Now that the BBC miniseries Black Mirror is available on streaming Netflix, a lot of us are getting to see it for the first time. I had been hearing for months about the third episode, “The Entire History of You”, and it truly was worth the wait.
For my money it’s an incredibly well written story. And unlike much of what you see on American television, not everything is spelled out in a patronizingly explicit way. The more I thought about the characters afterward, and what was left implied but never said about their relationship history, the more perfectly it all came together.
Spoiler alert: Stop here if you want to know nothing at all about the episode before seeing it, although I’m not going to give anything away that you won’t find out in the first few minutes of the show.
When you and I have a conversation, I can choose what to tell you and what not to tell you. But more than that, I can skew the truth in artful ways, usually to avoid saying something that might be hurtful to you or someone else. “The Entire History of You” raises the question of what human relationships would be like if everyone had total recall. So one thing that strikes me about this question is how much it highlights the importance of ambiguity.
Not only is our entire social existence predicated on a delicate dance around truth, but natural language itself supports this dance very well. There is a consensus among linguists that one of the richest features of natural language is its powerful ability to modulate degrees of ambiguity of meaning. Note, by the way, that this is exactly the opposite of what we generally want from computer programming languages.
So if everyone had perfect total recall, we would be faced with a socially impossible situation: The very way that we have evolved as a species to think and to communicate with each other, to be able to co-exist with each other as humans, would no longer work.
After all, happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory. And if I had total recall, I could tell you who first said that. 🙂
When you posted about Black Mirror a while back, I checked it out and was absolutely floored by how perfect episode 1 was. I showed it to some friends, and we watched all 6 episodes, a great series for sure. I will warn you, though, that the last episode definitely rubbed my friends and me the wrong way. I’d say you should just not bother watching it, but if someone told me that, I know I’d watch it anyway! 🙂
In my mind, 1st episode was the best. I loved both how extreme the situation was, but also how unsurprising. I think the 1st episode really could happen in our current society, and I think the way it played out is probably one of the most likely outcomes, whatever that may say about us.