Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
Directed by David Slade
Produced by Russell McLean
Written by Charlie Brooker
Starring Fionn Whitehead, Will Poulter, Asim Chaudhry, Craig Parkinson, Alice Lowe
Production company Netflix
Distributed by Netflix
I didn’t rush to watch Bandersnatch before because I read that it was based on 1980s computer interactive games. Aside from sounding like a rather dated concept, there is the fact that I played some of those 1980s computer games, and I was utter shite at them. I remember one I had on my Apple //c, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. Took me three weeks to figure out how to get the babel fish out of the vending machine. I’m not particularly stupid, but me and those sort of games just never got on.
Still, it’s Black Mirror, and it’s Charlie Brooker. Black Mirror, for those of you in a cave, is a dark, funny, intelligent near-future anthology in which people interact with sometimes-existing technology in a variety of ways that can be unfortunate, bemusing, or hilarious, and this being Brooker, often all three. By way of example, in the very first episode of Black Mirror, the British Prime Minister is ordered to have sex with a live pig on national television, or nobody will ever see the captive princess again. Brooker had a bit of luck there: not long after that pilot aired, a particularly lurid sex scandal involving a Tory PM emerged that had enough echoes of the Black Mirror story line that people could no longer reject it as unlikely or unnaturally grotesque.
The storylines here are about a computer programmer, Stefan (Whitehead) who wants to write a game based on a variable-reality novel, Bandersnatch, by one Jerome F. Davies, portrayed by Jeff Minter, who was one of the superstars of 1980s computer game design. (There’s a lot of sly, self-referential stuff going on, and the jokes are as meta as it gets). Describing the plots (there’s five major endings plus a bonus ending) isn’t easy, but the overall effect is if Alice Through the Looking Glass had been written by Philip K. Dick.
Making choices isn’t the only level of interactivity. There’s a number of branches where you can chose between the characters doing something reasonable and constructive, or doing something catastrophically stupid. Like most writers, I can’t resist messing with my characters, so I often chose to have Stefan do something idiotic. In most instances, he simply gets killed (the LSD death scenes are particularly unhinging), but in some, he gets around to wondering if some invisible power isn’t making him do things and just generally fucking with him, and in one instance, you find yourself trying to explain “Netflix” to the 1980s British lad. It doesn’t go well.
In a miracle of storytelling, each scene is congruent and coherent with all the other scenes, and all the branches are seamless. The viewer is never presented with a branching that makes no sense to what went before. The writing and direction are simply marvelous, wonders to behold. The production values and acting are at the high levels one expects from Black Mirror.
Ground-breaking and brilliant as it is, it seems unlikely that Bandersnatch will usher in a whole new genre. It’s bloody hard to do at all, let alone well. While the default for the show, in which the automatic choices are used throughout, is 90 minutes runtime, this show has at least six times that in recorded material, including the various dead ends.
But Brooker has proven that it can be done, and done well. I foresee a time when similar features will be written, drawn and directed by computer AI, and may even have episodes where the AI ‘wings it’ in response to viewer input.
But until then, the final step before the robots rise up and enslave us all, we have this treasure by Brooker.