Ah, American Horror Story. Garbage? Yes. Brilliant? Yes. The next season is due out in just a few weeks, so it seems like the time to delve into the show’s, uh, mixed back catalogue – from best to worst, I’m ranking everything this show has injected straight into my veins. You can take a look at my predictions for American Horror Story: 1984 right here, and in the meantime, let’s get some opinions up in this joint!
You know, when I first saw the news of the Gossip Girl reboot a few days ago, I didn’t think much of it. Yeah, sure, whatever. Just because I spent my teenage years consuming the books and TV series and the spin-offs with an avaricious hunger that is only triggered when I’m a hormonal teenager crushing hard on Blake Lively doesn’t mean I actually still care about it. I mean, the series is trash – pulp of the highest order. I’m grown now. I watch films and describe the camera work as “dynamic”. I don’t have room in my Meaty galaxy brain for stuff like Gossip Girl anymore.
so so proud to share this article from my amazing boyfriend about bipolar, suicide, and mental health in the media.
Alright, I’m going to be real with you here: I didn’t give a shit about the new season of Stranger Things.
Another weak-ass attempt at prestige horror leaves me cold
20 years on, what has one of my favourite movies done for the genre?
(trigger warning for discussion of rape and sexual assault)
What does a rapist look like?
I’ve been vegetarian for pretty much my entire life. I’ve just never really liked meat, and did the usual baby-vegetarian thing of looking at my cats, looking at my chicken nuggets, and figuring that I didn’t want to put things in my mouth that came from another animal, something which had the figurative ability to snuggle on my lap during Saturday morning cartoons. For a long time – about fifteen years, aside from some brief breaks – I was just vegetarian and I was just fine with it and I politely ate my Quorn chick’n chunks in relative peace.
Still stanning Saw against all my personal interests
Black Mirror. You want to talk about Black Mirror? I’d love to talk about Black Mirror. I’d love to talk about the odd, patchy season that came before this one. I’d love to talk about the weird, unsettling experiment of Bandersnatch. And most of all, I’d like to talk about why this latest season, out last month, feels like such a downturn for a show which has so often held such a huge place in the cultural zeitgeist.
The problem with shows like Black Mirror is that they rely on an outside perspective on the aspects of society that they’re critiquing. When Black Mirror started out, back in 2011, it felt like a genuinely anarchic and even important take on where technology was taking us. Paranoia and fear about technology and social media was only just starting to really bloom, and Charlie Brooker, with his esteemed eye for pop cultural batshittery, was the perfect choice to explore it in a narrative sense.
But how can you sustain that sense of acerbic outsider-dom when you are firmly inside the system? When Black Mirror shifted to Netflix, and when it started working with Youtube personalities, and when it embraced the involvement of huge pop culture figures like Miley Cyrus and the like, it couldn’t hold on to this sense of being on the outside, looking in, and providing all the cogent commentary you would expect from someone holding that position. Other shows have suffered similair fates over the years; The Simpsons worked as a sharp-tongued critic of other pop culture, but after it became so thoroughly absorbed into the very fabric of what made up the modern media landscape, it just had to resort to sending the family on trips to Brazil and Japan for want of a better idea.
When Charlie Brooker gave up writing his legendary Screen Burn columns in the Guardian, he credited some of that decision to becoming part of the industry that he was trying to critique. His reasoning is pretty unarguable: you can’t poke holes an industry that you have become so deeply entrenched in. As Black Mirror uses modern technology and media to push itself forward, attempts to critique the same become more and more shallow. I mean, I saw Anthony Mackie, star of one of the this season’s episodes, in a Marvel movie just a couple of months ago – unarguably the biggest deal in storytelling since Game of Thones ended. The presence of his celebrity (and the celebrity of so many who have been attached to recent seasons, like Miley Cyrus, Jodie Foster, Bryce Dallas Howard, Letitia Wright, et al) sort of blunts everything the show is trying to achieve. As the show expands to swallow up great swathes of popular culture, it can’t stand outside it comfortably any longer without ringing with some abject hollowness.
And that’s why this season, for me, just doesn’t work. While the show still has some obvious merit – creativity, solid writing, handsome cinematography and talented performers – the central message seems increasingly lost as the meta-narrative of what the show has become in the real world overwhelms the actual narratives that it’s trying to tell us within these episodes. Black Mirror, to its own detriment, just got too good at playing its own game.
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(header image via Cultbox.co.uk)
The Cutprice Guignol 