W.H. Auden, the 20th century poet, once said: "Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow." It’s a striking metaphor, describing the personal impact of how we see ourselves.
Auden proposes a "parlour game for a wet afternoon — imagining the mirrors of one’s friends." But in the 21st century, we don’t have to imagine.
When Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror first aired in 2011, he explained why he chose its title: “The 'black mirror' of the title is the one you'll find on every wall, on every desk, in the palm of every hand: the cold, shiny screen of a TV, a monitor, a smartphone.”
"We are seldom parted from our black mirrors, which promise us connection, wisdom, and life."
So we no longer need to guess what kind of mirror our friends carry. We are seldom parted from our black mirrors, which promise us connection, wisdom, and life. They give us back our reflection — but darker, with features blurred. In many ways, this is what Brooker’s anthology series achieves.
Technology, with its dizzying possibilities, is pivotal to the stories it tells. But since it is a black mirror, the real subject of each episode is us.
Two episodes from the latest season...
The most recent season is no different. The six episodes span a range of human concerns — hope, fear, cruelty, longing and tenderness. Some of the episodes are more successful than others; not unexpected, given the anthology format, in which each is a self-contained story.
If you’ve never seen it, here are a couple from the series I would recommend:
- First, "Common People", in which we meet a couple whose lives are rescued from disaster by a revolutionary new health technology — only to discover that it serves the financial interests of those who offer it, and that they are customers before they are patients. Even this summary of the plot gives the wrong impression: Black Mirror, at its best, wears its concepts lightly, and the writing and acting is far more affecting than it is didactic.
- Second, "Eulogy", a story of memory and regret with a haunting premise: what if technology could allow you to step into old photographs, and step closer to lost loved ones? Paul Giamatti’s performance is astonishing, full of guile and gall, in a story with moments very like grace. Black Mirror has a reputation for bleak, dystopian visions of the future — but "Eulogy" shows us that the series goes deeper than the caricatures, capable of telling stories which ask questions about what makes us human.
That struck me as I watched the series: even as we worry about whether our technology will render humanity superfluous, or whether our reliance on it is diminishing us, Black Mirror is preoccupied, more even than technology, with human beings.
To give another example, and without spoiling a key episode, it transpires that a virtual reality which had been presented as procedurally generated is nothing of the sort: what looked like a technological achievement turns out to be powered by human ingenuity, creativity and exploitation.
The moments in Black Mirror that ring true are those in which we can recognise our reflection in the stories it tells.
What do we do with what Black Mirror shows us?
But, as Auden observes: "We shall be judged, not by the kind of mirror found on us, but by the use we have made of it, by our riposte to our reflection."
What do we do with what Black Mirror shows us? What do we do with the black mirrors of our tech, so easily drawn from a pocket and scrolled on for hours?
Auden is alive to the dangers of staring into mirrors: he sees this as the "futility" of the classical myth of Narcissus: "trying…to have a telos [a goal worth living for, which fully satisfies us] but to find it within oneself not without."
And this is where a Christian believer finds hope. Instead of being stuck in front of a mirror (black or otherwise), the gospel presents another possibility. As Athanasius tells it, where we have marred God’s image in us, the Son who is the true Image of God has come to sit, as a model might for a portrait, that it might be re-painted in all its truth and beauty. In other words, that we might be renewed.
"Human dignity is not found by looking at our own reflection."
Human dignity, which we are so at a loss to define and so anxious to preserve, is not found by looking at our own reflection. We discover it in the transforming beauty of Jesus Christ, the God who became fully human to renew us in the divine image.
As Paul puts it, we who contemplate the Lord’s glory with unveiled faces are being transformed into His image with ever-increasing glory by the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 3v18), for we are looking at God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4v6).
We stare into our various mirrors, wishing we could change. But the longer we look at Christ, the more we find ourselves transformed and renewed by the glory we see.
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