User:Lbattich/notes/Black Mirror and Deleuze
(Unedited notes from 5 Oct class session - xpect lots of grmatcal mistakz)
Black Mirror: White Bear
Victoria wakes up in a room and cannot recall anything. Looks like she had tried to take her life. Looks a bit like a post-apolaliptic scenario.
No one's around.
She cannot remember where she is. nor who she is.
A mans comes out of car and tries to kill her with a gun.
Passers by and many people film the action on their cameras.
She encounter 2 other people that are being persecuted. One of them gets killed.
The 2 girls manage to run away from the persecutors.. They find them through the cmeras.
A signal of pitches tat appeared through any device with a screen, which did something to people. Everyone becomes an spectator. Everyone becomes an audience. Watches, films with their phone devices.
Some people were not affected. And some of those affected became aware that under the new rules they can do anything: kill others.
The girl looks into the screen and receives some sort of weird signal.
They are followed again and saved by some other guy in a van.
They go to place in the woods where there is no communication signals.
He turn out to be a persecutor, with a shotgun.
Taken to a plcae in the wood with many cadavers.
One girl scapes.
MAny people come to watch, while recording with their phiones
Girl comes back and shoots eveil persecutor guy. They run away together.
Tey head to a tranmission station in order to destroy it.
She gets what seem to be flshbacks from somehwere.
They break in a start to covwe thinga with petrol.
Wen sSudenly it is revealed that everything is art of a show. Like a reality show?
She's put in a chair in the spectacle and shown about her own life which she couldnt remember.
According to the video shown to her, she's a criminal.
She was watchnig as her partner murdered a girl. Now the audience watches as she is being punished.
Punishment by
The reality (of her being paraded and ppl watching, etc) does not seem that dissimilar to the fictional world created for her, when eveyone is an spectator.
Public punishment and execution, as in medieval times.
it seems she
A "Justice Park"
She becomes a n object ina show for entertainment.
She is branwashed again and the show starts again.
Over and over again.
Black Mirror is produced by Charlie Brooker.
"If technology is a drug, what are its side effects?"
The television format relies on shows of tales of the unespected.
Seems to be loosely based on Peter Walkinson's film: The Punishment Park.
Script a moment in society and media.
(cf. The Truman Show)
Scripting the situation so someone behaves in particular manner.
A synopticism rather panopticism: everyone watches everyone, rather than one watching all.
Disciplinary: containment, and presets (rules)
Control: digital and deterritorialized.
She has been programmes, scrpted, in amanner in which she is boliged to take part in the system in her particular role.
Black Mirror: The Waldo Moment
Political campaing.
The Tory candidate Being followed by a cartoon in a van.
Waldo: a cartoon blue bear character, controlled by a comedian real-time.
Waldo is pretends to be campaigning as well.
The comedian stablishes a relationship with a campaign manager for the Tory candidate.
Can a cartoon campaing for a political position?
Laughing at someone we won't engage?
A cartoon having a round panel politics discussion.
What is a politician for? no one knows anymote.
The young follow Wanldo.
It cannot articulate.
Waldo is not real but its more real than all the others (candidates).
Wando has no policy, yet at least he doesn't pretend to have one.
A candidate with no party
A mascot for protest voters.
A voice for the disenfranchasid: neutralized
Encourage people not to think deeply about politics.
Walde the bear "people likes"
Uncanny.
Waldo is a construct people not only embrace put accept.
People like Waldo even though they know it is a construct, a team effort (of beacuse of this)
He can send a twitter slingshot to the opposition: he is the perfect assassin.
Now Waldo is anti politics, yet everything he says can be accepted.
Global political entrertainment product people wants.
Waldo becomes bigger. If Waldo is the ain opposition then the whole system is absurd, which may well be.
Comedian tries to resign by yelling in public "do not vote for Waldo"
At the end we are to learn that Waldo becomes a fascist political power with international control.
Is the traditional media (TV) a parasite of the new media (YouTube, Twitter) or vice versa?
Programm consensus.