Netflix’s Black Mirror borrows from this thematic tactic, but brilliantly versions it up for the 21st century audience. Creator Charlie Brooker presents tech-based stories that are so arresting and strangely believable that they cause viewers to look around as the credits roll with a creeping fear that they may actually already be living in the same world as the show. The aliens and talking dolls of The Twilight Zone are replaced by next-gen social media apps, terrifyingly sentient AI, and implantable computers. Suddenly the horror isn’t so far-fetched.

In fact, Black Mirror’s hiatus during the Covid years seemed like no hiatus at all, just a way to allow a real-life season of the show to take the stage. Paranoia, global disharmony, and humanity’s lack of control were played out in every corner of life. Twitter became awash with Black Mirror memes and attempts at (dark) humor. “This new season of Black Mirror is a little too close to home”, etc. As I mentioned before, the recurring theme of near-future technology betraying its users runs like a thread in every installment of the anthology series. In this way, the show highlights the worst-case scenarios of our present technological trajectories.

This viewpoint pushes back against a more rosy, humanistic view of the future. Those who prognosticate, saying, “With the right people in power and with new data and communication, we can solve all our problems” are proven fools in the world of Black Mirror. Maybe more technology in the hands of flawed people yields middling or even bad results. Or to borrow again from the forerunning Twilight Zone, maybe getting what you want is a curse.

Example: In an episode entitled The Entire History of You, people are offered a small implantable device that records all their experiences and saves them for later playback. A dashcam for your entire life, if you will. And of course, you can share these recordings with others. The central married couple enjoys using these devices to relive fond memories later on. But this enjoyment evaporates as the husband begins suspecting his wife has been dishonest with him. He obsessively combs through his recorded memories for evidence of infidelity and throws clips at his wife to demand explanations for tiny comments or glances. The entire affair boils over into violence and a dark ending for everyone. The technology that offered joy and shared recollection has instead given fuel to sin, jealousy, and unforgiveness.

Black Mirror is not what one would call a “feel-good show.” There is very little light in the universe of this program. And yet, I think God has embedded some brilliant truths here that teach us about the interplay between law and gospel.

Like near-future technology, the law of the Old Testament places the burden on humanity to save themselves. It tells us that with the right behavior, and with the right tools, we can elevate our station before God.

But here’s the thing: getting new running shoes doesn’t magically make you a runner. Getting a pricey new journal notebook doesn’t make you a better writer. Picking up a new Bible or devotional book doesn’t make you more pleasing to God. In fact, these things can soon become the tools that mock you for your failure if your measurement for success is high. The shoes don’t get used enough. The notebook keeps too many blank pages. And the Bible and devotional are not read enough. In these times, we feel worse, not better, when we realize that we’re still the same broken people as before even though we feel like we should be better now. Rather than save us, these endeavors humble us. They show us that our sin is still inside no matter what we try to do to extract it or purify it ourselves. We’re like the doomed Black Mirror characters, looking around in shock. Aren’t things supposed to be better? Why are they worse? We’ve advanced so far as a civilization and things are still so bad!? To paraphrase Paul in Romans 7, “Who will save us from this world of death?”

And that’s where the gospel rushes in, wiping off the black mirror that records and plays back our faults and helping us see through a crystal clear glass instead to something else, to someone else. The answer isn’t our reflection, it’s the windows of Jesus’ grace. Once we stop gazing at ourselves for help, we can see Jesus as the one who takes the burden off our shoulders, and even “forgets” our sin (Heb 8:12), at the cross. 

Jesus doesn’t offer us some tools and technology to pull ourselves out of the grave — none such tools exist today or ever will. Instead, Jesus himself pulls people out of graves with his own nail-pierced hands. His resurrection is ours when we believe. With the black mirror of the law, this is impossible. But with Jesus Christ, all things are possible.

Here in the 21st century, this gospel helps us navigate a confusing and increasingly bleak feeling culture. This gospel invites us to not rely on humanity quite so much. It invites us to let go a bit more, to be people of grace to those around us. It invites us to interact with the tools and personalities of the world without pouring our hopes into them. So when people let us down, when tech lets us down, when sinful people keep doing sinful things even with all the right data available to them, we can lean on Jesus. We can lean on our church. We can be not dismayed, but know that our Savior lives. The black mirror won’t save us. Jesus will. Always.

The post Black Mirror appeared first on Red Tree.

~ Spoilers to follow ~

When a near fender-bender in a parking lot results in excessively-honked horns and a faceless middle finger, Danny Cho (played by Steven Yeun) channels The Dude of The Big Lebowski: “This aggression will not stand, man.” Danny was primed for an outburst as he’d just endured a jaw-tightening episode of trying to return merchandise and being denied. It’s the latest in a long string of indignities he’s faced, as we’ll come to learn. Soon he’s speeding after the offending SUV and its aggressive pilot, screaming through neighborhoods and taking out gardens while people gawk. Unable to look his enemy in the eye before they get away, he takes down the plate number and retreats, still fuming and not letting this go. 

We are then introduced to the other driver, Amy Lau (played by Ali Wong). She’s an upper-class business owner who has slaved away at growing her houseplant company until an elite millionaire retail mogul finally shows interest in acquiring it. On this particular day, she’s also set up for a fit of rage as the pressures of career and family threaten to crush her once and for all.

What follows for these two characters is a series of escalating interactions as they angrily orbit each other, each trying to bring the other down for the crime of road rage. 

It becomes clear through all of this that both of them have been killing themselves for years in a desperate search for validation, stability, and love and neither has found it. As we come to know more about their lives, we find past sins and mistakes contributing to their pattern of behavior today as the problems just keep getting worse the harder they try to atone for themselves. It’s a deeply human quandary that so many of us find ourselves stuck in as we ask, “Will anything actually make me happy?”

As he reckons with his failures, Danny finds himself back at the Korean-American church of his youth. In a moment of raw emotion, he weeps during a worship song, and a stranger gives him a hug with no questions asked. It’s a glimmer of love and it moves him deeply, nudging him back into that community a bit. He meets his ex-girlfriend’s husband Edwin who is a mini-celebrity in the small church and relishes this status with a devilish smile. One of my favorite moments in the show is during a church league basketball game when Edwin’s pride is being brought low by Danny’s superior skills. He steps back and launches a 3-pointer, yelling “For the Lord!”, only to brick the shot and ultimately lose the game. He’s devastated, sensing his self-worth slip away as his role is usurped by Danny. A work of pride masquerading as Christian devotion is foolishness for Edwin while Danny’s pride has almost no mask at all as he uses the church as a fence for illegal dealings on behalf of his criminal cousin while also leading the worship band himself. It’s all so twisted. 

Amy, on the other hand, is devoted not to a church community but to the hustle of her work and the “spiritual leaders” of that realm take her in and preach the gospel of fortune and excess. In her quest to grab hold of her dream of windfall profit and freedom from the millstone of expectations, she aligns herself with an even richer business owner and guru. She compromises and sacrifices her family to further her attempts at a deal, which only makes her burden heavier and her mental health worse. At one point, she’s pulled on stage for a panel discussion on entrepreneurship where she smiles and says “I’ve learned you can actually have it all” even as her life is spiraling further and further out of control. 

Soon Amy begins flashing back to her younger years when she imagined being visited by a folklore demon who silently takes note of all her sins. Terrified of the demon tattling on her for eating candy when she’s not supposed to, young Amy asked the monster “Are you going to tell anyone?” The demon answers “No”. Amy asks why and the demon calmly replies, “Because then no one would love you.” Amy’s secret pain and the burden of sin that she carries becomes more and more crippling in her life because she believes Satan’s lie that there is no forgiveness and love on the other side of confession. 

In the final episodes, Danny and Amy become more and more fixated on the other as the avatar of all that has gone wrong in their lives. If they could just exact righteous punishment on their rival then all would finally be right in their own life! When everything comes to a violent, chaotic climax of gunfire and gruesome death, Danny and Amy somehow manage to flee from the wreckage and find themselves alone together in a desert, injured and poisoned by the wild fruit they thought would keep them alive. They spew hatred at each other as they spew bile to the ground and begin to realize they may be dying together. 

Here is where undiluted grace finally breaks through as it so often does — in the lowest moments. Danny and Amy, in their hallucinatory states, begin to see each other for the first time. In fact, their addled brains entangle their identities until they hear their own words come from the other person’s lips. They are seen by the other and they are the same. They are broken people without hope who have spent their entire lives kicking against the goads (as Paul calls it in Acts 26). For the first time in their lives, they are not hiding. They are exposed but the other isn’t attacking or recoiling.  At the end of their own rope, they have been transported to the Garden of Eden. Two human beings, truly naked and unashamed. Fully known and fully loved.

Danny and Amy came together as bitter enemies over brake lights and horns. On that day, they were faceless personifications of the seemingly unjust fact that their blood, sweat, and tears have amounted to unfulfilled lives. But lying on the ground in a California desert, they finally understand each other and themselves. As they “die” together and awake the next morning free from the effects of the poisonous berries, they are somehow no longer enemies. They are not lovers, but more like spiritual siblings who fought tooth and nail but were ultimately restored. Like Jacob and Esau in Genesis 33, meeting later in life after so much anger and betrayal and somehow finding healing and restoration, almost to their own surprise. The show ends with a quiet picture of inexplicable love and care.

Grace turns enemies into friends, and bitter rivals into brothers and sisters. Grace cools hot tempers and invites broken people to dine together at the table set by Jesus himself, leveling the ground so we can see our brokenness and need. His own body and blood were broken and shed so that angry, undeserving people could be saved from the poison of their own toil and comparisons and be made whole. Beef screams “It’s not about you” in a voice choked with pain, but it’s a song we all must hear to be saved. And then, like The Dude, grace abides.

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