[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!]
[Note from Dr. J: What follows is a guest post from Shannon M. Mussett, a brilliant philosopher and dear friend with whom I frequently disagree about almost all things technological. When I posted my ranking of Black Mirror episodes a couple of days ago, I inadvertently reignited an argument that Shannon and I have been having for years. We disagree about the merits of “15 Million Merits.” She loves it. I do not.
So, I asked her if she would like to write a guest post to convince me that there was something I was missing in the episode, and she agreed. For what it’s worth, I find Mussett’s argument below very compelling. I’ll be posting my own review of “15 Million Merits” later today, and mine will include a response to Mussett. Enjoy!]
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Here’s the thing about Black Mirror’s “15 Million Merits” (S1E2): It isn’t really about the tragic story of the man who sacrifices all he has earned through meaningless labor only to exchange one jail cell for a bigger one with fancier graphics. It isn’t even really about the woman who dreams of making it big in Hot Shot/American Idol and who instead—again, tragically—ends up drugged and doing porn. It’s about those almost invisible (except you can’t not see them) cleaners. “15 Million Merits” is about them. That’s why it packs such a gasping, horrible punch. Because in the end, didn’t you forget about them too?
But before we get to that, let’s back up and recall who the episode is more overtly concerning. Bing, brilliantly played by Daniel Kaluuya (also the show-stopping lead in 2017’s Get Out) wakes up in a stiflingly small cubicle/bedroom. He is surrounded on all sides by touch screens that have more magic than Arnold Schwarzenegger could have imagined in Total Recall. All four walls provide an animated, avatar dominated wonderland controllable by the mere movement of his hand. But there’s a catch—Bing is bombarded by endless advertisements for pornography, reality television, and pointless goods for his digital self. If he wants to turn any of it off, it costs him credits—those units he earns day in and day out by peddling a stationary bike in a cavernous hive of identical bikes and exercise rooms, for no known reason.
There is a poignancy in the small act of inserting his state of the art ear buds, joining all of the other grey sweat-suited drones in the elevator where they stand together but in total isolation. They join the rest of the worker bees, “putting their back into giving back, right now, for a brighter future.” Ah, the promise of working for the man, eh? I bet this message really resonates with the Millennials. As we see, there aren’t a whole lot of older people peddling on those bikes.
Abi (Jessica Brown Findlay), the new kid on the block, tells a newly stirred Bing, “I just went 21 last week,” clearly a recent entry in the work force. This explains what is so captivating about her—she is not yet broken by the mindless work awaiting her. Even the dream of capitalism is denied to these laborers—they work for credits but don’t get to purchase anything tangible with them. Abi tenderly folds a discarded food wrapper into an origami penguin and hands it to Bing, apologizing because, “You never get to keep them more than a day.” But it is meaningful because, “It’s, you know, something.” You really are pulling for these two. They are sweet, their blossoming crush is tender, naïve, and stupid, as all young love is. As a result, Bing gifts the 15 million credits to Abi immediately upon hearing her sing in the bathroom. These credits—largely a gift from his dead brother—are meaningless until he sees that maybe he can help her achieve a better life. And well, we know how that all turns out.
The dominating question of the episode—like so many in the Black Mirror repertoire—is, why? Why are they all dressed the same in gray sweatpants, riding identical bikes, inside, watching a horrid stream of terrible options on the screens in front of them? Are they running some massive post-apocalyptic machine? “Going where? Powering what?” as Bing passionately screams while holding a shard of glass to his neck in his appearance on Hot Shot. Is it simply a metaphor for modern cubicle life? Give me something, anything real.
I return to the cleaners, those towel-gatherers and crap picker-uppers. “You missed a bit,” the jerk we all know says as he throws a can over his shoulder for the nameless woman in yellow scrubs to fetch. It should not be lost that the very next scene shows Bing playing a video game where he passionlessly shoots animated cleaners as the heavy, stupid-looking, o-faced creatures hold up their hands and presumably beg for mercy. They return in video-game form toward the end of the episode (although this time Bing allows them to shoot him because he has himself given up).
The cleaners are there. They are obvious at the beginning—you are uncomfortable about them and say to yourself, yeah, Black Mirror, I get it. It’s shitty enough that you have to ride your stationary bike for no reason, gaining credits that, in the end, buy you meaningless and even completely destructive goods. But hey, at least the cyclists aren’t them—those gaze-averting, silent janitors of the slightly-less downtrodden. They are the slaves who clean up after the slaves. It doesn’t get much lower than that.
But you don’t remember the cleaners. Not really. Did you notice that they even have their own American Idol? It’s Botherguts—where they gain weight in order to be humiliated on television. Their only manufactured dream is to be humiliated publicly instead of in the confines of their individual gyms. Because however horrible the drone life of stationary bike riding is, it’s nothing compared to being the garbage sweepers and sweaty towel gatherers of those who, although not even in any real power, still have power over your very identity. You are nothing, you are a place-holder, you are utterly expendable.
All of society is built upon the cleaners. Every time you throw that empty bottle into the street it’s because they will be there to pick it up, to make your miserable life go forward. However, empty and pointless your existence is—and really, it is pretty damn bad riding an exercise bike for empty credits to eat ersatz food and watch depressing pornography—there is so, so much worse it could be. And it is, for the nameless, suffering masses who are despised and discarded by society.
“Fuck you, that’s what it boils down to is fuck you,” screams Bing to the judges of Hot Shot, “Fuck you for sitting there and slowly making things worse.”