But just by cycling us through Bing’s daily routine, we’re able to get acclimated and find the similarities to our own. That’s pretty remarkable with how complicated and foreign that world seems at first. “Fifteen Million Merits” establishes the status quo of its unique world better than perhaps any other episode of Black Mirror. Naturally this means plopping down right in front of another screen, peddling away on an exercise bike as he watches his “dopple” bike through a digital meadow in front of him. Then he pays a couple of “merits” to ward off unwanted advertising and gets to work. He’s woken up by the screaming digital chicken in his tiny apartment made entirely of screens (just imagine Brooker leaning across the sci-fi writes’ dinner table with his fork and snatching this right off of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451’s plate). We follow Bing as he goes through his day-to-day routine. It’s because he has too much and has had to learn to guard them. Though it’s clear from just the subtlest expressions on Kaluuya’s face that his armor is not because Bing has no emotions. His performance is almost Gosling-like in its lack of reaction to external stimuli. Largely because the human story within it works.īlack Mirror continues (or begins) its proud tradition of unearthing talented British actors for American audiences with Daniel Kaluuya ( Get Out) as Bingham “Bing” Madsen in “Fifteen Million Merits.” Bing as embodied by Kaluuya is a perfect entrance into this brave new world for the audience. Brooker has taken the ultimate nanny-state control portions of 1984 and folding them into the entertaining-ourselves-to-death portions of Brave New World.Īnd it works. “Fifteen Million Merits” at times feels like every futuristic science fiction idea rolled into one hour-long package. That’s a lot, and there’s more! We didn’t even mention the “Cuppliance” milk. In just this one episode alone, Black Mirror forwards: Conceptually it just has so much going on. “Fifteen Million Merits” features so many elements that could have been the sole focus of a single sci-fi story, rolled into one over-sized episode. Which makes sense as there is a lot of world to build. While, “The National Anthem” was a tightly-plotted almost Jack Bauer-esque 44-minutes of chaos, “Fifteen Million Merits” is 61 minutes of leisurely world-building. “Fifteen Million Merits” is an over-stuffed, chaotic episode of the show. What archetype dystopian future does Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits” choose to model itself after? Orwell’s or Huxley’s? The answer ends up being: a little bit of both. In episode two, Brooker and Black Mirror turn their attention to the future-future, as all “speculative fiction” must inevitably do. But that was the present or very near future. Brooker opens his show with an ultra modern satire of our tech-saturated world. “The National Anthem” may be a divisive episode but it’s hard to argue that it’s not one of the most distinctive Charlie Brooker-esque episodes of the series. Huxley’s vision of the future world is us entertaining ourselves to death (as Neil Postman noted in his 1985 book appropriately Amusing Ourselves to Death, that contrasted 1984 and Brave New World).īlack Mirror got off to a hot start. And it all kind of works – as long as individuality and actual freedom isn’t a priority. The world is an assembly line, modeled after Ford’s factories. Citizens are birthed through an artificial process to make sure their bodies can accommodate the pre-prescribed class system they’ll be placed in. The citizens of the World State city of London in 2540 have a near crushing excess of peace. Rather than war being the force that keeps society in order, and certain people at the bottom of that order: it’s peace. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley takes a different tact to predicting a future dystopia.
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