[NOTE: This is the next installment in my series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!]
More on her later…
“USS Callister” takes place in two worlds, one in real meatspace and the other inside the beta version of Infinity, a super-sophisticated virtual reality MMOG created by our protagonist, Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons), and his company, Callister, Inc. Daly is a fairly standard, cookie-cutter, office tech nerd. He’s brilliant but socially awkward. He works hard but allows others to take credit for his accomplishments. He pines-at-a-distance for the cute new girl in his office, but he barely speaks to her, and when he does, it’s only about his massive collection of Space Fleet memorabilia (a sci-fi television show from his youth that serves as the basis for Infinity). Daly is an introvert and a loner: prickly, stiff, graceless, and more than little bit in his own way. He writes ingeniously elegant code, but is painfully inelegant in his body, even more so in his interactions with other human beings. And so he simmers and pouts and resents, but accomplishes nothing that improves his station. To borrow the language of Nietzsche, Daly is “prevented from a genuinely active reaction, and [he] compensates for that with merely imaginary vengeance.”
He’s also the walking, talking, breathing embodiment of toxic masculinity.
With the aid of near-future technologies– a combination of advanced DNA cloning and 3D printing— we eventually come to learn that Daly’s “merely imaginary vengeance” is capable of taking real hostages. In the meatspace world, Daly surreptitiously steals, and then clones, the DNA of colleagues who have ignored, embarrassed, belittled, or in some other way “emasculated” him, and he reproduces them in cyberspace, where they populate Infinity, Daly’s reproduction of the Space Fleet world of his youth. The clones are sentient and thinking in Infinity, but Daly is in full control. He’s also the only one who can leave the game.
As you might expect from an insecure man given a world in which his Will is Law– see: history– Daly plays out his frustrated-in-real-life fantasies by requiring obedience and admiration from his colleagues and manufacturing scenarios that secure his role as Hero, Commander, and Savior. Not only is “Captain” Daly debonair and desirable, he is also knightly. He abides by a “code,” which makes possible the kind of self-congratulatory noblesse oblige that has, for millenia, given cruel subjugation the mask of enlightened humanitarianism. Infinity is the idealized version of the Masculine Dream. It is, in the words of James Brown, a man’s man’s man’s man’s world.
Even still, as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business reminded us, “it ain’t nothin’ without a woman or a girl.”
We don’t yet know, in the opening scene, that the crewmembers of “USS Callister” have been there for some unknown number of ages. We don’t know that their enthusiastic participation in Captain Daly’s adventures, and their fawning obedience to and adoration of him, have been secured through a combination of humiliation, demoralization, and torture. We don’t know that the crewmembers waste away in desperate boredom when Captain Daly is away from the game, denied even the simplest comforts, like food and drink (there is only imaginary “space” rations) or erotic pleasures (their sexual organs have been removed and replaced with Ken-and-Barbie-esque blankness). We don’t learn anything of the horror and terror of Infinity until the newest crew member, Cristin (Natalie Cole), comes aboard.
It is ultimately Cristin, with her capacity to deliver an epic eye-roll, who gives lie to the entire Infinity world.
I won’t go into all of the details of how Cristin ultimately bests both Daly and Infinity— it involves clone-Cristin finding a way to communicate with IRL-Cristin to exploit a bug in the game’s code– but it is important to note, I think, that Daly is ultimately outsmarted by a women. That’s like, THE WORST for men like Daly. By which I mean, men.
Instead, I want to focus on (a) the specific punishment that Daly employs to subjugate Cristin, (b) the real and symbolic power of Cristin’s epic eye-rolls, and (c) how both tell us something about the (present and future) dangers of a overwhelmingly male-dominated tech industry.
The Punishment: Cristin resists from the moment of her very first appearance onboard the USS Callister, against the counsel of the other crewmembers, who have already been terrified into obedience. Captain Daly shows a kind of mildly exasperated forbearance of her at first, but when she refuses to give him a congratulatory kiss– it’s important that the actionable offense is a sexual refusal– he punishes her by “blanking out” her face. Without a nose or mouth, she is silenced and unable to breathe, though she struggles to scream and to gasp for breath nevertheless. While she is in this state, Daly informs her that he can continue her suffering infinitely, that she will not die, and he demands that she (silently) indicate her acquiescence to his absolute control. It is a horrifying and terrifying scene.
It’s also a scene reminiscent of the sci-fi short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison. Ellison’s story takes place after a World War fought between three artificial intelligences, originally developed by Russia, China, and the United States, but which subsequently become self-aware and independent. One of the AIs eventually defeats the other two, and proceeds to extinguish the human race, except for four humans, which it tortures endlessly. The super-AI goes by the name “AM” in the story– first standing for “Allied Mastercomputer,” then “Adaptive Manipulator,” and finally “Aggressive Menace”– and it aims to prevent its remaining human victims from escaping their torture by killing themselves. SPOILER ALERT: One of the humans, Ted, eventually realizes the hopelessness of their situation and manages to kill the other three humans. However, AM intervenes before Ted can kill himself, transforms Ted into a gelatinous blob incapable of self-harm, and condemns him to an eternity of despair. Ted’s final thought in Ellison’s story, which we must presume goes on forever, is “I have no mouth, and I must scream.”
Ellison’s world is in many ways a sort of reverse Roko’s Basilisk. (No room here to explain that whole nightmare.) And it is almost exactly the same as the Daly-controlled Infinity world in “USS Callister.” Of course, it also shares much in common with representations of eternal damnation in religious and secular literature across cultures. Abandon hope all ye who enter here, the words that Dante inscribed on the entry gates to Hell, are meant to not only communicate the severity of the punishments Hell holds, but also the utter helplessness of its inhabitants. Their petitions are not heard, their cries inspire no sympathy, their suffering does not matter. They have no mouths, and yet they must scream.
This is also how systemic misogyny punishes women.
The Eye-Roll: Because and in spite of the above, it is all the more satisfying to see Cristin’s #resistance to Captain Daly’s subjugation expressed as a so obviously inauthentic acquiescence to it. While the other crewmembers push all-in with their performances of servitude, Cristin stands slightly aside, out-of-view of Daly, and (silently) rolls her eyes at the farce of it all. As I mentioned above, this is what the original Star Trek was always missing, I think, and perhaps why it never really registered with me. I always found myself thinking: somebody, somewhere in that melodramatic, manufactured, hyperbolized, and hypostatized Man’s Man’s Man’s Man’s World has to be the one who gives a skeptical side-eye to her fellow captives that says “oh COME ON, already!“
Meanwhile, over here in IRL meatspace, I often find myself thinking: somebody, somewhere in THIS melodramatic, manufactured, hyperbolized, and hypostatized Man’s Man’s Man’s Man’s World has to be the one who gives a skeptical side-eye to her fellow captives that says “oh COME ON, already!“
Cristin is the somebody who does that. (#MeToo) And lest you think epic eye-rolls are no kind of resistance, allow me to remind you of The Punishment above.
Last October at SPEP, I heard a really amazing paper by Dr. Lindsey Stewart (Philosophy, University of Memphis) in which she employed the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade to talk about (what Stewart called) “principled indifference.” According to Stewart, some forms of resistance to, for example, systemic racism, may involve strategically refusing to “perform” the trauma of anti-black racism in ways that benefit (and console) what we might call “good liberal” whites. The example she gave was of being told, by a good liberal, non-Southern, white person at a cocktail party, that “it must be really hard to live in the South,” with the obvious implication that racism is something that only happens in the American South. Stewart argued that when the inquirer follows up with the question, “so how are you doing?,” she is implicitly being asked to perform the trauma of anti-black racism for the benefit of the white person who wants to congratulate him- or herself for being a sympathetic ally. One form of resistance to this charade, according to Stewart, is for her to answer something like “what do you mean?,” in effect feigning ignorance of the script she is being asked to perform and exhibiting a “principled indifference” to the question.
Cristin’s eye-rolls effect a similar sort of principled indifference, I think. They express resistance, not by saying STOP IT! or WTF?! or THAT IS A LIE!, but rather by feigning ignorance of the misogynist Script women are meant to ventriloquize. The eye-rolls represent a principled indifference to what is taken to be our collective acquiescence to performing that Script. Come on, already! Eye-rolls could be easily mistaken for passivity or complicity, but that would be to misunderstand the whole complex architecture of structural oppression. And it would be to forget The Punishment.
The Takeaway: I’m fairly convinced that “USS Callister” is one of the most explicitly feminist Black Mirror episodes so far, in part for its imaginative recreation of systemic misogyny a la Infinity, but more so for its obviously self-referential criticism. Black Mirror has never been unproblematically technophilic or technophobic, but this is the only episode that intentionally casts a Titan of Technology as the villian… not because of the technology he creates, but because he is a HE.
I’m not the first person to note this, of course, but at least one consequence of our present-day tech industry being disproportionately male-dominated (also white-dominated, and upper-class-dominated) is that the primary “Questions Concerning Technology” that get any real consideration are of only two types:
(1) Will the robots kill us? or, in what amounts to the same thing, will they take our jobs?
(2) Will we be able to have sex with them?
These are in many ways quintessentially (and stereotypically) “masculine,” perhaps also misogynist, questions. As long as the tech industry is controlled by a restricted subpopulation of body types and identity-concerns, it will continue to ask a restricted set of questions, devise a restricted set of solutions to those questions, and reproduce a world of ever-more-restricted possibilities.
“USS Callister” gives us some hope that there may still exist bugs in our technology that, in the hands of the right coders, could be features. I think the episode is absolutely clear that those “right hands” belong to women and to coders of color. (Depending on how you read the “Milanka” character, maybe also immigrants?) But, presently, that hope is steadily being extinguished as the power to guide future technologies becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer wealthy, white men. Men who do not know what the word “intersectional” means, men who think sharing power is emasculating, men who continue to drive a wedge between STEM and the humanities, men who think women or people of color who roll their eyes are bitches and ingrates, men who only ask how much surplus value their tech can generate and not how valuable the world it creates will be, or for whom.
If we do not begin making a collective effort to exhibit principled indifference to that Script and to actively author another code for the world-to-come, those men will enact their vengeance through technology. And that vengeance will not be merely imaginary.
Random Episode Notes:
- Jesse Plemons is brilliant in the role of Daly. I wish this actor got more work. I’ve been a fan of him since Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad.
- The two planet names in the episode, “Rannoch” and “Skillane,” are the surnames of the child abductors in S2E2 “White Bear”
- There were a lot of details about the tech in this episode that I thought were executed rather sloppily– like, what exactly did the 3D printer do? why did Daly need to keep the original DNA (he could have just recopied the code) of his captives? how did IRL Cristin’s invitation to the game give clone-Cristin access to the game’s root directory? how does the clone-crew get new uniforms after escaping Daly? who coded those outfits?!– but none of those things really mattered that much to me in the grand scheme of things, since I thought this episode was a prime example of how Black Mirror is sometimes only really tangentially “about” the technology.
- The entire supporting cast of “USS Callister”– but especially Michaela Coel and Jimmi Simpson— were just top notch. I think this is the only Black Mirror episode with an “ensemble” cast.
- You really should read the Ellison short story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” if you have a spare 10 minutes.
- You really should read about Roko’s Basilisk if you have a spare eternity and do not care about ever sleeping peacefully again.