Black Mirror - Allegory

 Black Mirror

Allegory is a narrative story that conveys a complex, abstract or difficult message. For example, Godzilla is a message about nuclear warfare

The episode of Black Mirror is an allegory of

• life and death
• a love story
• after life
• sexuality
• fear of dying - characters get over the fear by plugging their mind into a matrix
• how women are shown in the media
• mental health
• physical health
• PTSD/dealing with trauma/disassociation
• homophobia - Yorkie cannot be a lesbian as her family disapproves
• suicide and euthanasia
• identity
• caring for the elderly
• seductive power of narrative
• power of nostalgia
• social media - disassociation

Hyper-reality is a representation that is more real than the thing it is representing

How women are represented?

• how lesbians are represented?
• are the women sexualised?
• Romeo and Juliet story?

Assumes the audience is heteronormative

Closely associated to video games such as The Sims, which provides escapism in a hyper-realistic world

Explore how a combination of media language is used to create meaning in both the Black Mirror episode San Junipero and The Returned (30 marks)

Roland Barthes - Semiotics

• semiotics are the study of meaning
• connotations and denotations - the deeper meaning of media language (connotations) and the surface meaning (denotation)
• symbolic code - something that symbolises something else, with a deeper meaning (e.g Tuckers is lit with red and blue lighting with symbolises bisexuality
• proairetic code - foreshadowing, also known as action codes, implies something else will happen later (e.g Yorkie sitting on the rooftop suggests her suicidal intent although she chooses not to jump; )
• hermeneutic code - an enigma code, something that asks a question of the audience, that will be answered later. This keeps the audience engaged. For example, will Yorkie and Kelly get together, but also 'what is reality'?
• referential codes - intertextuality. Songs from a variety of films are used to construct intertextual relay and to construct meaning
• the function of myths - a traditional story that imparts a moral. We structure our understanding of the world of narratives

Claude Levi-Strauss - Structuralism

• structuralism says everything has a structure or system
• binary oppositions - a way of understanding the world through two concepts being presented in direct opposition of one another. For example, shy, nerdy Yorkie is a binary opposition of Kelly
• binary oppositions construct narratives