Interactive Narratives and Trauma in Bandersnatch (2018)
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Change Your Past, Your Present, Your Future? Interactive Narratives and Trauma in Bandersnatch (2018) Terence McSweeney and Stuart Joy INTRODUCTION For a television show that has often seemed to delight in shocking viewers since its very first episode in 2011, which, in case we needed reminding, featured the Prime Minister of Great Britain having carnal relations with a sus scrofa domes- ticus, Black Mirror saved one of its greatest surprises for 28 December 2018 with the release of the 20th instalment in the series, Bandersnatch, directed by David Slade. While two of its previous episodes had centred around video games: the highly regarded dystopian vision of gamification en masse, “Fifteen Million Merits” (01.02), and the horror-inflected augmented reality tale of “Playtest” (03.02), in an unexpected turn of events for both Netflix and the creator of Black Mirror, Charlie Brooker, Bandersnatch was not just about video games, it was one. Rumours about what would be the next addition to Black Mirror had begun to circulate earlier in 2018 with the leak of three significant and later revealed to be interconnected details. The first was that it was to be calledBandersnatch , with online commenters quickly speculating that it was named after the fic- tional creature created by English author Lewis Carroll (the pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), most famous, of course, for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), a beast which appeared in two of his poems “Jabberwocky”, included in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and later The Hunting of the T. McSweeney (*) • S. Joy Southampton Solent University, Southampton, UK e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 271 T. McSweeney, S. Joy (eds.), Through the Black Mirror, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19458-1_21 272 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY Snark (1876). The second piece of information was that Bandersnatch was to be set in the 1980s and thus would be another text to resonate with the current nostalgia for all things connected to the decade manifested in films likeSuper 8 (2011), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), It (2017), and Ready Player One (2018), and popular television shows like The Americans (FX, 2013–2018), The Goldbergs (ABC, 2013–), Netflix’s ownStranger Things (Netflix, 2016–), even Black Mirror’s award-winning “San Junipero” (03.04) “set” in 1987. The third, and perhaps most important detail, was that the project was intended to be not just an episode of the series, but a film and an interactive one at that, a largely neglected medium, which, quite fittingly, had initially become popular during the 1980s. Interactive movies, as they have most commonly been referred to, are a blend of video game and film, which had become possible with the invention of nonlinear playing devices in home entertainment such as laser disks, with notable early examples like Dragon’s Lair (Advanced Microcomputer Systems, 1983), Firefox (Atari, 1983), and Night Trap (Digital Pictures, 1987). Not coincidentally their rise coincided with the phenomenon of so-called interac- tive books, the most popular in the United States of America being the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series, which began with Edward Packard’s The Cave of Time (1979) and in the United Kingdom the “Fighting Fantasy gamebook” series in fondly remembered titles like The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (1982) by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston.1 While several prominent interactive movies had gained some success, as a medium they were never quite able to achieve mainstream status, being largely rejected by fans of video games as not being interactive enough, and by film enthusiasts as deviating too far from their own medium of choice. On this important distinction between games and films Bernard Perron observed, “It is not possible to tell a story by putting the sto- rytelling in the hands of the spectator. And the linearity of a story is going against the nonlinear nature of a game” (2003, p. 239). Therefore by 2003 Perron was quite correct to refer to the failure of the genre, if that is indeed what the interactive movie is, as “total” (2003, p. 239) with Daniel Ichbiah going even further by suggesting that the revival of the interactive movie would be greeted with “as much enthusiasm as an eruption of acne” (qtd. in Perron, 239). In the years since Perron and Ichbiah’s comments, the narrative style, if not the genre itself, had experienced something of a revival in the evolving medium of video games, with examples from developer Quantic Dream including Fahrenheit (2005), Heavy Rain (2010), Detroit: Becoming Human (2018), and several series of titles published by the company Telltale Games based around popular franchises: The Walking Dead (2012), Game of Thrones: A Telltale Games Series (2014) and Batman: The Telltale Series (2016). Each of these examples operates by the same narrative principle of an interactive movie, 1 Soon after the release of Bandersnatch, the publisher Chooseco sued Netflix for trademark infringement for using the phrase “Choose Your Own Adventure” (see Chmielewski, 2019). CHANGE YOUR PAST, YOUR PRESENT, YOUR FUTURE? INTERACTIVE… 273 where players have a variety of opportunities throughout the narrative to make choices which impact on the path the game then follows (see Hagebölling, 2004; O’Neill, 2008; Shaul, 2008). Since the comments dismissing interactive movies by Perron and Ichbiah, something else had changed, something which scholar Henry Jenkins (who contributes to this collection) called the emer- gence of a “participatory culture”, that is, one which “contrasts with older notions of passive media spectatorship” in his Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (2006, p. 3). The term “participatory culture” high- lights the myriad of ways in which contemporary audiences tend to regard themselves no longer as simply passive consumers of entertainment products and seem to possess an increasing desire to play a more active role in how they experience entertainment media: whether that might be how they watch it, how they comment on it, or even how it is funded. At the same time as this, as was widely reported throughout 2018, the games industry itself, even though it is widely regarded as not being as culturally important as other forms of media, now earns significantly more revenue globally than either the television industries ($105 billion), the box office returns of film releases ($41 billion), or digital music sales and rentals ($17 billion), with total earnings of games sales being a remarkable $116 billion, up 10 per cent from the previous year and projected to continue growing in ways television, film, and music produc- ers could only dream about (D’Argenio, 2018). These factors might have been why Charlie Brooker was interested in turn- ing to the medium of the interactive movie for Bandersnatch, a text which offers several challenges to those who engage with it and is as immersed in some of the defining fears and anxieties of the twenty-first century asBlack Mirror has been since its first episode. The first of these challenges might be said to come before we even switch on Netflix to accessBandersnatch on our televisions, laptops, tablets, or mobile phones. What are we supposed to call both it and those who interact with it? As it is not just an episode of Black Mirror, something which Netflix has recognised itself as it is not listed along- side the others on the streaming platform, nor is it a “special” as “White Christmas” (02.04) was called back in 2014. Instead Netflix considers it to be a film and this is how it is labelled, but even this term does not seem quite sat- isfactory.2 The difficulty of definingBandersnatch was something that the cre- ators of Black Mirror had an issue with too: in an interview for The New York Times conducted with Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones, Jones suggested that “It wasn’t really designed as a game. It was designed as a cinematic experi- ence”. But Brooker seemed to disagree adding that it had “game-y elements… You are making decisions. You are actively guiding it” but that ultimately, “I think some people will judge it just on a narrative basis, some people will judge it as a game… It’s not up to us. It’s down to them” (Streitfeld, 2018). For the 2 It should be noted here that Bandersnatch is not the first interactive movie on Netflix. In 2018, Minecraft: Story Mode (Telltale Games & Mojang, 2015–2016) and before that Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale (2017). 274 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY purposes of this volume, we will consider Bandersnatch as an example of “hyper-narrative interactive cinema” as Nitzan Ben Shaul defined the form in his Hyper-narrative Interactive Cinema: Problems and Solutions (2008). It is also to Shaul that we turn to for assistance with what we should call those who engage with Bandersnatch, as it does not seem quite right to call them “view- ers” because they do more than view, nor does it seem entirely correct to call them “gamers” as it does not offer quite enough interactivity to warrant calling it a game.3 In place of this, Shaul prefers the term “interactors” (2008, p. 15) and it is this accurate if not commonly used term we will use for the purposes of this chapter. Interestingly, Shaul is generally very critical of the examples of “hyper-narrative interactive cinema” which he explores. Indeed, he argues: For interactive hyper-narratives to sustain deep engagement rather than the cur- rent shallow distraction, hyper-narrative structures, interaction and audiovisual design should manage the multi-tasking split-attention problems these constructs engender and—most importantly—use this multi-tasking to enhance rather than reduce engagement.