I Had 2 Options… either write this post and get a good grade, or don’t write it and get a zero… but I chose the good ending.

Hey y’all… I’m about to reflect on my experience watching the new Black Mirror episode, “Bandersnatch”. There are spoilers ahead so don’t say you weren’t warned.

“Bandersnatch” was an insane story… anyone who watched it would say the same thing. I genuinely think that each individual viewer would take something different out of this story and find their own meaning behind the events and the layout of the episode because so many people can and can’t relate to things that happen in the story. For example, not many people can relate to choosing whether to bury your father’s murdered body or chop it up, but I am sure a lot of people can relate to thinking you are going crazy and thinking they are hearing voices in their head.

The meaning of “Bandersnatch” was something along the lines of we are all living in a society where everything is controlled by someone else. The story took place during the 1980s, in a time before advanced technology and electronics that can track your every move and all your personal information and everything you say, like the technology we are surrounded by today. As the viewers, we were aware of all of Stefan’s thoughts, words, and actions all the time and used that information to make decisions for him in order to achieve the five star video game review at the end. The creators of this show were trying to compare us to the government of today, and make us realize how dangerous their power over us is. They know what we do, say, and think all the time and sometimes we do not even notice. (If you watched this episode, think about how long it took Stefan to realize that someone was watching him and controlling him.) This is similar to how we are aware that people are watching us and have influence on our decisions by making jokes about how “our phones are listening to us” when we see an ad pop up on Instagram for something we were literally just talking about five seconds ago but have never once Googled! We are conscious of these things happening but we do not really anything about it because we know there is nothing we can do, so we just go on with our lives as if we are not being watched. This is the same as how Stefan went on with his life even after Netflix revealed that it was controlling him.

Obviously this made him go completely crazy, which leads me to the conclusion was that this whole episode is serving as a warning to us about the dangers of having our lives programmed and controlled. Being monitored limits are freedom in more ways than we can imagine and eventually, it will cause us all to go crazy, but we have not had this type of technology for long enough yet to experience that. Stefan’s case was seen as such an ordinary occurrence for the time period, but in today’s society, the anxiety and illness is seen so commonly in people with the rise of program and control technology and social media.

“Bandersnatch” is a postmodern work because of its use of metafiction and irony. Metafiction is a way to connect the viewer to the story and is a very common postmodern technique in literature and theater.  It is when the text itself is referenced during the text, to make the reader more a part of the story and therefor make the story seem less like a fiction and more real. Television critic Erin bales says when reviewing the episode: “there is no other work of metafiction I can think of that compares to “Bandersnatch.” The episode doesn’t just break the fourth wall; it acts as if the fourth wall never existed. Which is to say, the line between consumer and creator is shattered at times” (Bales). My literal reaction when I read this in her review of the episode was “yasss queen” because that it what I was thinking too. The writers of “Bandersnatch” were totally successful in breaking down the fourth wall when they had Stefan talk to the Netflix viewers as if we were in the room with him. The fact that the fact that people were watching him on television and controlling his decisions was actually said to him in the episode, and that happened to be true and happening at that time, was what made this scene one of the most iconic uses of metafiction of all time.

“Bandersnatch” also uses irony as a postmodern element. Examples of this was when Stefan would say things such as, “I don’t know where the urge to say no came from” or people would say things to him such as, “the past is unchangeable”, and we (the viewers) would be sitting behind the screen like… *cue cricket noises strictly reserved for awkward moments*. They would say things that completely contradict reality even though they are under the impression that they are true, but as an outsider who is actually controlling his decisions and changing the past throughout the episode, it is funny and ironic that these types of things were said during the episode.

My experience viewing “Bandersnatch” was interesting because some of the decisions were not chosen by me and were not what I would have originally picked because I was watching with my class. If my vote was not with the majority vote, I would not get to see the ending I was going to see if I had picked the one I wanted. I know that we went back and re watched some alternate endings, but some of the chronology of the story did not make sense to me and maybe it would have clicked better in my mind if I saw the segments in a different order, but enjoyed the viewing experience nonetheless. There are over a trillion different sequences possible to watch this episode and it is impossible to have seen them all, but the ones I viewed were great.

I hope you enjoyed this extremely wordy review of “Bandersnatch” and see y’all next time. #blessup

Pic Link: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/11/netflix-faces-25-million-lawsuit-over-black-mirror-bandersnatch/