There are no formal slides associated with the introductory lecture. We did, however, briefly consider Jan Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait—specifically the small convex mirror depicted in the background. We’ll return to this seminal painting in a future lecture.
Clips
Links
Two teens send a Lego man into near space
See the first Readings for some additional links to Black Mirror and Blade Runner.
Quotes
The word that Mrs. Bronson is unable to put into the hot, still, sodden air is ‘doomed,’ because the people you’ve just seen have been handed a death sentence. One month ago, the Earth suddenly changed its elliptical orbit and in doing so began to follow a path which gradually, moment by moment, day by day, took it closer to the sun. And all of man’s little devices to stir up the air are now no longer luxuries – they happen to be pitiful and panicky keys to survival. The time is five minutes to twelve, midnight. There is no more darkness. The place is New York City and this is the eve of the end, because even at midnight it’s high noon, the hottest day in history, and you’re about to spend it in the Twilight Zone.
–Rod Serling in The Twighlight Zone
Whether explicitly nuclear or otherwise, the apocalypse was never far away [in the Twilight Zone]. “The Midnight Sun” was telecast on the day the U.S. consolidated its drive for “push-button warfare” with the first successful launching of a Minuteman missile from an underground silo. The episode substitutes a kink in the Earth’s orbit—an analogue to what we currently call “the greenhouse effect”—for an atomic holocaust. Rape and pillage seem imminent, and even the pigment is boiling on the heroine-artist’s canvases as the radio weatherman goes nuts on the air.
–James Lewis Hoberman
Back when Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” aired, in the fifties and sixties, it was an oasis in a bland era. Through sci-fi metaphor, Serling could talk about civil rights and the Red Scare without the censors stepping in. His endings could be unhappy, even nihilistic—a break with the industry’s feel-good ways. Brooker has a lot in common with Serling: he’s an absurdist, with a taste for morality plays and horror shows. He knows how to land a punch. Yet he’s responding to a very different media environment, one that is saturated with “edginess,” from sexy torture scenes to cynical satire. “Black Mirror” slices at this material from several angles, critiquing the seductions of life lived through a screen. It’s an approach that could easily turn pedantic—just another op-ed about Tinder-cruising millennials—but it never does. Because Brooker is an insider, with a deep and imaginative understanding of tech culture, he . . . can’t condescend to those who rely on their devices, because he’s so clearly one of us.
–Emily Nussbaum