Arrivederci a San Junipero. Estetiche metaseriali della paranoia, dalla theory-fiction alla funzione black mirror

Abstract

The British TV series Black Mirror, with its enunciative (starting from the opening sequence) and marketing strategies (both online and offline), has triggered innovative spectatorial dynamics in audiovisual seriality. They operate in the interzone known as ‘the space of the black mirror’ and rely on a radical exploitation of media convergence. The series has a strong ‘meta-serial’ component which becomes even stronger from season to season, from episode to episode. Starting from the interactive film Bandersnacth (2018), as well as other relevant episodes, the present paper aims to analyse the contemporary and progressive loss of autonomy of human beings and the crisis of their individual unity. Therefore, this paper deals with the ineluctable nostalgia for and the importance of the human dimension, as well as the functions played by Black Mirror. In particular, we focus on the categories of humanism, the collapse of the space-time linearity, and the questionable notion of ‘future’ which is broadly applied to most scenarios. Videodrome (1982) is here proposed as the antecedent of Black Mirror in order to better understand the advent of the new flesh, an electronic flesh which innervates the so-called BlackDrome.