Black Mirror’s fifth season arrived amid hype about scenes filmed in São Paulo, and it was a total disappointment. Weak scripts, banal images, and no surprises.
I had awaited this season as a kind of compensation for the tedium of the much-hyped interactive special, the film Bandersnatch. Released last October, its “great” achievement was to remind us what life was like in the CD-ROM era. Nothing more.
All this disappointment is justified because the first four seasons excelled at addressing contemporary communication and information technologies critically and dystopically, through the prism of the relations between culture, media, and society.
Surveillance, neurological prostheses, human cloning, digital social networks, augmented realities, and memory were among the themes covered by the series, which premiered in 2011. Its symbolic cartography was so precise that the expression “that’s so Black Mirror” became popular.
UFBA professor Andre Lemos, one of the leading theorists of network culture, wrote a book about the series in which, without exaggeration, he drew attention to the popularity of that expression (“that’s so Black Mirror”). This, he says, revealed “the estrangement, discomfort, and sometimes the feeling of dread, fear, or disgust when we find similarities between the stories told in the series and our relationship with today’s digital communication and information technologies, especially the internet and social networks. At the same time, the expression illustrates that something depicted in Black Mirror is already happening or will happen very soon.”
The fifth season
But this does not recur in the new season. The first episode, the one set in São Paulo, is definitely the worst. I will avoid details so as not to give the episode away, but suffice it to say that the plot revolves around two friends whose relationship, through an augmented-reality game, begins to become a love affair.
Closeted sexuality liberated in online environments revisits clichés from the early internet, when people turned to chat rooms to assume another personality.
The inclusion of São Paulo is nonsense. The Copan building, the Minhocão, and the Santa Efigênia viaduct appear as an inert backdrop, without any influence on or relationship to the story. These scenes demonstrate the strength of SP Commission, the Spcine department responsible for filming in the city, with which Netflix negotiated its São Paulo locations, more than anything else.
Ultimately, I wonder whether the weakness of this fifth season of a series once so critical and prescient in its dystopian portrayal of our time is an effect of a reality that has become far more dystopian than fiction.
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