eulogy

I'm a pretty big Black Mirror fan so I was super excited when the latest season hit Netflix the other week. Charlie Brooker can do little wrong in my eyes, but I was surprised to see a lot of negative criticism about the new episodes. The only one that people seemed to really care about was Episode 1, Common People. And don't get me wrong, it was great, and I love to see an Irish man in a lead role, but I was shocked that there wasn't more commotion over Episode 5, Eulogy. 

Maybe it's because I love Paul Giamatti, but more likely it's because this episode ticked so many boxes of the facets of my interests that it was the real standout for me. The premise of the episode is that Phillip's (Giamatti) estranged ex-girlfriend has passed away and in the future dystopian way that only Black Mirror could pull off, he is invited to use some new technology that will access his memories of their time together in order for her family to construct a memorial for her. He is sent out a little box with a device to plug into the side of his head, and prompted by what we are lead to believe is an AI companion to revisit his memories. "Close your eyes and picture her face", the companion asks. Phillip tries this, but struggles to form a clear picture. Of course it doesn't take long after this for photographs to be mentioned and this is where my interest piqued. Photographs and memory, memory and photographs. They go together like salt and pepper, ketchup and mustard, Ant and Dec. One cannot escape the other and this episode demonstrated a really interesting approach to that. 

The device plugged into the side of Phillip's head also allows him to close his eyes and literally step into his memories once triggered by the photographs. Here memory is presented as static at first, but as his mind begins to fill in some blanks and he steps forward into the image, my eyes grew large. I almost felt emotional as I saw something which I had been thinking about for years appear in front of me. The visual of a photograph or memory existing as a lifesize, 3D world which a person can walk through and navigate. I touched on it here when I spoke about my sketches of 'dream dioramas', but it felt kind of unreal to see that kind of visual understanding represented here (even if it felt a little bit like I was being beaten to the punch on making work like this). 

As we are taken on this journey of remembering,  we learn more of Phillip's heartbreak and rage over the years. We see that he has destroyed some of the photographs of his ex, Carol. Even though he has scribbled over or punched holes through her face in every single photograph he has of her, he never actually seems to have felt disconnected enough to discard the images completely. As I think about all of this, I'm reminded me of something Brian Dillon writes in his book In the Dark Room, about how memory is sometimes a failure of preservation, how even our most precious images and recollections can crumble under the weight of what we feel about them. Watching Phillip move through those damaged scenes, and seeing the scratches and gouges reappear as physical wounds across the landscape of his recollection just felt so close to how memory actually functions when it’s marred by loss or absence. 

It’s not just images themselves that carry our memories, but the things that we project onto them. At a later point in the episode, Phillip struggles to fully recall a memory from a photograph, and his AI companion suggests adding some music to help deepen the memory. As the music plays, the landscape of his memory begins to fill itself in in real time. It’s not just a photograph that holds memory intact, it’s the emotion that runs alongside it. Memory needs feeling in order to take shape. Without it, the image alone is just a surface waiting for the mind to colour it in. As I write this now, it makes so much sense that music keeps coming up in posts here and there across my blog. Whether I’m writing about dreams, about photographs, about memory, sound seems to be another way of reaching deeper into these things. Music, like photographs, seems to act as both a trigger and a vessel for remembering.

I think too, about my own absence of photographs when it comes to certain figures in my life, most of all my biological father. By my own choice, and one I do indeed still stand to, there is no album to leaf through, no half-torn photographs to tape back together. Just a kind of mental blur that no technology could ever sharpen or rescue. In my project Back Into Your Mind, I was trying to build something out of that absence, to draw attention to the blanks, to show how we can be shaped just as much by what we've chosen to forget as what we can remember. Watching Eulogy, it struck me again how the spaces where faces should be, whether scratched out or never captured at all, are just as full of emotion as the ones where time is perfectly preserved.

It feels important to acknowledge, when talking about this episode, that Phillip has carried a deep resentment for his ex, Carol, for many years. We learn that his desire to control her, and his inability to manage his own emotions during their time together, led to his self-imposed downfall. His slow-burning anger seems like something that might have been avoided, if he hadn’t been so quick to jealousy, so rash in his assumptions. And then, of course, we get that classic Black Mirror twist: his AI companion turns out to be Carol’s daughter, who has just sat through this whole replay of memories where he so often spoke poorly of her mother. Carol had written Phillip a letter, one he didn’t even realise he’d kept, and they read it together. In the end, we see that so much of his bitterness was built on misunderstandings. That’s the kind of emotional resolution Black Mirror is so good at delivering, and it’s where this story feels satisfying and resolved for those who came for a good story. And that is partly me, but what I’m really left with is a mess of thoughts I want to keep following, to keep unfolding, even beyond what I’ve started to write down here.

This episode is a strange little confirmation and affirmation that the visual language I'm beginning to build (albeit for now, just in my in head) about photography, music, memory, feelings, would be understood if I explored them in this way. It helped me further understand why music is starting to become so important in the bigger picture of things I'm interested in. And it was really, really good TV. Now I just have to battle with the voice in my head that keeps saying "they've already done it in Black Mirror, so why bother?". We'll see how that goes.