Black Mirror: Be right back

United Kingdom, 2013

Director: Owen Harris

Script: Charlie Brooker

Cast: Hayley Atwell (Martha), Domhnall Gleeson (Ash), Indira Ainger (Daughter)

Music: Vince Pope

Genre: Science fiction

Plot

Martha and Ash are a young couple who have moved into a country house. He is a fan of new technologies and is all day hooked to his cell phone and social networks.

When returning a van he had rented for the move, Ash has an accident and dies. During the wake, a friend of the bereaved Martha, proposes to hire the services of a company that would allow her to “communicate” with the deceased, or rather with a chatbot, a computer program that has copied the dead man’s response patterns through algorithms.

At first, Martha dismisses that suggestion. But when she discovers that she is pregnant by her dead boyfriend, she changes her mind. Thus, she has a sort of consolation.

She starts chatting with this artificial intelligence-created simulation (with which she spends more time than with real people from then on), where she projects her feelings for Ash. And soon, this robotic creature suggests him to move from chatting and phone calls (with a voice created based on phone records and recordings of the real voice) to “another level”…

Comment

The episodes of “Black Mirror” are, as the title itself proclaims, an increasingly black mirror of reality, and of the near future that is being programmed (never better said, “programmed”).

In this episode, Brooker shows us how far transhumanist chimeras go, through the creation of a kind of cybernetic clone, based on computer records of the personality and behavior patterns of a dead person, all covered by “synthetic muscle”. The Frankenstein of the 21st century.

The spectator is emotionally manipulated, through the protagonist, who decides to hire the services of this golem manufacturing company. The viewer is prepared for a world in which artificial intelligence, that double-edged sword, will be commonplace and fully integrated into everyday life. The “love beyond death”, a classic in a multitude of literary and cinematographic stories, is here effectively taken to “another level”; that “it is not a spiritual thing”, as Martha’s friend rightly points out when recommending the simulation of deceased loved ones. For the spiritual is completely banished from the world of “Black Mirror”. Why activate the natural and immaterial springs of the Spirit, when we can resort to machines, devices and buttons, to “technological immortality” that allow us to connect to the “cloud”? What is thematized in this episode could still sound like science fiction in 2013, but today we are closer and closer to transhumanist dystopia.

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