Black Mirror
I recently watched Black Mirror season 1, episode 2, entitled "Fifteen Million Merits". It's about a man who, after having his sole dream crushed by a cruel dystopian system, delivers an epic rant about how inauthentic and soul-destroying and numbing and unchanging the system is. Immediately after this rant, he succumbs to greed and peer pressure and participates in this grotesque system he so hates in an even more perverse, inauthentic, soul-destroying way. In the end, nothing substantive changes.
I felt a lot of things when I watched this episode. The actors all delivered compelling performances. The story was smart and poignant, with clever foreshadowing and stunning twists. But one feeling I can't get away from is my dislike of the overwhelming, crippling cynicism of the episode. For a show that's clearly an acerbic satire of all the hollowness and inauthenticity of modern life, it left me feeling more hollow and inauthentic than ever.
Cynicism is paralyzing. It chokes us with a cloying sense of helplessness. It's seductive in this way. What effect can I have on a system so powerful, so evil, so massive? And besides, it's all pointless anyway. Nothing ever changes in the end. And so, freed of responsibility or agency, I do nothing, change nothing. The myth perpetuates itself, and in so doing, becomes reality.
Then there's the irony of it. Black Mirror is all about the corrupting influence of technology. Our screens stifle us, it says. We are captivated by an endless stream of trivial nonsense manufactured for the sole purpose of captivating us. Our attention is precious, and to let such meaningless content capture it is to let it rob us of genuine, worthwhile endeavors, like human interaction and connection. But Black Mirror -- so named for the look of the "cold, shiny screen" omnipresent in modern life -- itself strives to capture our attention, to keep us glued to the screen. It certainly kept me glued.
Political Satire
Another thing that has kept me glued against my will is political satire, which I find boringly predictable, rankly partisan, and horribly childish -- yet, to my own disgust, I still watch a lot of it.
To vent my concerns on the genre, I present this video from Vox's Carlos Maza explaining why modern political satire is good. I disagree with nearly every point he makes.
First, he says political satire has a "low tolerance for bullshit", whereas the mainstream media is burdened by the need to take everything seriously. I agree with the latter claim; major news networks' portrayal of Trump's egregious lies, featuring extensive back-and-forth debate from both sides, spread the illusion that there's something to debate, when actually there's not. A complete falsehood, stated with no evidence (and often, with easily verifiable evidence to the contrary), should not merit any kind of debate. It does, however, merit serious discussion.
Political satire is not serious discussion. It is flagrant derision and mockery, lacking just as much substance as the thing it's mocking. Political satire constantly makes fun of people on the basis of their appearance, their demeanor, and countless other meaningless traits devoid of substance. It converts an extremely serious issue -- the fact that the American president is a shameless, pathological liar -- into a series of breezy punchlines. Maza lauds this aspect of satire shows, because it gives more time to cover different topics. In reality, these rapid-fire one-liners diminish the full impact of the situation.
When the punchline of a joke hits, I laugh, the joke is over, and I don't feel any compulsion to do anything. Laughing is the end of the conversation. In this Wei, political satire has a lot in common with the paralyzing effects of cynicism in "Fifteen Million Merits". Maza even suggests things have gotten so ridiculous that the only response is to laugh at them, as though (a) laughter is somehow a solution in its own right, and (b) it is the sole solution. This is precisely the kind of seductive-yet-numbing effect cynicism can have, and it is far from the truth. Mocking laughter doesn't cause change. Genuine change is the result of hard work, resistance, often tedium. Genuine change is a fight.
The problem is, I don't want to go out and fight after a satirical joke because it seems like the joke was the fight, a clever bullet wryly fired into the heart of political evil. How chastised and excoriated Trump must feel in the wake of such incisive satire, I gleefully think. Of course, that's not what happens. The only thing such contemptuous mockery does is to make people like myself even more rigidly sure of my preexisting beliefs.
Worse yet, mockery of this sort also galvanizes the other side. Being ridiculed and laughed at has never caused anyone to change their mind, only incited them to more vehemently oppose the ridiculer. Maza claims political satire is good because "it trains your brain to think critically", when in fact it does the opposite. By lulling you with formulaic entertainment, satire more firmly entrenches you in your own opinions. It trains your brain to think condescendingly.
"Fifteen Million Merits" seemed inauthentic due to the irony of it being a television program. By making it, its writers had to buy into the notion of television in some way, thereby undermining their criticism of it. Political satire is also stained by insincerity, but for a different reason. While I have no doubt that the writers and performers believe the things they say on air, the constant influx of news content, and hence the necessity to make jokes at such a rapid pace, renders their jokes inert and predictable. They are all regurgitated freak-outs, tenuous analogies, references to youth culture desperate to be cool. They feel all too familiar, the joke you heard a second ago about one hideous Trump surrogate isomorphic to the next joke about a similar villain. There is no life in this comedic wasteland.
Satire -- specifically, late-night television political satire -- is a bad vehicle with which to confront the current state of American politics because it is cloying, divisive, and substanceless (I'm talking about the satire, here). It's yet another cheap, hollow contrivance engineered to keep you glued to the screen.
Conclusion
I don't like political satire, and I consider it terrible television, yet I still watch it. On the other hand, I didn't like "Fifteen Million Merits", but I consider it fantastic television. These paradoxes caused another, more personal irony to surface in my mind: For all I was supposedly paralyzed by Black Mirror's cynicism, for all my cynicism towards it, it absolutely compelled me enough to write this entire blog post. And I don't know what to think about that.
Other Stuff
I listened to this podcast recently, which was why I watched that episode of Black Mirror. The creators' heartfelt takedown of a specific instance of satire in the academic community is what enabled me to verbalize my own long-held distaste toward political satire.
For political commentary I think is valuable, check out this other podcast.
