Insincere Criticism and How It's Adopted
(spoilers for Black Mirror episodes "White Bear" and "San Junipero" and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi)
(CW: child abuse, gaslighting, cyberviolence, societal violence, vigilante justice)
Specifically, I really love the first two seasons - not only were they perfectly paced, they often had thought-provoking ideas regarding media perception ("The National Anthem"), the contradiction of being a rebel in an age where being provocative in any way gets you a big payday ("Fifteen Million Merits"), and the false security of insisting that monogamy be the default and "right" relationship alongside the insistence of knowing everything about a person ("The Entire History of You"). At its most mediocre (which is still pretty solid by must-see-TV standards), these episodes act as really great gateways into discussions regarding the personhood of sentient non-human beings in regardings to the unknown ("Be Right Back" being a lead-in to similar discussions in Thomas Was Alone, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the entire Blade Runner series) or the exploitability of media personalities for sociopolitical and socioeconomic dominance ("The Waldo Moment" being a nice lead-in to similar discussions in Network, A Face in the Crowd, and Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop and Starship Troopers).
My personal favorite episode out of the entire run - after thinking about it long and hard (and including episodes from the similarly-great-if-muddied Netflix seasons, such as the excellent "Arkangel," "Hated in the Nation" and "Shut Up and Dance") - is "White Bear." It's not because of the big twist - I could give less of a damn about if Bruce Willis was dead the entire time if The Sixth Sense wasn't a good analysis of the grieving process and the ability to relate to those who came before us - but it's because of how the twist ties into the story.
"White Bear" starts off and, until the last 10 minutes, presents itself as a straight-forward exploitation of the dangers of readily-available entertainment devices (read: smartphones) by exploring the fractured journey of Victoria Skillane, a woman trying to find a girl she thinks is her daughter. Running away from what fellow survivors describe as mind-controlled zombies, she runs into a gamut of post-apocalyptic tropes, eventually going as far as fighting more of these fully-transformed zombies in a radio tower the survivor insists on calling "White Bear." All the while, she gets residual flashbacks of her memories - all of which start taking a turn for the very worse. This culminates to where she doesn't want to go inside White Bear - but she still does anyway since the survivor goads her into doing so. Inside, there are more fully-transformed zombies - more like if Slipknot's on-stage shows met a horror movie circus. Victoria readies her gun, in full badass mode, and...
...and a stream of confetti comes out. This whole thing is just a ruse. The audience is exposed and an emcee, or, more fittingly, the warden, comes out to explain to Victoria that she's not a grieving mother trying to find some hope in a crapsack world who may have made some mistakes before ending up in her own hell, but a woman who knowingly kidnapped a little girl, left her white bear plush on the side of the road, got the media up in a frenzy over trying to find this little girl all while holding her prisoner in her basement, and filming her boyfriend setting said kid on fire. Because the boyfriend - Iain Skillane - had a distinctive tattoo (the same symbol shown all throughout the post-apocalyptic world), it was easy to track him on security cameras showing him, Victoria and the kid. However, before the trial could go underway, Iain commits suicide, so with a media-hungry public tuned in to the trial of the century and with the accomplice constantly breaking down at the televised trial, the decision is made to give Victoria what is effectively legalized psychological vigilante justice.
Victoria breaks down at the revelation of her own character and begs to be killed, unwilling to live with what she's done. However, the warden and the audience don't want this - or rather, they believe her to be playing a character like they thought she was at the trial. So after humiliating her in public, the warden takes her back to the home that she wakes up to, erases the past 12 hours from her mind (and any retaining of her residual memories regarding what she and Iain did), and marks off another day on her calendar.
She's been experiencing this for YEARS. And for what it seems, based on how the warden and the public interacts with her, she's in there until she dies either from some outside source or from old age.
And to top it off, this isn't just a private thing that only a select few are invited to. This is a full-blown theme park - guests/zombies are advised not to interact with Victoria Skillane, fed the story that she's extremely violent and often cite incidents where Victoria, frustrated with the inactivity of the zombies/guests, has tried to shake them out of their stupor (or pelt them with rocks) before the survivor tells them not to bother; scare actors revel in the fact that they get to act as antagonistically towards this criminal and get paid good money for it (not to mention the job security); and the people cast as survivors, along with the warden, tell people to have good, clean fun.
In layman's terms, "White Bear" is why vigilantes are not something to look forward to. The episode goes out of its way to deconstruct the entire point of a vigilante, deliberately muddying the waters to potentially make us side with the employees of White Bear Justice Park. The episode doesn't want you to side with Victoria - she was an accomplice to a kidnapping and brutal murder, not to mention relatively uncaring until she realized that she wasn't going to make it out untarnished - but to say that Charlie Brooker intends for you to side with the employees is like being a person who doesn't get that Paul Kersey, "Dirty Harry" Callahan, Walter White, and Dexter Morgan are not people to look up to at all and constantly celebrate them as unorthodox heroes. For example, people who unironically and ironically post "Skyler is a bitch, Walt did nothing wrong" on Breaking Bad threads are very much like the guests and employees of White Bear Justice Park in that they've justified the actions of the vigilantes and anti-heroes to the point where reasonable counters against them (namely, Skyler White, Walt's disturbed wife who thinks that what he's doing is wrong) are considered bullshit. We've become so used to the idea of vigilante justice that if we get another viewpoint showing how incredibly nightmarish the whole ordeal is, we shoo it away or toss the damn thing out, a pesky black fly in your Chardonnay.
And another thing: "White Bear" is designed to be a satirical evisceration of American network TV, namely shows like The Walking Dead with their hackneyed post-apocalyptic settings and Dexter with their wishy-washy and ultimately dangerous promotion of "greater good" vigilante justice. It makes roughly the same point about justice that the film Hot Fuzz does; however, rather than make rapid-fire jokes about how doing criminal things in order to benefit society as a whole (utilitarianism, for those into the whole brevity thing) is a really disturbing thing to do (and can often be seen in many a police force, especially with the rise of police brutality, broken windows policing, and the countless traffic stops), "White Bear" takes the Hannah Gadsby approach of leaving you with the tension of knowing that what you've been raised to believe in is a lie that destroys the lives of many innocent and not-so-innocent people AND plays all of its satire for real. It successfully makes its satirical points, but it does so without winking at the camera and giving you some random joke so you can laugh. Satire doesn't mean that it has to make you laugh - it just has to give you an exaggerated world set up in the same way one would set up a joke, but show you why it's wrong. Satire can be so serious and still tell you that maybe, just maybe, American TV and media trends dull us into believing some really toxic ideas.
(That does not mean that Breaking Bad is a bad show. Dexter is lackluster, from what I hear, but Breaking Bad at least tries to scream to its audience that Walter White is not a person to be looked up to and that Skyler, Jesse, and Walt Jr. are infinitely better without the guy. Yes, Walt was screwed over immensely by Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz, but that does not give him the right to torture them into harboring his drug money so they can hand it to Walt Jr., using Skinny Pete and Badger as hitmen decoys to really hit the point home. While it's nice that Walt's thinking about somebody else other than himself in that scene, he's still showing off his power one last time as one final laugh. Vince Gilligan is many things, but at least he tries to deconstruct the idea of an anti-hero as just a hero unrecognized in their time.)
To this day, "White Bear," while highly regarded as one of the show's highlights, still receives a bunch of criticism. For example, a particularly pithy Tweet by Daniel Ortberg, former editor of The Toast and highly inspired by this episode and "White Christmas," created the succinct criticism of "what if phones but too much," which in turn inspired the interesting-if-somewhat-half-baked episode "Playtest" and a sight gag in "White Bear"'s spiritual successor "Hated in the Nation." The idea that "White Bear" was that divisive of an episode to where it's created an entire genre of criticism regarding Black Mirror and its themes regarding the imposing presence of technology when it comes to sociopolitical issues is rather disturbing, but not entirely new. I have seen polarizing genres, films, TV shows, albums, etc. receive these total critical eviscerations that often boil down to these basic criticisms: I don't like what the pieces of media represent, and I don't like what they have to say about me.
Most people who hate "White Bear" often don't like the fact that they're being criticized. However, they don't want to come out and say it because they have seen extremely invalid criticisms that roughly state these exact same problems, but often throw in some sort of issue that limits their critique to being taken seriously by, say, white nationalists or MGTOWs. Like, there are probably (and I mean probably) criticisms of "White Bear" out there that do mention the belief that there's nothing wrong with vigilante justice, but follow it with a chaser of "why are the villains in the episode predominantly white men and the protagonist a black woman? Channel 4's become too PC, I say!"
With that said, how do you get across the idea that you don't like "White Bear" deconstructing you, the audience, relaxing your mind and floating downstream into accepting vigilante justice, legal or otherwise, wholesale? By trying to state that there's something wrong with the whole thing. It's not just you that's out of order - the whole damn system's out of order. This is why "what if phones but too much" has become a big joke in the Black Mirror fandom, but a succinct summary of negative criticism of the show in other circles. It gets to the heart of masking the fact that you don't like being chewed out by this TV show that tells you that you're promoting some really toxic ideas regarding justice, so you hide it in a convenient package of "the show is cliched and hackneyed and does all the technology criticisms wrong and it demonizes technology." It's not that far from people criticizing "San Junipero" not because it drags a bit during the scenes outside the simulation - exterior shots can be tightened up for tempo reasons - but because our leads Yorkie and Kelly happen to engage in a lesbian relationship (and make a point about how Yorkie's family only advocates for her staying alive because their worst nightmare - a digital afterlife where Yorkie can be a lesbian with a fulfilling life, something they do not want - is the alternative) while also stating that the episode dwells way too much on nostalgia baiting because part of San Junipero's appeal is that it allows people to live in hyper-concentrated areas resembling the best of a decade, so of course it's going to have Jazzercise and Pac-Man and Toto playing at full blast.
I know what the real criticism is, so why not cut the crap and go for the jugular? You didn't like an episode of Black Mirror because it made you feel bad about your entire moral system. You don't like having to check yourself - to think about who you are and what you've done - so you'd rather live in your blissful world where you don't have to worry about questioning your own beliefs as long as you get to stay in your ideological bubble.
Note that I do not limit this to the obvious false criticisms from alt-lite, alt-right, and libertarian-right figures, who often have a problem with some trivial element of the story, namely the presence of lead women in the cast and minor character differences (i.e. Luke Skywalker being more jaded than he is in the Original Trilogy), since those are often reactionary. I include seemingly valid criticisms, such as story issues, whether or nor a character works at all, and the reason for deconstructing a specific element from their predecessors. I've seen people admit that harassing Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram was a bad move, but also insist that The Last Jedi was a terrible movie because "audiences don't want to be lectured about how they or their tastes are congruent to the villain." These people often insist that their base fandoms are, more often than not, really nice people who don't promote retaliatory tactics on the regular.
However, I've been in enough fandoms to realize that a lot of fandoms do engage or, at the very least, promote retaliatory tactics. Star Wars fans have historically been pretty snide towards new developments in the stories - for the longest time, they didn't like how increasingly banal and fanfictiony the Extended Universe novels got; then it was how utterly preoccupied the Prequel Trilogy was with its sociopolitical discourse and its discussion of how fascism rises from manipulated democracies; and then it was on how much the Disney films copy-cat the Original Trilogy. Star Wars has always had plot points mirrored from the OT - every hero often has a Luke Skywalker-type of start, where he's just another farm boy on another deserted planet looking to go beyond the binary sunset; every villain is a retread on some element of Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, and the Emperor; every plucky rogue-turned-hero is some variation of Han Solo or Lando Calrissian or Chewbacca or whoever. To make things even worse, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope copycatted Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and about a hundred different sci-fi serials, with maybe a dash of that Doctor Who mysticism because George Lucas probably watched three minutes of Jon Pertwee using a sonic screwdriver to open up a brewski for a reprogrammed Dalek while channel-surfing during one of his days off from filming American Graffiti. Disney's doing nothing new here.
From what I can gather from my viewing of The Last Jedi, it's by and large a deconstruction of all of the elements Star Wars has copycatted from other sources and from itself, alongside outwardly mocking JJ Abrams' mystery box style of writing. Rey isn't the Skywalker or Solo or Kenobi or Jinn descendant we've come to expect from all our Extended Universe protagonists, but rather some random girl sold to junkers so her parents could get a couple of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters with extra original KFC spice from the Immortal Galactic Demi-Demon Colonel Sanders himself...who just happened to have a higher-than-usual count of midichlorians in her blood (which allow her to tap into the Force - note: midichlorians don't create the Force). Poe isn't the hotshot pilot who's secretly a genius - he's actually a tactician who doesn't know what he's doing, gets half of the Resistance killed, and tries to throw a mutiny over not being told by Holdo that her obvious retreat plan is a retreat plan. In other words, he's a hotshot in the negative sense. Finn and Rose aren't the secret big damn heroes we need to save the day, but just more soldiers who think they're doing important things (and their important action is designed to be as unimportant as possible - wreaking havoc on Canto Bight and giving some much-needed hope to a group of child slaves who also happen to be Force-sensitives) and ultimately almost get the Resistance destroyed. DJ isn't Han Solo or Lando, but rather Lando if he wasn't sorry for throwing Han under the bus at Cloud City - it's just business. And Luke isn't the plucky farm boy dreaming of going beyond that binary sunset - he's seen some things, to put it mildly. He's not even a wise mentor, but rather a bitter sarcastic old man who drinks his blue milk and locked himself out of the Force after screwing up big-time with the kid who'd later become Kylo Ren.
Get it?
A big criticism people have with The Last Jedi is often how Kylo Ren's character has been read by some audiences to be a reflection of the fanbase as a whole. The fanbase does not like being compared to the childish, impulsive, destructive mess that is Kylo Ren. They often cite the battle where Rey and Kylo team up to fight Snoke's men as one of the few good moments of the film - as Mikey Neumann puts it in his excellent video essay on The Last Jedi, it explores the idea of a grey Jedi more than the Extended Universe novels and the character of Qui-Gon Jinn have. The fact that Kylo can fight for a seemingly beneficial good, but also still tap into his negative energy to give him motivation (i.e. using the Dark Side alongside the Light Side) shows that there can be balance within warriors that use the Force. You don't have to be a fascist hitman like Darth Vader nor be a goody-good afraid of getting emotionally invested in his fights like Obi-Wan Kenobi to use the Force effectively - as long as you use the Force, and you use it right, and you don't mess it up, it works. It just works.
But I don't want to just talk about Kylo being a grey Jedi. I want to talk about the fact that he is impulsive, he is selfish, he is manipulative, and he is entitled. This is a guy who's big iconic scene in The Force Awakens isn't him unsheathing his cross-bladed lightsaber, but him talking to somebody about continuing their legacy - only to reveal that he's blabbering about this to Darth Vader's mutilated mask. He views himself as the inheritor of everything awesome about the Force - namely, the Dark Side and Darth Vader's sheer power. In a weird way, you can read that as how some fans have actually looked up to Darth Vader/Anakin as a guy with good intent, but overall terrible praxis. A man who realizes that being a self-abnegating goody-good isn't beneficial, but rather achieving his own desires - that's the core of who Anakin is. In other words, Vader does things for himself. Not exactly a great way to completely dummy out the Jedi Order, so what does he do? Join with the Empire - the space fascists. He's fighting for his personal desires while also helping out the guys who just want to screw over everything in the galaxy while also inspiring thousands of fans to engage in the "Empire did nothing wrong, the Jedi are basically space terrorists" thought game.
I've seen this a lot in most contemporary fandoms, where the protagonists are seen as some sort of hinderance or, at the very least, "lame." It saddens me to see people buy into this party line that they don't feel like any of their attributes, especially in regards to fandom culture, should be deconstructed lest a negative side be shown. How else are people going to better themselves? You have a film that tries to restore hope into Star Wars out of all things and all people are wondering is "when are they going to reveal Finn as a Force-sensitive?" I'm all for that idea - the fact that Finn can operate a lightsaber without blasting his hand off by accident AND the fact that he had an awakening when the First Order killed Max Von Sydow's Jedi straggler despite all of the Stormtrooper brainwashing and conditioning does hint that there is something about his character that hints at him being somewhat connected to the Force - but saying that prematurely revealing Finn as a Force-sensitive is admirable to implying that Kylo Ren is a satirical-in-the-serious-sense look at how Star Wars fans have reacted to change within the fandom (to the point where George Lucas sold off Lucasfilm and Lucasarts just because making Star Wars isn't fun to him anymore) is like having all of your priorities out of order.
Another complaint usually revolves around the characters of Holdo and Rose. The common complaint - the one I've seen a lot in alt-right and MGTOW circles - is that they're only in there to up the quota for female characters. However, I've seen "legitimate criticism" regarding those characters and their usefulness to the story. Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about how Holdo, in comparison to her characterization in the novelization of The Last Jedi, is kinda bare-bones outside of being Leia's stand-in and Poe's nemesis, or how Rose can be a bit on the Genki-girl side to the point of Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory, but rather the criticism that Holdo and Rose don't have any use in the plot.
Except they obviously do.
Holdo is supposed to be everything Poe hates: she's new, she's in charge, and she rightfully calls Poe's plan to hit the First Order back irresponsible because it is. Poe killed half of the Rebellion via his hotheadedness. Of course Holdo's going to be skeptical of whatever new idea he has cooking - in that case, she has more than every right to withhold detailed information regarding the specifics of the retreat after hearing rumblings of Poe possibly holding a mutiny if he doesn't get his way AND that he's sent two greenhorns (a greenhorn and a former Stormtrooper) into unfamiliar territory in order to get a codebreaker to steal whatever program the First Order is using on their Star Destroyers to track the Rebellion ships through hyperspace. Poe is banking everything on this espionage operation that's doomed to fail - if that doesn't show the immaturity of Poe Dameron, then I don't know what would. So Holdo's in the right. As far as the "test of character" goes and how Leia lets Poe off the hook, Holdo realizes that Poe is slowly realizing that, given the length of time regarding the espionage operation (it's taken Finn and Rose a bit too long to come back with DJ), maybe his plan wasn't a good idea and that he's a bit impulsive. In other words, he's the Rebellion version of Kylo Ren - he wants so hard to be like the heroes of the past, but he doesn't possess any of Luke and Obi-Wan's restraint. He's similar to Han Solo in that regard - a rogue who's on the side of the Rebellion - but remember that Han Solo was sold out by Lando just so the latter could keep Cloud City out of Empire control...and subsequently frozen in carbonite so Jabba the Hutt could keep him as his mantlepiece keepsake and conversation starter ("hey, remember that time I bought Han Solo frozen in steel? man, that was awesome").
The problem people have with Rose is that she's too chipper, despite being designed to be a Genki girl through and through, and that all the stuff she does with Finn doesn't do anything of note.
A Genki girl is supposed to be chipper. They're supposed to be bubbling with all this positive energy. Saying that a Genki girl needs to tone it down is like saying that for Saints Row the Third to work as a good game, Professor Genki needs to be dead serious, like he's the Ellen Ripley of super deadly game shows/glorified target practice minigames. It doesn't make sense if Rose weren't always looking on the bright side of life - even her corny line about fighting for hope ties into that. She's always rationalizing something in a positive light, even as she's lying on the ground, possibly dying. Also, Canto Bight has thematic connections to the story - it shows how the Extended Universe's reliance on keeping all Force-sensitives within established Force-sensitive families (namely the Skywalkers and Kenobis) has effectively limited the Force to a mere hereditary power. The existence of the kids at Canto Bight and the fact that one of them shows off minor Force control opens up the possibility to be a Force-sensitive. It stops the gatekeeping of leaving most Force-sensitives within Skywalker and Kenobi kin. If anything, it adds to the possibility of both Finn and Rose being Force-sensitives and helps explain that - high midichlorian counts aren't inherited, but rather random. Like everything in life. If the Force is connected to all life, wouldn't it make more sense for the Force to be in all life when it sees fit? It also recontextualizes how much of a miracle kid Anakin was - this nobody from an unremarkable slave family...and he has all of these powers that even he can't comprehend. Two people from all the way on that big planet with the city all over it - they show to him that he's not the only one with these powers.
And another thing: Canto Bight is designed to be a critique on the military-industrial complex and war profiteering. It's pretty much a theme from the Prequel Trilogy - the idea that wars can be engineered in order to gain some sort of economic advantage (i.e. all of that hubbub regarding the trade deals in The Phantom Menace), which, in the case of this whole thing, might as well be true. In that case, Kylo Ren and Rey's own doubts regarding the validity of what they're fighting for are elaborated on - the First Order and the Rebellion are nothing more than puppets by weapons manufacturers blowing all their big bucks on craps and the space horse tracks. It screams out loud that their ideological wars aren't so much about ideology - no, scratch that. It's about an ideology. The ideology of the almighty dollar. Or Galactic credit. Or whatever Harvey Korman pays Bea Arthur to pour whiskey down that big hole in his head. If the First Order and the Rebellion are under the control of greed, then what does that make Kylo Ren and Rey? The last Jedi. They're the ones still fighting for that big capital-C Cause. They don't care about stoking a war economy to line the pockets of PMC and getting Space Liquid Ocelot to fight Space Old Snake on top of a Space Outer Haven over space memes - they're fighting for what they believe is right. And what brings Kylo down is that he still fights for domination. He still fights for that gatekeeping. He still fights for the puppetmaster, albeit this time, he wants to be the puppetmaster. He wants control. Rey wants everybody to be a Jedi. Anybody who can tap into some element of the Force - they're all more than welcome to join. No kidnapping kids to be Jedi younglings now. Rey wants to continue, for lack of a better term, hope that the fandom can be better for everybody.
So in a weird way, Rose's dumb line about hope ties into what Rey is fighting for and what Kylo isn't.
What I'm trying to impart to you is that sometimes, criticism can be a bit insincere, especially when it comes to deconstruction. Simply throwing away pieces of media because they tell you that you're going about this the wrong away and then coming up with some vague criticism that tries to tie in with some flaws about whatever you're criticizing but more or less just comes back to you not liking the deconstruction makes art shallow.
In layman's terms, just give the damnfourth Chaos Emerald film another chance.
And another thing: you guys don't even like nu metal and prog rock not because they're all run by white men - rock music and country are in general - and because they're mainstreamy and bombast (Led Zeppelin is that in general), but because they're foreign, weird, new and offer some sort of diversity of the rock playing field. Nu metal has minorities playing the instruments, rap guys offering big jokes on how most rock frontmen are balls of toxic masculinity, and lyrics about legitimate abuse and bullying that the singers suffered. Prog rock has weirdo compositions that sound like upbeat rock versions of what Brian Wilson was doing from 1965-73, wacky electronic instruments, and lip service to classical composers in a genre whose big rallying cry is Chuck Berry whining about how he can't play the piano because his sister's hogging it to practice "Fur Elise."
(CW: child abuse, gaslighting, cyberviolence, societal violence, vigilante justice)
Insincere Criticism and How It's Adopted
Chapter One: The One Where Victoria Skillane Gets Killed by Robot Bees
One of my favorite shows on Netflix is Black Mirror.Specifically, I really love the first two seasons - not only were they perfectly paced, they often had thought-provoking ideas regarding media perception ("The National Anthem"), the contradiction of being a rebel in an age where being provocative in any way gets you a big payday ("Fifteen Million Merits"), and the false security of insisting that monogamy be the default and "right" relationship alongside the insistence of knowing everything about a person ("The Entire History of You"). At its most mediocre (which is still pretty solid by must-see-TV standards), these episodes act as really great gateways into discussions regarding the personhood of sentient non-human beings in regardings to the unknown ("Be Right Back" being a lead-in to similar discussions in Thomas Was Alone, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, and the entire Blade Runner series) or the exploitability of media personalities for sociopolitical and socioeconomic dominance ("The Waldo Moment" being a nice lead-in to similar discussions in Network, A Face in the Crowd, and Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop and Starship Troopers).
My personal favorite episode out of the entire run - after thinking about it long and hard (and including episodes from the similarly-great-if-muddied Netflix seasons, such as the excellent "Arkangel," "Hated in the Nation" and "Shut Up and Dance") - is "White Bear." It's not because of the big twist - I could give less of a damn about if Bruce Willis was dead the entire time if The Sixth Sense wasn't a good analysis of the grieving process and the ability to relate to those who came before us - but it's because of how the twist ties into the story.
"White Bear" starts off and, until the last 10 minutes, presents itself as a straight-forward exploitation of the dangers of readily-available entertainment devices (read: smartphones) by exploring the fractured journey of Victoria Skillane, a woman trying to find a girl she thinks is her daughter. Running away from what fellow survivors describe as mind-controlled zombies, she runs into a gamut of post-apocalyptic tropes, eventually going as far as fighting more of these fully-transformed zombies in a radio tower the survivor insists on calling "White Bear." All the while, she gets residual flashbacks of her memories - all of which start taking a turn for the very worse. This culminates to where she doesn't want to go inside White Bear - but she still does anyway since the survivor goads her into doing so. Inside, there are more fully-transformed zombies - more like if Slipknot's on-stage shows met a horror movie circus. Victoria readies her gun, in full badass mode, and...
...and a stream of confetti comes out. This whole thing is just a ruse. The audience is exposed and an emcee, or, more fittingly, the warden, comes out to explain to Victoria that she's not a grieving mother trying to find some hope in a crapsack world who may have made some mistakes before ending up in her own hell, but a woman who knowingly kidnapped a little girl, left her white bear plush on the side of the road, got the media up in a frenzy over trying to find this little girl all while holding her prisoner in her basement, and filming her boyfriend setting said kid on fire. Because the boyfriend - Iain Skillane - had a distinctive tattoo (the same symbol shown all throughout the post-apocalyptic world), it was easy to track him on security cameras showing him, Victoria and the kid. However, before the trial could go underway, Iain commits suicide, so with a media-hungry public tuned in to the trial of the century and with the accomplice constantly breaking down at the televised trial, the decision is made to give Victoria what is effectively legalized psychological vigilante justice.
Victoria breaks down at the revelation of her own character and begs to be killed, unwilling to live with what she's done. However, the warden and the audience don't want this - or rather, they believe her to be playing a character like they thought she was at the trial. So after humiliating her in public, the warden takes her back to the home that she wakes up to, erases the past 12 hours from her mind (and any retaining of her residual memories regarding what she and Iain did), and marks off another day on her calendar.
She's been experiencing this for YEARS. And for what it seems, based on how the warden and the public interacts with her, she's in there until she dies either from some outside source or from old age.
And to top it off, this isn't just a private thing that only a select few are invited to. This is a full-blown theme park - guests/zombies are advised not to interact with Victoria Skillane, fed the story that she's extremely violent and often cite incidents where Victoria, frustrated with the inactivity of the zombies/guests, has tried to shake them out of their stupor (or pelt them with rocks) before the survivor tells them not to bother; scare actors revel in the fact that they get to act as antagonistically towards this criminal and get paid good money for it (not to mention the job security); and the people cast as survivors, along with the warden, tell people to have good, clean fun.
In layman's terms, "White Bear" is why vigilantes are not something to look forward to. The episode goes out of its way to deconstruct the entire point of a vigilante, deliberately muddying the waters to potentially make us side with the employees of White Bear Justice Park. The episode doesn't want you to side with Victoria - she was an accomplice to a kidnapping and brutal murder, not to mention relatively uncaring until she realized that she wasn't going to make it out untarnished - but to say that Charlie Brooker intends for you to side with the employees is like being a person who doesn't get that Paul Kersey, "Dirty Harry" Callahan, Walter White, and Dexter Morgan are not people to look up to at all and constantly celebrate them as unorthodox heroes. For example, people who unironically and ironically post "Skyler is a bitch, Walt did nothing wrong" on Breaking Bad threads are very much like the guests and employees of White Bear Justice Park in that they've justified the actions of the vigilantes and anti-heroes to the point where reasonable counters against them (namely, Skyler White, Walt's disturbed wife who thinks that what he's doing is wrong) are considered bullshit. We've become so used to the idea of vigilante justice that if we get another viewpoint showing how incredibly nightmarish the whole ordeal is, we shoo it away or toss the damn thing out, a pesky black fly in your Chardonnay.
And another thing: "White Bear" is designed to be a satirical evisceration of American network TV, namely shows like The Walking Dead with their hackneyed post-apocalyptic settings and Dexter with their wishy-washy and ultimately dangerous promotion of "greater good" vigilante justice. It makes roughly the same point about justice that the film Hot Fuzz does; however, rather than make rapid-fire jokes about how doing criminal things in order to benefit society as a whole (utilitarianism, for those into the whole brevity thing) is a really disturbing thing to do (and can often be seen in many a police force, especially with the rise of police brutality, broken windows policing, and the countless traffic stops), "White Bear" takes the Hannah Gadsby approach of leaving you with the tension of knowing that what you've been raised to believe in is a lie that destroys the lives of many innocent and not-so-innocent people AND plays all of its satire for real. It successfully makes its satirical points, but it does so without winking at the camera and giving you some random joke so you can laugh. Satire doesn't mean that it has to make you laugh - it just has to give you an exaggerated world set up in the same way one would set up a joke, but show you why it's wrong. Satire can be so serious and still tell you that maybe, just maybe, American TV and media trends dull us into believing some really toxic ideas.
(That does not mean that Breaking Bad is a bad show. Dexter is lackluster, from what I hear, but Breaking Bad at least tries to scream to its audience that Walter White is not a person to be looked up to and that Skyler, Jesse, and Walt Jr. are infinitely better without the guy. Yes, Walt was screwed over immensely by Gretchen and Elliot Schwartz, but that does not give him the right to torture them into harboring his drug money so they can hand it to Walt Jr., using Skinny Pete and Badger as hitmen decoys to really hit the point home. While it's nice that Walt's thinking about somebody else other than himself in that scene, he's still showing off his power one last time as one final laugh. Vince Gilligan is many things, but at least he tries to deconstruct the idea of an anti-hero as just a hero unrecognized in their time.)
To this day, "White Bear," while highly regarded as one of the show's highlights, still receives a bunch of criticism. For example, a particularly pithy Tweet by Daniel Ortberg, former editor of The Toast and highly inspired by this episode and "White Christmas," created the succinct criticism of "what if phones but too much," which in turn inspired the interesting-if-somewhat-half-baked episode "Playtest" and a sight gag in "White Bear"'s spiritual successor "Hated in the Nation." The idea that "White Bear" was that divisive of an episode to where it's created an entire genre of criticism regarding Black Mirror and its themes regarding the imposing presence of technology when it comes to sociopolitical issues is rather disturbing, but not entirely new. I have seen polarizing genres, films, TV shows, albums, etc. receive these total critical eviscerations that often boil down to these basic criticisms: I don't like what the pieces of media represent, and I don't like what they have to say about me.
Most people who hate "White Bear" often don't like the fact that they're being criticized. However, they don't want to come out and say it because they have seen extremely invalid criticisms that roughly state these exact same problems, but often throw in some sort of issue that limits their critique to being taken seriously by, say, white nationalists or MGTOWs. Like, there are probably (and I mean probably) criticisms of "White Bear" out there that do mention the belief that there's nothing wrong with vigilante justice, but follow it with a chaser of "why are the villains in the episode predominantly white men and the protagonist a black woman? Channel 4's become too PC, I say!"
With that said, how do you get across the idea that you don't like "White Bear" deconstructing you, the audience, relaxing your mind and floating downstream into accepting vigilante justice, legal or otherwise, wholesale? By trying to state that there's something wrong with the whole thing. It's not just you that's out of order - the whole damn system's out of order. This is why "what if phones but too much" has become a big joke in the Black Mirror fandom, but a succinct summary of negative criticism of the show in other circles. It gets to the heart of masking the fact that you don't like being chewed out by this TV show that tells you that you're promoting some really toxic ideas regarding justice, so you hide it in a convenient package of "the show is cliched and hackneyed and does all the technology criticisms wrong and it demonizes technology." It's not that far from people criticizing "San Junipero" not because it drags a bit during the scenes outside the simulation - exterior shots can be tightened up for tempo reasons - but because our leads Yorkie and Kelly happen to engage in a lesbian relationship (and make a point about how Yorkie's family only advocates for her staying alive because their worst nightmare - a digital afterlife where Yorkie can be a lesbian with a fulfilling life, something they do not want - is the alternative) while also stating that the episode dwells way too much on nostalgia baiting because part of San Junipero's appeal is that it allows people to live in hyper-concentrated areas resembling the best of a decade, so of course it's going to have Jazzercise and Pac-Man and Toto playing at full blast.
I know what the real criticism is, so why not cut the crap and go for the jugular? You didn't like an episode of Black Mirror because it made you feel bad about your entire moral system. You don't like having to check yourself - to think about who you are and what you've done - so you'd rather live in your blissful world where you don't have to worry about questioning your own beliefs as long as you get to stay in your ideological bubble.
Chapter Two: The One Where I Defend That Star Wars Film with the Chick with the Purple Hair
Now, with that said, I don't think a lot of the criticisms regarding Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi are valid.Note that I do not limit this to the obvious false criticisms from alt-lite, alt-right, and libertarian-right figures, who often have a problem with some trivial element of the story, namely the presence of lead women in the cast and minor character differences (i.e. Luke Skywalker being more jaded than he is in the Original Trilogy), since those are often reactionary. I include seemingly valid criticisms, such as story issues, whether or nor a character works at all, and the reason for deconstructing a specific element from their predecessors. I've seen people admit that harassing Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram was a bad move, but also insist that The Last Jedi was a terrible movie because "audiences don't want to be lectured about how they or their tastes are congruent to the villain." These people often insist that their base fandoms are, more often than not, really nice people who don't promote retaliatory tactics on the regular.
However, I've been in enough fandoms to realize that a lot of fandoms do engage or, at the very least, promote retaliatory tactics. Star Wars fans have historically been pretty snide towards new developments in the stories - for the longest time, they didn't like how increasingly banal and fanfictiony the Extended Universe novels got; then it was how utterly preoccupied the Prequel Trilogy was with its sociopolitical discourse and its discussion of how fascism rises from manipulated democracies; and then it was on how much the Disney films copy-cat the Original Trilogy. Star Wars has always had plot points mirrored from the OT - every hero often has a Luke Skywalker-type of start, where he's just another farm boy on another deserted planet looking to go beyond the binary sunset; every villain is a retread on some element of Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, and the Emperor; every plucky rogue-turned-hero is some variation of Han Solo or Lando Calrissian or Chewbacca or whoever. To make things even worse, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope copycatted Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress and about a hundred different sci-fi serials, with maybe a dash of that Doctor Who mysticism because George Lucas probably watched three minutes of Jon Pertwee using a sonic screwdriver to open up a brewski for a reprogrammed Dalek while channel-surfing during one of his days off from filming American Graffiti. Disney's doing nothing new here.
From what I can gather from my viewing of The Last Jedi, it's by and large a deconstruction of all of the elements Star Wars has copycatted from other sources and from itself, alongside outwardly mocking JJ Abrams' mystery box style of writing. Rey isn't the Skywalker or Solo or Kenobi or Jinn descendant we've come to expect from all our Extended Universe protagonists, but rather some random girl sold to junkers so her parents could get a couple of Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters with extra original KFC spice from the Immortal Galactic Demi-Demon Colonel Sanders himself...who just happened to have a higher-than-usual count of midichlorians in her blood (which allow her to tap into the Force - note: midichlorians don't create the Force). Poe isn't the hotshot pilot who's secretly a genius - he's actually a tactician who doesn't know what he's doing, gets half of the Resistance killed, and tries to throw a mutiny over not being told by Holdo that her obvious retreat plan is a retreat plan. In other words, he's a hotshot in the negative sense. Finn and Rose aren't the secret big damn heroes we need to save the day, but just more soldiers who think they're doing important things (and their important action is designed to be as unimportant as possible - wreaking havoc on Canto Bight and giving some much-needed hope to a group of child slaves who also happen to be Force-sensitives) and ultimately almost get the Resistance destroyed. DJ isn't Han Solo or Lando, but rather Lando if he wasn't sorry for throwing Han under the bus at Cloud City - it's just business. And Luke isn't the plucky farm boy dreaming of going beyond that binary sunset - he's seen some things, to put it mildly. He's not even a wise mentor, but rather a bitter sarcastic old man who drinks his blue milk and locked himself out of the Force after screwing up big-time with the kid who'd later become Kylo Ren.
Get it?
A big criticism people have with The Last Jedi is often how Kylo Ren's character has been read by some audiences to be a reflection of the fanbase as a whole. The fanbase does not like being compared to the childish, impulsive, destructive mess that is Kylo Ren. They often cite the battle where Rey and Kylo team up to fight Snoke's men as one of the few good moments of the film - as Mikey Neumann puts it in his excellent video essay on The Last Jedi, it explores the idea of a grey Jedi more than the Extended Universe novels and the character of Qui-Gon Jinn have. The fact that Kylo can fight for a seemingly beneficial good, but also still tap into his negative energy to give him motivation (i.e. using the Dark Side alongside the Light Side) shows that there can be balance within warriors that use the Force. You don't have to be a fascist hitman like Darth Vader nor be a goody-good afraid of getting emotionally invested in his fights like Obi-Wan Kenobi to use the Force effectively - as long as you use the Force, and you use it right, and you don't mess it up, it works. It just works.
But I don't want to just talk about Kylo being a grey Jedi. I want to talk about the fact that he is impulsive, he is selfish, he is manipulative, and he is entitled. This is a guy who's big iconic scene in The Force Awakens isn't him unsheathing his cross-bladed lightsaber, but him talking to somebody about continuing their legacy - only to reveal that he's blabbering about this to Darth Vader's mutilated mask. He views himself as the inheritor of everything awesome about the Force - namely, the Dark Side and Darth Vader's sheer power. In a weird way, you can read that as how some fans have actually looked up to Darth Vader/Anakin as a guy with good intent, but overall terrible praxis. A man who realizes that being a self-abnegating goody-good isn't beneficial, but rather achieving his own desires - that's the core of who Anakin is. In other words, Vader does things for himself. Not exactly a great way to completely dummy out the Jedi Order, so what does he do? Join with the Empire - the space fascists. He's fighting for his personal desires while also helping out the guys who just want to screw over everything in the galaxy while also inspiring thousands of fans to engage in the "Empire did nothing wrong, the Jedi are basically space terrorists" thought game.
I've seen this a lot in most contemporary fandoms, where the protagonists are seen as some sort of hinderance or, at the very least, "lame." It saddens me to see people buy into this party line that they don't feel like any of their attributes, especially in regards to fandom culture, should be deconstructed lest a negative side be shown. How else are people going to better themselves? You have a film that tries to restore hope into Star Wars out of all things and all people are wondering is "when are they going to reveal Finn as a Force-sensitive?" I'm all for that idea - the fact that Finn can operate a lightsaber without blasting his hand off by accident AND the fact that he had an awakening when the First Order killed Max Von Sydow's Jedi straggler despite all of the Stormtrooper brainwashing and conditioning does hint that there is something about his character that hints at him being somewhat connected to the Force - but saying that prematurely revealing Finn as a Force-sensitive is admirable to implying that Kylo Ren is a satirical-in-the-serious-sense look at how Star Wars fans have reacted to change within the fandom (to the point where George Lucas sold off Lucasfilm and Lucasarts just because making Star Wars isn't fun to him anymore) is like having all of your priorities out of order.
Another complaint usually revolves around the characters of Holdo and Rose. The common complaint - the one I've seen a lot in alt-right and MGTOW circles - is that they're only in there to up the quota for female characters. However, I've seen "legitimate criticism" regarding those characters and their usefulness to the story. Don't get me wrong - I'm not talking about how Holdo, in comparison to her characterization in the novelization of The Last Jedi, is kinda bare-bones outside of being Leia's stand-in and Poe's nemesis, or how Rose can be a bit on the Genki-girl side to the point of Manic Pixie Dream Girl territory, but rather the criticism that Holdo and Rose don't have any use in the plot.
Except they obviously do.
Holdo is supposed to be everything Poe hates: she's new, she's in charge, and she rightfully calls Poe's plan to hit the First Order back irresponsible because it is. Poe killed half of the Rebellion via his hotheadedness. Of course Holdo's going to be skeptical of whatever new idea he has cooking - in that case, she has more than every right to withhold detailed information regarding the specifics of the retreat after hearing rumblings of Poe possibly holding a mutiny if he doesn't get his way AND that he's sent two greenhorns (a greenhorn and a former Stormtrooper) into unfamiliar territory in order to get a codebreaker to steal whatever program the First Order is using on their Star Destroyers to track the Rebellion ships through hyperspace. Poe is banking everything on this espionage operation that's doomed to fail - if that doesn't show the immaturity of Poe Dameron, then I don't know what would. So Holdo's in the right. As far as the "test of character" goes and how Leia lets Poe off the hook, Holdo realizes that Poe is slowly realizing that, given the length of time regarding the espionage operation (it's taken Finn and Rose a bit too long to come back with DJ), maybe his plan wasn't a good idea and that he's a bit impulsive. In other words, he's the Rebellion version of Kylo Ren - he wants so hard to be like the heroes of the past, but he doesn't possess any of Luke and Obi-Wan's restraint. He's similar to Han Solo in that regard - a rogue who's on the side of the Rebellion - but remember that Han Solo was sold out by Lando just so the latter could keep Cloud City out of Empire control...and subsequently frozen in carbonite so Jabba the Hutt could keep him as his mantlepiece keepsake and conversation starter ("hey, remember that time I bought Han Solo frozen in steel? man, that was awesome").
The problem people have with Rose is that she's too chipper, despite being designed to be a Genki girl through and through, and that all the stuff she does with Finn doesn't do anything of note.
A Genki girl is supposed to be chipper. They're supposed to be bubbling with all this positive energy. Saying that a Genki girl needs to tone it down is like saying that for Saints Row the Third to work as a good game, Professor Genki needs to be dead serious, like he's the Ellen Ripley of super deadly game shows/glorified target practice minigames. It doesn't make sense if Rose weren't always looking on the bright side of life - even her corny line about fighting for hope ties into that. She's always rationalizing something in a positive light, even as she's lying on the ground, possibly dying. Also, Canto Bight has thematic connections to the story - it shows how the Extended Universe's reliance on keeping all Force-sensitives within established Force-sensitive families (namely the Skywalkers and Kenobis) has effectively limited the Force to a mere hereditary power. The existence of the kids at Canto Bight and the fact that one of them shows off minor Force control opens up the possibility to be a Force-sensitive. It stops the gatekeeping of leaving most Force-sensitives within Skywalker and Kenobi kin. If anything, it adds to the possibility of both Finn and Rose being Force-sensitives and helps explain that - high midichlorian counts aren't inherited, but rather random. Like everything in life. If the Force is connected to all life, wouldn't it make more sense for the Force to be in all life when it sees fit? It also recontextualizes how much of a miracle kid Anakin was - this nobody from an unremarkable slave family...and he has all of these powers that even he can't comprehend. Two people from all the way on that big planet with the city all over it - they show to him that he's not the only one with these powers.
And another thing: Canto Bight is designed to be a critique on the military-industrial complex and war profiteering. It's pretty much a theme from the Prequel Trilogy - the idea that wars can be engineered in order to gain some sort of economic advantage (i.e. all of that hubbub regarding the trade deals in The Phantom Menace), which, in the case of this whole thing, might as well be true. In that case, Kylo Ren and Rey's own doubts regarding the validity of what they're fighting for are elaborated on - the First Order and the Rebellion are nothing more than puppets by weapons manufacturers blowing all their big bucks on craps and the space horse tracks. It screams out loud that their ideological wars aren't so much about ideology - no, scratch that. It's about an ideology. The ideology of the almighty dollar. Or Galactic credit. Or whatever Harvey Korman pays Bea Arthur to pour whiskey down that big hole in his head. If the First Order and the Rebellion are under the control of greed, then what does that make Kylo Ren and Rey? The last Jedi. They're the ones still fighting for that big capital-C Cause. They don't care about stoking a war economy to line the pockets of PMC and getting Space Liquid Ocelot to fight Space Old Snake on top of a Space Outer Haven over space memes - they're fighting for what they believe is right. And what brings Kylo down is that he still fights for domination. He still fights for that gatekeeping. He still fights for the puppetmaster, albeit this time, he wants to be the puppetmaster. He wants control. Rey wants everybody to be a Jedi. Anybody who can tap into some element of the Force - they're all more than welcome to join. No kidnapping kids to be Jedi younglings now. Rey wants to continue, for lack of a better term, hope that the fandom can be better for everybody.
So in a weird way, Rose's dumb line about hope ties into what Rey is fighting for and what Kylo isn't.
Chapter 3: The One Where I Reiterate the Whole Thing in Case if You Didn't Get It the First Time
And people just wanna throw that all away because a film told them that being greedy is bad and that the fandom's current shape is in total shambles after what's transpired over the past 30 years? Like, are deconstuctions too harsh for people now? If that's the case, we need more episodes like "White Bear" and more movies like The Last Jedi that expose even more of our societal morés that we should've abandoned years ago. The entire point is that you see yourself in the villains and you desire to change. That's the entire point of satire, whether intentionally funny or intentionally serious. People don't want to be Lonesome Rhodes, the exploitative TV show host/political pundit/Secretary for National Morale. People want to be Sheriff Andy Taylor, the kind-hearted friendly and courteous sheriff of Mayberry and the ideal of what a cool cop should be - not this Mark Fuhrman or Dirty Harry nonsense. Dirty Harry's too loose-cannon and unpredictable and Mark Fuhrman was racist enough that he destroyed the validity of the OJ Simpson case alongside the LAPD's already piss-poor reputations as nothing but mercenaries for those lucky enough to live in Brentwood. Oh, no, some blue-collar black dude's driving a bit tipsy on the road! Quick! We gotta beat the wits out of him until he's near death! And when push comes to shove and we have to put our police boys on trial, we'll just let them off so they can continue policing! What a wonderful idea! I'm sure that'll improve your own public image! Everybody will be singing the praises of the cops that beat up Rodney King and got away with it!What I'm trying to impart to you is that sometimes, criticism can be a bit insincere, especially when it comes to deconstruction. Simply throwing away pieces of media because they tell you that you're going about this the wrong away and then coming up with some vague criticism that tries to tie in with some flaws about whatever you're criticizing but more or less just comes back to you not liking the deconstruction makes art shallow.
In layman's terms, just give the damn
Addendum(b):
And another thing: you guys don't even like nu metal and prog rock not because they're all run by white men - rock music and country are in general - and because they're mainstreamy and bombast (Led Zeppelin is that in general), but because they're foreign, weird, new and offer some sort of diversity of the rock playing field. Nu metal has minorities playing the instruments, rap guys offering big jokes on how most rock frontmen are balls of toxic masculinity, and lyrics about legitimate abuse and bullying that the singers suffered. Prog rock has weirdo compositions that sound like upbeat rock versions of what Brian Wilson was doing from 1965-73, wacky electronic instruments, and lip service to classical composers in a genre whose big rallying cry is Chuck Berry whining about how he can't play the piano because his sister's hogging it to practice "Fur Elise."
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