Black Mirror, White Masks

How Charlie Brooker just Rickrolled us with a race lecture

“The black man should no longer be confronted by the dilemma, turn white or disappear, but he should be able to take cognizance of a possibility of existence.”

—Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

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All right, so Black Mirror is back with Season 7 and it’s still brooding, still British, and still trying to make you feel guilty for owning a Roomba. This once-perfect show has fallen off quite a bit, with writer Charlie Brooker buttering on the woke in thicker spreads every season. But don’t worry, there are no spoilers down below.

The eye-roller this time around is Episode 3, “Hotel Reverie,” which badly wants to be the next “San Junipero,” that one from Season 3 with the oh-so-profound message that genocide is bad and lesbians are people too. In the new one, Keyworth Studios, once a prominent name in British cinema, partners with the VR firm Redream to remake its beloved 1950s classic Hotel Reverie by putting a modern actor’s consciousness into a digital recreation of the film.

Enter Brandy, played by Issa Rae, a black actress in the twilight of her career who, seeking to escape her typecasting, signs up with Redream agent Kimmy, played by Awkwafina, and enters the simulated world of Hotel Reverie in which she plays Dr. Alex Palmer, the white male lead.

Do the other characters in the world of Hotel Reverie, particularly Dr. Palmer’s love interest, accept that he is somehow now a black woman? You bet. They even show Awkwafina and a crack team of coding experts monitoring Rae’s progress and tracking VR metrics such as narrative adherence and emotional resonance, ensuring that the AI characters, who are fully conscious yet unaware they live in a movie, respond precisely as they did in the original film.

The message is clear. Hotel Reverie uses the team’s data-tracking as a kind of meta-argument to say that casting a black woman to play a white man in a 1950s romance doesn’t matter because the (make-believe) science says it works. The AI doesn’t glitch, the narrative metrics line up, the romantic tension registers. As things get spicy with the love interest, played by Emma Corrin, the team crunches the numbers and the data tracks precisely the same with a black woman. In your face, haters.

As I’ve argued before, blind casting isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This is, after all, fiction. And they are, after all, acting. Fiction allows for reimaginative freedom that can enhance a work’s relevance or reach. And you don’t need imaginary metrics to make the point. We have the receipts.

Consider Morgan Freeman as Red in The Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite films. In Stephen King’s short story on which the film was based, Red was described as having red hair because he was Irish. When Andy asks Red about his nickname, he replies, “Maybe it’s because I’m Irish.” They didn’t even bother to cut this from the film, but that didn’t make it weird. It made Freeman’s character clever.

Or consider Eartha Kitt as Catwoman in the 1960s Batman series. Iconic. Or Idris Elba as Heimdall in the Thor movies. One of the best things about the franchise. The point is, it can work. But this is like when people complain about the prevalence of female leads in Marvel films. The problem isn’t having a strong female lead. Sigourney Weaver in the Alien series and Linda Hamilton in the Terminator movies proves this.

But in those cases, their characters start off weak, suffer long, lose much, and eventually triumph through spirit of the will and some goddamn grit. When it doesn’t work is when it’s shoehorned in to push a social justice agenda, especially one that thumbs its nose in the face of fans.

Let’s take Captain Marvel as an example. In 1967, he first appeared in Marvel Super-Heroes #12 as an alien being, a member of an advanced race known as the Kree, whose military authorities send him to Earth to assess its threat to the empire. But, over time, he grows to admire humans and defects to protect Earth. What does Mar-vell, who possesses godlike powers, admire about these lowly humans? Their freedom.

The humans speak their minds and question authority. They choose their own paths, even at great cost. Vell, the subject of a totalitarian regime, sees this as a profound kind of moral courage, and his character arc describes this struggle between the soldier’s sense of duty and allegiance — and the dissident’s sense of duty to the truth.

Once he settles in on Earth, apart from his own people, he now also struggles with fitting in. As there symphony of his story continues, themes of the foreigner’s sense of isolation and belonging in an adopted home become the dominant chords of the next movement. The whole thing can clearly be read as a metaphor for some high-level Soviet spy who learns to admire American freedom, defects, and spends the rest of his life trying to fit in, unable to go home.

In the end, he dies of cancer. No big battle, no heroic sacrifice — just a deeply human, tragic end. It’s often considered one of the best graphic novels of the 1980s.

In the film adaptation, they made Mar-vell a woman, played by Brie Larson, who starts the movie amazing, in fact so amazing she doesn’t even know it because the Kree are not her people in this version, but simplistic baddies from the start, suppressing her awesome powers. The movie drags along for about 40 minutes until she realizes her own amazingness and defeats the bad guy with a single punch.

I wish I could tell you I am grossly oversimplifying the narrative structure. Instead of a allegory for loyalty and freedom, a metaphor for Cold War dissidents, and a meditation on community and the loneliness of the immigrant, we get a book report on feminism by someone who took one undergrad course at Brown. The message? Ladies are amazing except when men hold them back, but then they just have to push those men away and then they’re amazing again. Girl power.

The problem isn’t feminist filmmaking. I minored in feminism as an undergraduate and one of my concentrations within my major was film. I love feminist film. Agnès Varda’s 1962 classic Cléo from 5 to 7, Ana Lily Amirpour’s 2014 Iranian vampire horror A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 love letter All About My Mother — these are provocative and illuminating feminist works of art.

The problem, you see, isn’t blind casting, but woke casting. Not feminist messaging, but feminist lecturing. It doesn’t even bother me that “Hotel Reverie” is a bit of a digital fever dream of love and liberation and enough gender theory to make Judith Butler lean back. Because even all this could have worked. “San Junipero” was woke, but hey, it had heart. And I think most folks who complain about blind casting are either truly bigoted, lore purists for whom anything short of textual originalism is offensive, and folks like myself who are in it for the art and willing to go along with almost anything so long was it’s done well.

The first camp gets offended by diversity, the second by deviation, and the third by anything that feels inauthentic or forced. And that’s the problem here, despite what the made-up metrics say. In the end, “Hotel Reverie” walks a fine line. The acting performances are quite good, the dialogue is fair, and the costumes and set design are gorgeous. But that’s not quite enough anymore. Given the past decade of woke browbeating in our media, and relentless depiction of white men as stupid, evil, or both, it’s fair for people to want out of the simulation even when it’s done well.

And it’s not even clever anymore. The magic trick has been revealed. The subtext is no longer sub. It’s boring and insulting, like a TED Talk on deconstructing whiteness via interpretive cosplay. Nobody asked for any of this. Nobody wants to see a prehistoric Swedish drama featuring every race on the Pantone chart. And we’re especially sick of paying money to be insulted.

Not to mention, the whole conceit of the episode hijacks the appeal of the show — which woke casting often does — by taking a series that fans adore for its techno-Orwellian horror and saying, “Oh, that’s what you like? Well, here’s something dressed up like that but — surprise — it’s actually woke finger-wagging.”

Nobody likes being Rickrolled, especially not with Marxist race theory. That’s the real issue with “Hotel Reverie.” It’s a race lecture on identity and mimicry that mistakes virtue-signaling for character development. If I wanted that, I’d go read Fanon.

P.S. Episode 2, “Eulogy,” starring Paul Giamatti, is great. But then, it’s Paul Giamatti, so of course it’s great.