[This is the next installment in my ongoing series of reviews of Black Mirror. These posts DO include spoilers. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know!]
Ever since the first season of Black Mirror was released in 2011, I have been utterly confounded by my friends’ and colleagues’ affection for its second episode, “15 Million Merits.” Reasonable people disagree about matters of taste all the time, of course, but the difference between my evaluation of “15 Million Merits” and that of my friends– especially those with whom I generally agree about Black Mirror in particular– is unusually extreme. Case in point: my friend Shannon Mussett, who wrote the excellent guest post (“What You Didn’t See In Black Mirror’s ’15 Million Merits'”) earlier today, considers that episode one of Black Mirror‘s best. I, on the other hand, ranked it second-to-last on my list of episodes.
That is not an “I say potayto / You say potahto” difference. That’s more like an “I like Kendrick Lamar / You like Toby Keith” difference.
Below, I’m going to give my (semi-brief) review of “15 Million Merits” in an attempt to explain why it didn’t really register with me the first few times I saw it. I had the opportunity to read Mussett’s review before re-watching the episode again last night, and I will say that her framing definitely (and positively) influenced what I “saw” this time around in surprisingly powerful ways. Nevertheless, I think my ultimate evaluation of the episode remains largely unchanged. I will get back around to commenting on what I find insightful and profound about Mussett’s remarks in the end.
It’s only fair to point out here at the beginning that “15 Million Merits” had a very steep hill to climb from the get-go. It was the second episode in the first season of Black Mirror, which means it not only had to overcome the audience’s greenness with respect to whatever it is that Black Mirror is, but “15 Million Merits” also had to immediately follow what is arguably the very best Black Mirror episode ever, “The National Anthem” (S1E1), a real game-changer for television and for the ways we think about our being-with-technology.
If I had to sum it up succinctly, I’d say that my chief complaint with “15 Million Merits” is that it is far too ham-handed and unforgivably uncreative in the execution of its ideas. This complaint has only become more acute in the years since I first saw it. On the whole, Black Mirror’s greatest strengths over its now four seasons have been (1) its imaginative world-building, followed by (2) its multivalence, followed by (3) its nuanced moralizing. “15 Million Merits” mostly fails on all three counts, in my view.
I just didn’t care about this story. It was too obvious, too derivative, too juvenile, too predictable. It was like reading a freshman Philosophy essay: Yeah, okay, I appreciate the fledgling ideas at work, and I commend the enthusiasm with which they were considered, but this is not my first rodeo. Even after re-watching it last night, I couldn’t quite get past my own overwhelming, eye-rolling, feeling of “meh.” I imagine the conversation in the “15 Million Merits” writers’ room went something like this:
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SCENE: BLACK MIRROR WRITER’S ROOM. SHOW-RUNNER CHARLIE BROOKER SITS AT THE HEAD OF A LARGE CONFERENCE TABLE, SURROUNDED BY MILLENNIALS WEARING SCARVES WHO HAVE NEVER READ MARX. EVERYONE IS DRINKING PUMPKIN SPICE LATTES.
BROOKER: Hey, thanks for coming today. Let’s brainstorm. How should we represent meaningless, exploitative labor in a near-future capitalist society?
MILLENNIAL WRITERS: Let’s put workers on stationary bikes! Dress them in identical grey tracksuits! Make them eat out of vending machines!
BROOKER: Alright, alright, alright! How can we make their non-work lives even MORE meaningless?
MW: Let’s have them spend all their credits on “virtual” goods! Confiscate and destroy their origami! Make their IRL existence like the internet! Bombard them with popups and porn and commercials!
BROOKER: Okay, great work, everyone. Now, how can we manufacture a false promise of escape?
MW: Let’s almost-exactly recreate American Idol! We’ll make the voting public a horde of cruel and thoughtless avatar-trolls! We’ll force our hapless but sympathetic, “authentic” contestants to drink some mind-numbing drug before they make the most important decision of their lives! We’ll call it “Compliance” juice!
BROOKER: Brilliant! But how can we really DRIVE HOME the point that NO ONE, and I MEAN NO ONE, escapes this dystopia? That everything “real” is IRRECOVERABLY LOST? That everyone, given the opportunity, SELLS OUT?
MW: Uhhhmmmm… dayum, bro. Well, we’re going to break the hero’s heart, obvs. Then, let’s give him his own reality show and commodify his authenticity!
END SCENE
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I mean, c’mon now. This episode had me like…
To be fair, there were bits and pieces of “15 Million Merits” that I found compelling. Most of those were elements of the protagonists’ bedroom/pod/cell existence. In particular, Bing’s inability to “mute” his bedroom feed and that unbearable, screeching, sensation-assault that occurred if he didn’t pay for the mute-privilege was something that I found especially well-translated from idea to screen. Very clever. I also liked the idea that we’re going to become increasingly invested in the projection/reception of our “digital” selves, as evidenced by the interest the red-headed secondary character, Kai (Colin Michael Carmichael), invests in his avatar’s clothing and haircut. (See my previous post “The ‘Real’ and ‘True’ You” on how I think about how we think about, or fail to think about, our “digital selves.”) And, even though it was a little too on-the-nose for my taste, the way the episode translated fame-whoredom into actual whoredom was surprisingly poignant.
But, again, on the whole, to “15 Million Merits” I have to say: I just wasn’t that into you. I’m still not.
Now, if you’ll allow me to adjust the rudder of this post a bit, I’d like offer some comments on the really excellent guest-post by Shannon Mussett earlier today: “What You Didn’t See In Black Mirror’s ’15 Million Merits’.” (Definitely click that link and read her essay before proceeding. You won’t be sorry.)
First, a sort of meta-comment: everyone should have people in their lives with whom they are close, whose thinking and views they genuinely respect, and with whom they occasionally disagree about things of import. Shannon Mussett is one of (thankfully, many) people like that in my life. Musset and I occasionally– correction: frequently— disagree about the meaning, the use(s), and the value of emergent technologies. I think Mussett tends to err on the side of techno-pessimism; she thinks I tend to err on the side of techno-optimism. I don’t want to speak for her, but I think we both would stipulate that we are pessimistic and optimistic about technology, respectively, though I think we would quibble about where the other places the line of “error.”
The advantage of having friends and intellectual peers like Mussett is that, when we disagree, I find myself motivated to reevaluate my own position. That’s something that is not only eminently valuable for refining and sharpening one’s own thinking, but also something that all of us in the professoriate ought to invest real energy in modelling publicly for our students. (Hey, students. I know y’all read this blog. Pay attention.) So, when Mussett and I disagreed about the merits of “15 Million Merits,” I asked her to write a guest post. Then, I read her evaluation before re-watching the episode, I thought about it, and I looked for the ways that it might influence the evaluation that I am writing now.
I found Mussett’s review not only astute, insightful, and deeply moving. but also dead right in really important ways. I had absolutely forgotten about the cleaners/Botherguts in “15 Million Merits” and, what is worse, even when I re-watched the episode and was looking for them, I still found that I didn’t have any non-voluntary affection for them. I was only able to generate care for them because my friend had already pointed them out to me and said “Look HERE!” and told me why I should care. Before reading Mussett’s essay, I was (in the words of the protagonist, Bing) just another one of the rest of us “sitting there and making things worse.”
That’s a hard pill to swallow.
Watching “15 Million Merits” with an eye to the Botherguts– and ugh, gross, that name hurts so much worse when you look for and finally “see” the anonymous, replaceable, expendable, but still real people who occupy that category– was, for me, a shameful experience. How could I not have seen them? It made me think again, and seriously, about the complicity of middle-class, professional, educated, and mostly urban white women like myself, who so frequently imagine ourselves as forwarding a so-called “progressive” vision while we thoughtlessly trample over the least-among-us for the sake of the lesser-than-us.
Thanks to Mussett, on this most recent viewing of “15 Million Merits,” as I watched Bing blithely massacre scores of Bothergut avatars from the comfort of his bedroom VR, I didn’t think of the wretchedness and meaninglessness of the stationary-bike-life that Bing would return to the next day. I didn’t think of his budding romance, or his recently deceased brother, or his frustration at acquiring an apple, or his desperate pining for anything as real and authentic as an apple. I didn’t even think think of Bing as the protagonist.
Rather, I thought of the literally scores of online videos of black men and women executed in public, before my very eyes, that I have watched behind the comfort and safety of my own bedroom or office screens, as if what I was watching wasn’t real, but rather some kind of social/moral/political lesson. Executions of people denied their right to judges and juries and due process, people who were for the most part unseen and unknown to white women like me before their deaths, people whose deaths were “significant” not as significance is determined by mothers, brothers, and neighbors, but rather as significance is determined by a Twitter hashtag. By the cruel and thoughtless, trolling horde. By all of us, white women especially, sitting there and slowly making things worse by not seeing until it’s too late to make a difference.
I still think “15 Million Merits” is a weak episode, but when Mussett writes of the Botherguts as “the slaves who clean up after the slaves,” it ought to give us pause to rethink what (and who) it is that we do and do not see on our screens, in our lives, all around us. It ought to give us pause to rethink how we select between the desperate and the dying in the allotment of our attention, not to mention also our influence and resources. It ought to give us pause to rethink how the things and people in our lives are represented to us, and how the things and people in our lives are awarded merit, meaning, and significance by us, to us, and for us.
That means rethinking Black Mirror, too. It was not lost on me this time around, thanks to Mussett, how Black Mirror displaces people of color even in its very subtle and very clever representation of the Botherguts. Despite how much I loved Mussett’s piece, this made me dislike “15 Million Merits” even more for its laziness, for its backdoor poking at bourgeois white women’s fear (the worst thing of all is to be fat, unseen, and insignificant!), and for pulling its punches.
I wish Charlie Brooker had read Mussett’s essay. It would have been a 15M times better episode if she had been in the writer’s room.
Other Random Episode Notes:
- I thought Rupert Everett‘s turn as “Judge Hope” was brilliant. It was just enough like American Idol’s Simon Cowell to be recognizable, without being a reductive impersonation. The guy who played “Judge Wraith” (Ashley Thomas), however, was a god-awful caricature.
- Keep an eye out in S4E6 “Black Museum” for fun references to “15 Million Merits.” The guy reading the comic book in “Black Museum” is reading the story of “15 Million Merits.”
- Okay, so I get it that it was an important plot-point that Abi be only an “above-average singer,” but why oh why did she have to sing that entire song in the episode?! This was my biggest irritation the first time I saw it and that irritation has not waned in any subsequent viewing.
- On the #BlackMirrorSoWhite theme (which I first remarked upon in my post on “Nosedive”): it’s worth noting that the “jilted” paramour in this episode is Asian, that none of the Botherguts are POC, that the only secondary character of color (Judge Wraith) is a racist caricature, and that Bing (the primary character of color) only gets a shot at “Hot Shots” because the judges are looking for “someone ethnic.”
- I have really ambivalent thoughts about the way porn is depicted in this episode, as I also have ambivalent thoughts about porn in general.
- I think there are some interesting parallels between “Nosedive” and “15 Million Merits.” The main reason I prefer the former over the latter is that “Nosedive” never really entertains the question of “merit” at all.
- It deeply depresses me that there wasn’t even a sub-sub-plot or a single, even secondary, character in “15 Million Merits” that represented the one and only possibility of overturning (or avoiding) the kind of totalitarian-capitalist dystopic world it imagines, namely, class consciousness. You have nothing to lose but your bikes!
- I want to award the WORST EVER BLACK MIRROR PLOT DEVICE to the writer’s decision to give “Hot Shots” contestants a drink literally named “Compliance.” Just get out of my face with that.
- You’ll notice that I ranked “15 Million Merits” as Black Mirror‘s second-to-worst episode. Trust me, “Metalhead” is soooooo much worse.