Inside Brooker’s TV parlor: Decoding 15 Million Merits

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Black Mirror: S01E02 “15 Million Merits” was certainly dark, although lacking in much of Brooker‘s usual acid humour. This might possibly have been due to the influence of co-writer Konnie Huq – who is also Brooker’s wife – a possibility leant more weight when one considers that, in a Brooker first, the story included a sensitively observed blossoming romance.

The plot consisted largely of a reworking of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley‘s Brave New World, and, although to a lesser extent, Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451. In some ways, it reminded me of Dead Set, his Romero-riffing zombie piece set in the Big Brother TV studios – it delivered nothing new thematically to the genre and so its success relied largely upon its execution. Ian Berriman at sfx concluded that “Like the best science fiction, ’15 Million Merits’ makes you think, tackling the important issues of the day in a way that a mass audience can comprehend.” Ryan Lambie at Den of Geek described it as “among the most moving I’ve seen for a while… a captivating piece of genre television.” It was a beautifully realised reworking, for sure.

Yes, this was essentially 1984 for the Mii/Kinect/iPhone generation, but – just like Orwell’s and Huxley’s novels – this was truly a work of its time. The choice of title for the series seems to have gone over many people’s heads: the “black mirror”, Brooker has said, refers to the screens of the gadgets we increasingly surround ourselves with. But Charlie is telling a porkie pie: the black mirror, he hopes we might understand, is actually the single screen in front of us that we are watching this show on. We, the viewer, he says, are complicit in every piece of horror unfolding before us. We are creating and feeding and buying into the media/social media monstrosity that we are pretending to find so monstrous… A great deal has been made by some about the use of an X Factor style show (“Hot Shots”) to interpret this purely as a satire of reality TV talent shows; they miss the mark, however: the meaning was far deeper.

It was really about the loss of privacy and true individual freedom, the complete repression of the human spirit by, and absolute control of daily life through, our willing surrender to entertainment technology – although whether the agency behind this was corporate or governmental was never disclosed. This was techno-totalitarianism with a jingle; picture Orwell’s 1984 with Walt Disney at the helm instead of Big Brother, or Huxley’s Brave New World with Steve Jobs supplanting Henry Ford… The characters represented the A18-30 advertising demographic, all were single and all lived in tiny cell-like cubicles consisting of just a bed and floor-to-ceiling touch screen walls – the TV parlor. In Fahrenheit 451, all four walls of a parlor could be replaced with screens for $8,000 – fifteen months pay.

Bradbury says: “On one wall a woman smiled and drank orange juice simultaneously. In the other walls an X-ray of the same woman revealed the contracting journey of the refreshing beverage on its way to her delighted stomach! Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds; it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and yellow fish. A minute later, three white cartoon clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter…” Advertizing and mindless distraction. Technology and virtual reality have replaced actual human interaction. Sure, it’s a 13-year-old’s dream – but even teenagers eventually wake up.

The images streaming in at the occupant are mindless and soulless – we never see “factual” content beamed into these cubicles, no news, no current affairs – just the programming Brooker alluded to from The Year Of The Sex Olympics: pornography, obese people being covered in food or hosed with water (the show was titled “BotherGut” and was clearly a riff on Nigel Kneale‘s “Hungry/Angry Show”), colourful, musical, in-your-face distraction. And if you close your eyes? The screens flash and emit a piercing screech, commanding you to “Resume viewing… Resume viewing…”

The accessibility of pornography – indeed, its forced nature: to “skip” some of the pornographic content on the “Wraith Babes” streams requires the viewer to pay anyway – also drew heavily from Orwell and Huxley. Love has been replaced by recreational – solo – sex. “What else are you going to use that hand for?” teases the voice on the screen: even the spontaneous expression of sexuality has been reduced to an almost mandatory distraction. Orwell wrote: “Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs…” Pornography is used to remove even the must personal and secret freedoms, to weaken intimate bonds and cultivate selfishness through mass produced voyeurism.

The “drones” in Brooker’s vision all spend their days pedalling away on exercise bikes while staring into more screens. The purpose is not explained fully, although later we see room after room of exercise bikes and one of the characters indicates that the electricity powering the stage lighting for Hot Shots is generated by the pedalling. Time spent on the bikes earns the titular merits, which appear to be the only form of currency in this society. Some commentators have picked at this aspect of Brooker’s vision, but in fact it is quite a narrative triumph: it is the ultimate treadmill, pointless, drudging work simply for the sake of work, to endlessly feed the machine that keeps them trudging away in the first place. This is 1984′s Theory and Practice Of Oligarchical Collectivism taken to a nightmare conclusion:

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away…

In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work… but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.

Orwell’s Winston stops at one point to listen to one of the proles singing a song. The lyrics that she sings mirror the feelings that exist in Winston about his relationship with Julia, even if he does not know it as he hears them. Brooker has his hero, Bing, similarly overhear Abi, his Julia, singing a simple love song – this time in the loo – which awakens these feelings in him and which, we are later shown, he cannot get out of his mind. The choice of song in Black Mirror was clever – a very simple but beautiful song, with a whole new level of meaning in its title: Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)”

(Meta moment: There already seems to be a campaign getting under way to make this the Christmas number one in another shot across Simon Cowell’s bows similar to the, successful, Rage Against The Machine effort in 2009.)

Bing goes on to “gift” an entry ticket – costing 15 million merits – to Abi so that she can perform the song on Hot Shots. As Robert Beams says at WhatCulture!: “She sings nicely but not exceptionally, but convinced of her gift he decides to buy her entry ticket in the hope of finding some meaning for his own existence. He sees her singing as something “real” in a pre-fabricated world… but the way the studio audience – comprised of viewer avatars – reacts to her performance is emblematic of the sorts of hate-filled comments people make in a world in which they feel increasingly alienated and anonymous. Here the bombastic and ugly “Hot Shot” – a stylistically perfect parody of well-known UK talent shows – is a conduit for people’s misdirected rage, apathy and nihilism. The horror aspect comes from the realisation that the events on-screen are not too far removed from where we sit now.”

The talent spot proves successful for Abi – but at a price. They don’t want her for her voice, they want her for her “titties”, as Judge Wraith puts it. Her release from the drudgery of the bike will only materialise if she accepts their offer to be a piece of performing meat on Wraith’s porno streams. Drugged with the obligatory soma (“Cuppliance”, pronounced almost “co(m)pliance”) and harangued by the audience and the judges, she eventually agrees. Her “performances” soon join the non-stop stream filling Bing’s cubicle with wall-to-wall pain.

Bing is crushed, but begins to channel his pain and rage into revenge. He devotes himself to earning another 15 million merits – cycling away in his ‘spare time’ also – and enters himself for Hot Shots. I’d rather hoped that he would use the opportunity to kill the judges in a deranged orgy of violence. Silly me, Brooker’s misanthropy would never allow such a neat resolution… Once on stage he produces a shiv, crafted from a broken screen, and threatens to kill himself unless they listen to what he has to say as he berates the judges and the audience for creating and buying into this vacuous mindset, the “fake fodder”, the “hats for our avatars” that they buy because “we’re so out of our minds with desperation, we don’t know any better…”

“That,’ roared Judge Hope, “was the most heartfelt thing I’ve heard on Hot Shots this season!”

Just as Abi was offered – and accepted – her Faustian Pact, Bing is offered – and accepts – a  “slot” on a “stream” where he can “talk just like that” for “thirty minutes twice a week.” Here we realised, as Tom Sutcliffe noted in The Independent: “He briefly turned into Charlie Brooker, in other words, and part of the undertow of sadness in “15 Million Credits” came from the biographical echoes in its story, with a disgusted and despairing man finding that even his rage can be repackaged for sale by the medium he deplores.” As Left Turn explains: “Bing is clearly Brooker – angry at the world and given a podium because of it. But in gaining his podium, he is neutered. For half an hour he is free to say what he wants, to rail at the system, to mock the sheepish stupidity of the masses. The masses, or those that watch, nod and laugh in agreement (as most of us will have done at Brooker’s own stuff) and then go back to doing exactly what Bing/Brooker was complaining about. This is not so much Brooker’s apology for himself but a cry of rage that he is not taken seriously, that most of us find ourselves agreeing with him and then do nothing about it.”

Just like Orwell’s Winston, Bing’s life is one of inner misery and drudgery. Orwell allows him, through Julia, a fleeting glimpse of happiness and perhaps hope, but then snatches it away again. There is no happy ending. Totalitarianism – techno or otherwise – does not tolerate happy endings. Winston – and Bing – must be crushed, or the writer’s agenda of showing the true nature of totalitarianism is lost. The show closes with Bing doing his “ranty throat cut man” piece to camera, then walking through his new, luxurious apartment. Gone are the streaming view screen walls of the drone cubicle, replaced by a window staring out over an expanse of forest. But is it illusion? We suspect it, too, is just pixels on a screen, but the play of light across Bing’s face reveals that he is looking through a window at the real world after all. But still on the wrong side of the glass, no nearer to freedom, no nearer to experiencing something real than he was before. Perhaps he doesn’t even realise that it isn’t just another screen…

Orwell insisted that Winston’s fate could befall anyone, and it is for this reason that Orwell and Brooker must destroy their hero in the end, so that the we might understand the warning and endeavour to prevent a society like this from ever coming to pass.

Tom Sutcliffe again: “I found myself thinking of Dennis Potter, who also loathed how low popular culture can sink but took comfort from its occasional heights. Perhaps the comparison’s a little premature, but the fact his name came to mind at all is telling in itself…”

Perhaps premature, but not inconceivable.

Related articles

• Tonight’s TV: Black Mirror (tool8.wordpress.com)
• TV review: Black Mirror; Piers Morgan’s Life Stories: Peter Andre; This is Justin Bieber (guardian.co.uk)
• The Weekend’s Viewing: Black Mirror, Sun, Channel 4 Japan Tsunami: Caught on Camera, Sun, Channel 4 (independent.co.uk)
• Black Mirror: 15 Million Merits, Channel 4, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• The Black Mirror Reflects Modern Horror in the UK (dreadcentral.com)
• VIDEO: Everett on role as talent show judge (bbc.co.uk)

~ by gabriel on December 12, 2011.