[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!]
What happens when our otherwise virtuous desire for justice becomes hyperbolized, hypostatized, and perversely transfigured into an insatiable thirst for vengeance? That is the question that was first explored in Black Mirror‘s “White Bear” (S2E2) and the creators return to it again in “Shut Up and Dance” (S3E3). This second time around, though, the Black Mirror creators aim to show us our dark reflections without the aid of futuristic mind-control technologies like the ones used in “White Bear”‘s Justice Park.
In fact, there is no technology in this episode that does not already exist today. I think it’s that very real, very right-now, very IRL possibility of “Shut Up and Dance” that convinced me it belongs in the top-5 of all of the Black Mirror episodes. I ranked it #3.
Much like “Nosedive” (S3E1, which I wrote about here) and “The National Anthem” (S1E1), the absence of too-far futuristic technologies makes “Shut Up and Dance” not only more poignant, but fathoms more unsettling, than the Black Mirror episodes that allow us the comfort of inserting an imaginative distance between our Lebenswelt and the near-future world being represented. No matter what dystopic horrors we might imagine the future to hold, it remains the case that what we are able to see right now in our extant black mirrors– if we dare to look closely and honestly– can be very, very dark indeed. I take it from my friend and fellow-blogger, Adriel Trott, that this is what she does not love about Black Mirror (and why she claims to watch it out more out of duty than interest or affection), namely, that Black Mirror reveals (in her words) the “dark capacities of human existence.”
The main players in “Shut Up and Dance” are: a pedophile, a womanizer, a racist, and one or more anonymous internet trolls. So, yeah, the darkest capacities of human existence, indeed.
This wasn’t the case when I first watched “Shut Up and Dance,” but we are currently experiencing what I think is the adolescence of an “Internet Reckoning” age, when the sorts of public-shaming and public-humiliation campaigns that were previously only employed by trolls are now being adopted by (known, anonymous, and/or pseudonymous) persons who, all things considered, seem to have a legitimate claim to those tactics. While considering what I wanted to say about “Shut Up and Dance,” I was less concerned with the iniquities of the episode’s protagonists, who are forced out of their secret places and into the public eye, than I was with the presumed righteousness of its invisible trolls who exposed them. I could not help but think of phenomena like revenge porn and subtweeting and “trials by Internet.” I thought of the recent fall of Aziz Ansari, of the #MeToo movement, and of both the harm done by and the sometimes-necessity of extrajudicial punishment. I thought of the role internet anonymity plays in the meting out of extrajudicial punishment, about which I have written before (here) and which I have been hard-pressed to re-think of late.
But, hold up a sec, I need to say some things about “Shut Up and Dance” first.
The basic plotline of “Shut Up and Dance” is so eminently possible that it might as well have been “ripped from the headlines” a la Law and Order. Our young-adult protagonist “Kenny,” played brilliantly and sympathetically by Alex Lawther, jacks off while watching porn on his laptop one afternoon, only to later discover that his computer has been hacked and his embarrassing autoerotic activities have been recorded. (We find out later in the episode that Kenny’s kink is for underage porn.) Kenny gets a series of text messages from “Unknown,” who threatens to send his masturbation video to everyone on Kenny’s “contacts” list and to post it publicly on the internet if he does not follow directions.
Kenny, of course, follows directions.
Unknown/Troll eventually directs Kenny to join forces with Hector (Jerome Flynn), who we are led to understand is another pawn in the same cruel game. (We learn later that Hector has been unfaithful to his wife.) The pair are ordered to rob a bank and then ditch/burn their getaway car. Hector’s involvement ends there but, in a horrifying twist, Kenny is forced to trek into the woods and engage in a hand-to-hand fight to the death with another stranger (also a sinner, also at the mercy of Unknown/Troll). The gruesome brawl is filmed from a hovering drone-camera above. Despite the various pawns’ complete surrender and unquestioning obedience to Unknown/Troll, they are all exposed in the end anway. To add insult to already-insulting injury, they are each texted the infamous Rage comic trollface, which silently laughs at their humiliation, their misery, and the utter destruction of their worlds.
Pause. Let’s talk for a second about how really, viscerally, and deeply, existentially terrifying the situation of these pawns is.
Maybe you’re one of those people who have never sent anything by text, email, or Messenger that you wouldn’t want made public. Maybe you’re one of those people who has never done anything within the scope of your laptop/desktop camera, or anyone’s cellphone camera, that you wouldn’t want seen by the public. Or maybe you’re one of those people who have managed to avoid ever having a photo taken of you in a compromising position– never a photo with a drink, never a photo smoking a cigarette or taking a toke, never a photo in a place you shouldn’t have been, never a photo with people you shouldn’t have been with, never a photo at an hour you shouldn’t have been out. If you’re one of those people– AND I DO NOT BELIEVE THOSE PEOPLE EXIST— then just skip to the end of this post because it has nothing to do with you.
On the other hand, if you are among the almost-everyone-else who has erred on the side of indiscretion at some point in your life, then you know the deep-seated, constant, and ubiquitous anxiety that comes with living in the Internet Age, where trolls are everywhere and legion, where they are always watching, where they are largely ungoverned (and ungovernable), and where nothing digital is ever deleted.
Like “White Bear” (S2E2), “Shut Up and Dance” pretends to be about justice, but it’s really about vengeance. In particular, it is about the quite often cruel and petty pleasure we take in watching others suffer their comeuppance. But it’s more complicated than that in the hands of Black Mirror. The care that both episodes take in accomplishing what I sometimes call “The Humbert Humbert Effect” is a real credit to Black Mirror‘s writers. (“Humbert Humbert” is the narrator and main character of Vladimir Nabokov‘s 1955 novel Lolita. He is a thoroughly despicable character that Nabokov manages to make us not only not despise, but genuinely empathize with.) This Humbert Humbert Effect refracts our perspective a bit and, even in spite of our distaste for the protagonists, we feel a nagging there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I reservation about our default schadenfreude. Halfway through “Shut Up and Dance,” we know that our heroes are not heroes, that both Kenny and Hector, and all of the other pawns in the anonymously-directed Troll Game, have committed venial sins. They are, generically, the persons that we are culturally and cinematically trained to understand as “villains.” And/yet/but…
Kenny and Hector’s trials, as “Shut Up and Dance” slowly unfolds, becomes increasingly less about asking “do they DESERVE this?” and increasingly more about asking “do they deserve THIS?”
In terms of generic life-advice, the imperative “Don’t feed the trolls” ranks right up there with “Look both ways before crossing the street” and “The guy who swings second gets the foul.” We’re warned against feeding the trolls, and we warn others against the same, because we don’t want to give trolls fodder, because we think that if we dry up their resources, they will stop doing harm. Somewhere deep down, even in spite of our many justified reservations about how due process works (and doesn’t work) in this country, we recognize that the extrajudicial tactics of trolls do harm. “Shut Up and Dance” shows us how far that harm can go if we throw our hands up in exasperation with our justice system and simply hand the scales of justice over to trolls.
We all feed the trolls, because we are all imperfect. We all violate the social contract. We all are “sinners.” We all break the law. We all have secrets. As long as there are humans online, there will be a virtually bottomless feeding trough for trolls.
Maybe “Don’t be a troll” is better life-advice. After all, studies show that more than a quarter of Americans have admitted to trolling. But here’s where we’re forced to look again at our exasperation with a broken justice system: what of the people who escape their deserved punishment?
I want to tread very carefully here, because I do not think that all trolls are created equal. Some are the products of the so-called “dark triad” of pathology (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy), but others are the product of genuine wrongs done to them and a corresponding neglect on the part of the rest of us to properly address those wrongs. Of course, it would be a grossly false equivalence to say that the women and men who have taken to the internet to publicly expose sexual harassers are doing exactly the same thing as garden-variety trolls who post inflammatory comments, provoke argument, or attempt to shame others for amusement. What their tactics do share in common, though, is the circumvention of due process, something that is, in my view, a central characteristic of “trolling.” (In the case of the former, that’s often because due process has been denied to them or has failed them. In the case of the latter, that’s more often because their cause is not a matter of justice in the first place or they prefer sadistic harm over proportionate punishment.) Nevertheless, however unjust we might find the harm done to #MeToo victime or however just we might find their silence-breaking, it is very difficult to see “trials by internet” as a preferred method of meting out blame and punishment.
And so here we are, perhaps feeling a quiet distaste at the methods employed to take down people like Aziz Ansari, while at the same time looking around for better options and finding none.
“Shut Up and Dance” is a powerful cautionary tale. Not primarily because it warns us of the dangers of “petty” trolling run amok, but rather because it makes us stop and think about our inclinations toward vigilantism and vengeance, and how easy it is to say of those who do not get the punishment they deserve that they deserve whatever punishment they get.
.
Random Episode Notes:
- If you’re a Game of Thrones fan, you most certainly recognized Jerome Flynn in his brilliant turn as “Hector” in this episode. You may have also noticed (as I did) that Flynn is particularly skilled at playing the part of broken-men-who-we-should-not-love, a la Humbert Humbert, as he does so well in his “Bronn” role on GoT.
- In Season 4’s final episode “Black Museum,” the two lab-rats are named Kenny and Hector, an obvious reference to our protagonists in “Shut Up and Dance.”
- I find it really interesting that the episode elects masturbation, pedophilia, racism, and infidelity as the beyond-the-pale sins. First, it shows how fundamentally biopolitical our darkest secrets are and, second, it really highlights the sorts of iniquities that so frequently escape “due process” judgment and punishment.
- On Kenny’s laptop, there is a sticker of Waldo from S2E3 “The Waldo Moment”
- The song played at the end of the episode is Radiohead’s “Exit Music For A Film.” I didn’t know this track before watching the episode, but it is an absolutely perfect selection.
- One of the things I really love about Black Mirror is how it subtly incorporates references to other episodes, and there are some real gems in one of the final scenes from “Shut Up and Dance.” There, we see the unnamed CEO– who we saw only briefly in the opening scene– checking her newsfeed to learn that anonymous trolls have released her “racist emails” to the public. This is what she sees on her screen:
