Today’s more accessible television is a direct response to the technological demands of today’s tech-driven consumers. Streaming services like Netflix and HBO’s online service HBO GO provide subscribers with a more immediate, personalized television experience, which the Internet has made them want and has made possible. As consumers’ habits have changed, streaming services like Netflix have acquired the means to produce their own shows. Though “Black Mirror” originated on Britain’s Channel 4, Netflix bought the rights in 2015 and recently released a third season that closely resembles the first two.
That “Black Mirror” seasons are released all at once and new HBO original series “Divorce” episode-by-episode is the least significant of the two shows’ differences. “Divorce” is a categorical comedy, and although its heavy titular theme leans toward drama, its severity could never match that of “Black Mirror.” Each episode of “Divorce” builds on the last, while “Black Mirror” is an anthology series. “Divorce” takes place in the modern world as we know it while “Black Mirror” tries to imagine where we will be in the near future if technology continues to advance the way it has. I could go on.
Thomas Haden Church and Sarah Jessica Parker co-star as a married (and soon-to-be divorced?) couple on the new HBO series “Divorce.”
But the third and final episode in Season 1 of “Black Mirror” tackles the same themes of love and betrayal as the three episodes of “Divorce” that have been released, with an eerily similar plotline. Each centers on an unfaithful wife and her heartbroken husband as he tries to understand and possibly overcome the depth of her deception. The catalyst in each case is a dinner party with friends – clearly, as evidenced by these two stories, an environment that can easily expose an adult couple’s deep-seeded dissatisfaction.
In “Divorce,” Frances (Sarah Jessica Parker) looks on as her friend Diane (Molly Shannon) threatens to shoot her husband in a drunken rage, narrowly missing Frances’s own husband Robert (Thomas Haden Church). The incident makes Frances reconsider the viability of her own marriage, which, we soon learn, she’s been doing for at least a year – the amount of time she’s been having an affair with a professor named Julian. Whereas Robert doesn’t find out about Julian’s existence until the next day, the dinner party in the “Black Mirror” episode clues husband Liam (Toby Kebbell) in to the possibility of his wife Ffion’s (Jodie Whittaker) affair with her old friend Jonas as he watches the two awkwardly interact that night.
The revelation of Frances’s affair with Julian creates a dynamic that puts Robert on the defensive, which allows the show’s writers to give Robert quick, funny quips but takes away any real power viewers hoped to see Frances hold. By the third episode, the two seek marriage counseling, and Robert demands to know everything about Frances’s affair. “How many times?” he asks, to which Frances, after considerable thinking, answers, “Thirty-two.” In this scene, just as the show begins to feel unmanageable, as Robert gets angrier, threatening to take away any agency Frances had left, he reveals that he’s had an emotional affair with a woman he has remained close with since college. Not only does the exchange provide some comic relief, but it also makes their rocky relationship feel a bit more balanced as the impending divorce loom.
Now, back to the future: the new-age technology included in Season 1, Episode 3 of “Black Mirror” allows its characters to “redo” any past memories – yes, anything – in their heads or on various screens; the videos can be quickly conjured, rewound, zoomed in, or even analyzed with lip-reading technology. Just as Robert pushed to know the full extent of Frances’s affair, Liam agonizes over the apparent lies Ffion has told about her past with Jonas. She admits to a one-month relationship, then reveals they actually dated for six months; after drunkenly confronting Jonas and catching a glimpse of a recent intimate encounter between Jonas and Ffion in Jonas’s memory bank, Liam demands that Ffion shows him the whole thing to prove that their young child must be biologically his.
Liam (Toby Kebbell) and his wife Ffion (Jodie Whittaker) play back one of Liam’s past memories on Season 1, Episode 3 of “Black Mirror,” titled “The Entire History of You.”
“Black Mirror” caters to George Cotkin’s (or, more accurately, Susan Sontag’s) New Sensibility very directly: the show takes our obsession with technology to a terrifying extreme in order to reflect on the tech-driven culture we’ve become so accustomed to. “Divorce,” however, reinforces the idea of the normal, nuclear family and the harm people incur when that normal structure is broken. The former calls attention to our willingness to conform to whatever piece of technology seems to improve our lives; the latter accepts what’s normal and even shows viewers how miserable life can be when they fail to conform effectively.
One missing piece of the integration of this “redo” technology is the intense paranoia that it could instill in its users to live their lives naturally. If a loved one could ask to see any point in a person’s history at any time, what privacy do these individuals maintain? Are they expected to live their lives worrying about a future encounter or else never keep a secret from anyone they love?
Bar this small hiccup, “Black Mirror” does a believable job of taking a well-known sequence of events – as shown in “Divorce” – and retelling that story with the advent of new technology that complicates the story’s ending. After seeing Ffion’s affair with Jonas on-screen, he can no longer bear to hold that memory and rips out the “grain” which would keep a copy of that experience and any happy memories he had with Ffion. Robert, on the other hand, does not have to make such a painful choice; whether he likes it or not, he keeps what natural memories, good and sour, he has from his marriage to Frances, and moves forward with the divorce. Given the two options, I’d choose to be Robert over Liam. As “Black Mirror” accurately proves, with advanced technology comes a responsibility to use it healthily that I’m not sure I could handle. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll have to make that choice.
