could it be worse than that, though? Could those voices in my head – the ones with really great/terrible ideas – be a sign of something…ummm… sinister?
Ummmm… no.
I mean, I’d totally be a super-villain if give powers or a budget, but I’m really more on the whimsical end of whatever spectrum I’m on.
The immunity to Stephen King, Clive Barker, American Horror Story, and Britney Spears is more about having built up a tolerance over the years for things that show the dark heart of the human soul. I mean, have you listened to her lyrics?
When I was a kid – maybe 7 or 8 – I got ahold of a copy of the Amityville Horror. And read it, cover to cover. When I was done, I announced that I was never going to sleep again. Ever.
Seemed like the best solution.
My dad sat me down and had a talk about what was real and what wasn’t real.
“But it was based on actual events!” I countered, but he eventually settled me down and – worn out from a long day of scaring the shit out of myself – I did go to sleep.
When I started in on Stephen King in earnest a few years later, it troubled me a bit. But, I was pretty well grounded by that point and shrugged it off. Even to the point where I would read “It” about 20 pages ahead of my mom and tell her what pages to skip. The late 700’s were a rough…
Once you’ve faced down/ been raised on a self-imposed diet of evil clowns and vengeful ghost/demon/zombie things, it’s tough to let a little thing like a less-than-optimistic future society get to you.
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I wrote the above before Jim got up the gumption to watch another episode and this one was as sweet and joyful as the last one had been dark. It even had, dare I say it, a happy ending?
Ugh.
So, looks like we’re in it for the rest of series.
And I’ll have to break out some Lovecraft if it stays sunny.