On Thursday, June 15, Netflix released five new episodes of the most ambitious and awkward series of recent years: “Black Mirror”. The series is one of the most successful series in the history of the platform. As a thank you (and proof of his omnipotence?), creator Charlie Brooker takes pleasure in beating up the streaming queen’s seedy tastes and questionable choices.
The sixth season shakes up the series’ recipe for success: we no longer have to question our dependence on technology. No new infernal machine, no unruly algorithms or a starring role for ChatGPT. In 2023, “Black Mirror” tells stories. True, twisted and terrifying stories. And does it pretty well.
Brit Charlie Brooker’s ingeniously deranged brain is evident in his insane obsession with wrapping a story within a story. In the end, these Russian dolls ask only two important questions: Can our unhealthy passion for the reality we consume on screen lead to our own demise? Are we still the main characters in our own lives?
Netflix has infested its back catalog with gruesome true crime and reality shows cast by none to surpass each other in their emptiness. The voyeurism, once staged, fabricated and taken to an extreme, manages to spit us away from the most heinous of serial killers. The most important thing is that the story is true.
In the second episode, a young filmmaking couple returns to the man’s hometown for a documentary project that even makes his elderly mother sleepy.
However, when a horrific incident comes to light worthy of Britain’s worst 4G-less city, they change their mind. You must tell everything, film everything, capture tears in close-up and envelop the horror. The aim is to sell the homemade true crime documentary to Netflix, which will be rebranded as Black Mirror’s Streamberry throughout the season. Locals are cynical and believe the documentary will bring tourists back: “Great! The assholes who see this landscape in 4K come here like flies on dog shit.”
The documentary’s two little Spielbergs will soon discover that these crimes, considered past by the entire village (or almost everyone) and absolutely not worth repeating, are engulfing the present. Yes, it will end badly. Like punishment for overusing that morbid curiosity that sells well.
Different location, same enemy in the first episode. Joan, a young Californian who runs a startup company, finds out when she comes home and turns on Streamberry that her daily life is being broadcast in great detail on a series called Joan. Yes, her life was, as the saying goes, filmed into a series.
An almost contemporary reality fiction in which this young entrepreneur discovers that she is being portrayed by none other than Salma Hayek. The rest is exactly what she’s been through since she woke up: from her blonde streak, to the text message she secretly sends to her ex, to the firing of one of her programmers. your life is over
Salma Hayek plays herself, does she play a role at all? Does she star in the series Joan? Who is actually playing against whom? Where’s the fiction? How many realities do we have in mind? In what could quickly become a cult scene, Joan tries to fight this hell by collecting mistakes and morally reprehensible behavior. Hope that the platform no longer dares to show her life to the whole world. Ironic considering that just one wrong word can cause controversy these days. Hayek was the first to respond. When she found herself doing something unclean in a pristine place, she wrote to herself:
“Black Mirror” here attacks one of the thrills of serial warfare: the viewer must be able to identify with the hero so that the sauce comes through. Taken to the extreme, we identify with… ourselves. Salma Hayek said a line that pretty much describes Netflix’s DNA: “It took Streamberry 100 years of cinema to make it a worthless app”. The real life actress admitted on Thursday that she was on the verge of turning down the role “because there were moments in the script that shocked me. I thought, ‘I’m going to be in trouble if I play this, right?’
This sixth season isn’t perfect, but it remains absolutely disturbing.
We leave you with the difficult decision of the last episode, where a demon disguised as the lead singer of Boney M. gives you a choice: Would you kill three people in three days if you did it to save all of humanity?
Source: Watson
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
