This festive period saw two much-anticipated deliveries to our TV screens.
Shown over three consecutive evenings, a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s classic Little Women has been met with rapturous reviews, no small feat considering that the 1868 novel had become synonymous with its 1994 cinematic adaptation. Running as far as possible in the opposite direction from the nostalgic, wholesome world of Little Women, the fourth season of Netflix-owned Black Mirror landed as a fully-formed, six-episode package of dystopian discomfort not long after Christmas Day. During a season where home, hearth and family are celebrated, it is timely that these entertainment offerings explore these two themes in striking contrast.
Marches and Mirror
Adapted by Heidi Thomas (Ballet Shoes, Cranford, Upstairs Downstairs) and directed by Vanessa Caswill (Thirteen), Little Women might be named for the four daughters of the March family, but the angle of this adaptation has matriarch of the family ‘Marmee’ (Emily Watson) firmly in the spotlight.
Early on, the story is concerned with being parented and parent-less. Theodore ‘Laurie’ Laurence arrives next door to the Marches to live with his grandfather (Michael Gambon) after recently being bereaved of his mother. In a quiet moment, Marmee tells her four daughters: ‘He just lost his mother, we must make him welcome.’ Quickly, we are introduced to a world where loss, sorrow and uncertainty play into the everyday, and are spoken of and acknowledged in community with others.
In the opening scenes of Black Mirror’s ‘Arkangel’ (directed by Jodie Foster), we are introduced to three-year-old Sarah and her single mother, Marie, when a fearful moment of not being able to find Sarah drives the rest of the episode’s action.
Marie’s response is to have Sarah implanted with a tracker, whereby her movements, vital statistics and her line of vision are accessed by Marie through a tablet at any given moment. The rest of Sarah’s childhood is passed over without remark, presumably remaining happy and safe through Marie’s application of a cortisol filter – when Sarah sees something which causes her stress or alarm, Marie can block Sarah’s vision of it through the technology. Barking dogs, blood, violence – Sarah grows up having her vision literally blinkered, in an isolated world which lacks both danger and community. Marie’s response to her daughter’s exposure to the cruelties of the world is the opposite of Marmee’s.
Courage and fear
Marmee is a quiet force of love and reason. She is the voice which tells her daughters to not let the sun go down on their anger, to deal with their friction and to go out into the world and their community with courage and goodness, particularly when dealing with the anxious Beth, who she slowly but surely encourages to engage with the outside world. In ‘Arkangel’, Marie is fearful, reactive and uncommunicative. Trouble and strife face both families and threaten them. The stress filter ‘protects’ daughter Sarah in ‘Arkangel’, but, not knowing what causes stress, she grows up without learning how to deal with stress or respond to it, with grim consequences for Marie. Conversely, when danger strikes in Little Women, Marmee (and Mr March, through his letters), urges her girls to fight their enemies with courage and love. ‘You can never be fatherless under heaven’, she assures them as she leaves to tend to her sick husband, uncertain of his chances of surviving.
Two ways to live
Where does this kind of TV leave viewers? We know we don’t want to live in the world of Black Mirror: ‘Arkangel’, with the way it tries to hide from and avoid the difficult realities of life on earth, leading to tragic consequences. It might even show us that our own portable screens, like Marie’s, are stress filters in and of themselves, allowing us to escape moments of boredom and awkwardness by diving into the worlds of our technology, worlds which are self-curated to protect our hearts and minds from feeling too deeply the difficult things of the world around us. But ‘Arkangel’ gives us no hope for something better, and we need something better to aim towards if we’re to have any success in turning from that which we know does us no good.
We need a vision of hope. Little Women, principally through Marmee, spurs us on in imagining a world of thinking before speaking, of not fleeing from trial and difficulty, of dealing with the other humans around us with grace and clarity. It’s an imaginative embodiment of a whole host of biblical proverbs, presented in a way which doesn’t gloss over the challenge of living them out in a broken world which aches for its future state of sorrow-free, stress-free, sin-free perfection.
