Black Mirror ‘White Christmas’ Critical Analysis

The episode in Black Mirror I chose to analyse is “White Christmas”, a Christmas special episode from one of the British science fiction anthology series in 2014. White Christmas is a little bit longer compared to another early-season of Black Mirror and it seems to be divided into three sub-stories alongside the main plot. The story starts with two men, Matt and Joe inside a house stationed at a remote area in the middle of a snowy wilderness. As they tell each other their respective life stories, those events are depicted on-screen and so come with the three sub-stories where the first two are about Matt and the last one brings back to Joe’s which is the main plot.

For the first sub-story, Harry is introduced as a young man who pays for Matt’s in-field support service where Matt watches everything Harry does in real-life and couches him on how to get the attention of Natalia he crushed into during a Christmas party. The story makes sense when White Christmas is set to be a world where all the people had implanted Z-eye, a recording device that allows them to rewind, re-watch and even revisit unlimitedly any moment from their life. Back in the story where Jennifer misunderstands Harry talking to the voices in his head because of having Dissociative Identity Disorder, just like her yet the fact is just him talking to Matt behind the technologies. Because of the misunderstanding, Jennifer whose thoughts herself have found a kindred spirit and forces a poisoned drink down Harry’s throat so that they can both escape from the pain even though Harry has admitted to Jennifer that there are other real people behind his Z-eye. This plot leads the audience to compare two characters, how the voices in Jennifer’s head are more real than Matthew and how can one distinguish one voice from a real thought. It is shown that there will be more than one voice in one’s identity and the indecisiveness is always present in everyone’s lives, expressed through multiple voices arguing about their different gratification.

In the case of the second sub-story, Matt has shown no sympathy for a living person named Greta. Greta is one of his wealthy clients who simply accepts a life-changing experiment in which she was unaware of what she had really paid for. The experiment literally detached Greta’s mind from her body and copied her consciousness into a device called a “cookie”. This copy is set to be a perfect housekeeper because it is actually a copy of herself that knows what exactly her real body needs. Matt then creates a virtual body for the copy which totally looks the same as the real Greta but the copy cannot accept the fact and refuses to be a sole slave to Greta. Therefore, Matt’s job is to break down the copy’s willpower through torture by accelerates the copy’s perception of time. For example, three weeks pass in one second and the copy will be traumatized by her solitude and will be desperate to get anything that she can do. This part of the story shows how human suffering is not only urged by social affairs and bodily urges such as hunger and sex. Instead, the most suffering is human loneliness or just remaining in thought but not able to do anything physically. Inside the film, I can feel the great empathy for the pain that Greta’s copy suffered when Matt presses the button to advance 6 months in her perception of time. Greta’s story is the least sensational of the three but in some ways, it has concluded as the worst as Greta’s copy remains the prisoner with meaningless daily routine while the real Greta does not give her copy double a second thought.

Last but not least, the third story is also the main plot in the film introduced to Joe where I have mentioned before in the first paragraph. When Joe finds out that his wife, Beth is pregnant and he is overjoyed about becoming a father yet Beth reveals that she does not want the baby. During the argument, Beth blocks him and then leaves without removing the block. To explain that, everyone in the world of Black mirror can block others by controlling a remote and the person you blocked will be faded with the shapes of silhouette left. Joe later discovers that Beth has kept the baby even though she never removes the block for him. Because blocks extend to offspring, Joe can only find out that the child is a girl after years and years returning to Beth’s father’s. Joe goes back to Beth’s father’s outpost after her death, only then he discovers that the child is not his daughter but is Beth’s co-worker’s. He attacked the child’s grandfather and left the child who then ventured outside and wound up freezing to death under a tree. Joe was arrested but never admitted. At the end of conversation between Matt and Joe, Joe finally confesses and Matt disappears. It turns out Matt was teasing out a confession from Joe’s cookie like in Greta’s case in return for taking away his prison sentence. The blocking people idea from this main plot has indirectly reflected the problem of humanity of how we treat people online and in the real world. In the online world, people tend to “block” someone media-style and straight end the conversation when they do not want to continue.

As a whole, White Christmas emphasizes a lot of philosophical issues regarding mind-body problems, especially the relations between thoughts and personality. Thematically, this episode also addresses whether artificial intelligence can be a form of life and it also reflects the issue of cyberstalking. I really enjoyed this episode and I find it so entertaining analysing the film and perhaps there is still more hidden philosophy to discover!