You don’t know what time it is on a given day. You sit in front of Netflix without knowing why. You browse through his catalog and suddenly come across an image that overwhelms you: it’s you. Come on, not you, an actress plays you, with the same looks as you. You play between curiosity and fear and things don’t get better: in fact, it’s your life, as Lydia Bosch would say in Motivos personales, life, that is in the air; a fiction that reproduces your avatars almost in real time. This is the premise of Joan Is Awful, the great first chapter of the final season of Black Mirror, a Matryoshka game with an integrated reflection on fiction, AI and the traffic of our privacy. From six characters looking for an author to one character looking for a platform to take responsibility.
Among the many reactions that comes from going undercover as a screenwriter, a very common one is that of those who believe their circumstances have a series. It’s happened to me at the bank, at the notary’s, to the point of falling asleep under anesthesia in the minutes before a colonoscopy. There’s a fine line between the understandable desire to be portrayed and the narcissistic need to see only one’s reflection. There are those who don’t want series, they want selfies.
“But be careful what you wish for,” replies Joan Is Awful, because the image returned by the mirror may not have a filter. The paradox is that with the time we spend in front of our screens, for many, the series would end up being that of a person sitting on a sofa in front of the TV and watching a person’s series on a sofa in front of the TV, and stuff further into aeternum . You want a series, okay, but what do you want to tell?
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