Abstract
For a television show that has often seemed to delight in shocking viewers since its very first episode in 2011, which, in case we needed reminding, featured the Prime Minister of Great Britain having carnal relations with a sus scrofa domesticus, Black Mirror saved one of its greatest surprises for 28 December 2018 with the release of the 20th instalment in the series, Bandersnatch, directed by David Slade. While two of its previous episodes had centred on video games: the highly regarded dystopian vision of gamification en masse, “Fifteen Million Merits”, and the horror-inflected augmented reality tale of “Playtest”, in an unexpected turn of events for both Netflix and the creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Bandersnatch was not just about video games, it was one. This chapter explores the significance of Bandersnatch as an intriguing combination of video game and film, an example of what many referred to as an “interactive movie” or what Nitzan Ben Shaul called “hyper-narrative interactive cinema” in his Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (2008). The authors interrogate how far Bandersnatch emerges as a text immersed in some of the defining thematic elements of what we might call “the Black Mirror experience” but also uses the interactive nature of the project in original and compelling ways connected to the protagonist’s experience of trauma which the audience or “interactors” are forced to share.
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Notes
- 1.
Soon after the release of Bandersnatch, the publisher Chooseco sued Netflix for trademark infringement for using the phrase “Choose Your Own Adventure” (see Chmielewski, 2019).
- 2.
It should be noted here that Bandersnatch is not the first interactive movie on Netflix. In 2018, Minecraft: Story Mode (Telltale Games & Mojang, 2015–2016) and before that Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale (2017).
- 3.
As Brooker detailed in an interview for The Empire Film Podcast #348, the team used Twine software to initially design the branching narrative for Bandersnatch (Brooker, 2019). Twine is an open source software for the construction of interactive and non-liner stories.
- 4.
In a process that has been frequently observed throughout this edited collection, the name “Bandersnatch” had been included as an Easter Egg in a previous video gamed theme episode of Black Mirror, “Playtest”, featured on the front cover of a magazine in the review section which promised reviews of the game and also “Psyclapse” and “Miner Willy Meets the Taxman”. The inclusion of the game “Psyclapse” here and “Bandersnatch” itself provides an imbrication with reality that Black Mirror has often experimented with in the sense that they are the names of real-life games developed by Imagine Software (1982–1984) for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum 48k home computers.
- 5.
The Shreddies or Frosties choice does come back later with an advert for the one chosen on screen presented in what might be read as Brooker’s sly jab and cookies and advertising.
- 6.
It appears that this is a real event although later permutations of the game will challenge what it appears to be through his psychosis.
- 7.
This second group is actually something of the reverse of what happens in Bandersnatch. In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked Kevin Spacey who he was talking to in those moments and the actor answered “Donald Trump”, Colbert’s answer to his own question was “The person you’re actually talking to of course are people on a ten-hour Netflix binge, sucking on boxed wine” (qtd. in THR Staff, 2015)
- 8.
In Steven Knight’s Serenity (2019), the fisherman and part-time gigolo Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) learns that he is a character in a video game.
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McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (2019). Change Your Past, Your Present, Your Future? Interactive Narratives and Trauma in Bandersnatch (2018). In: McSweeney, T., Joy, S. (eds) Through the Black Mirror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_21
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