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 fictional 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]

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 interactive 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 storytelling 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 producers could only dream about (D’Argenio, 2018). These factors might have been why Charlie Brooker was interested in turning 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 creators 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 experience”. 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 “viewers” 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 current 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. (2008, p. 12)

Exactly ten years after the release of Shaul’s book, Bandersnatch brought the interactive movie or hyper-narrative interactive cinema back to public promi- nence, and whether it was able to succeed in the ways Saul states others had failed is one of the central questions this chapter seeks to explore. Perron said in his rather dismissive analysis of the genre that “It is certainly not the film or the narrative part that is worth examining” (2003, p. 239), but this chapter argues that Bandersnatch is worthy of further critical study for both of these elements as well as its status as the 20th instalment in the Black Mirror franchise.

“It’s still a game though, yeah?” Given the context we have established then, it might be regarded as fitting that Bandersnatch is indeed set in the 1980s, in 1984 to be precise. The era is an evocative one for many and Bandersnatch offers an authentic recreation down to period accurate 1980s cereal packets, shop logos, clothes, cars, music, computers, and even money, all of which contribute towards a nostalgia for the era which has been pervasive during the second decade of the new millennium. Thematically, however, the decision to set the film in the 1980s is primarily connected to the fledgling years of the video games industry as the plot follows an aspiring young programmer called Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) and his desire to create a video game based on a fantasy novel called Bandersnatch.4

3 As Brooker detailed in an interview for The Empire Film Podcast #348, the team used Twine software to initially design the branching narrative for Bandersnatch (Brooker, 2019). Twine is an open source software for the construction of interactive and non-liner stories. 4 In a process that has been frequently observed throughout this edited collection, the name “Bandersnatch” had been included as an Easter Egg in a previous video gamed theme episode of Black Mirror, “Playtest”, featured on the front cover of a magazine in the review section which CHANGE YOUR PAST, YOUR PRESENT, YOUR FUTURE? INTERACTIVE… 275

Bandersnatch provides us with the first of many opportunities to determine the outcome of the narrative when Stefan is asked by his father which breakfast cereal he wants to eat (Sugar Puffs or Frosties) and subsequently what music he chooses to listen to (the Thompson Twins or Now 2). These inconsequential decisions—made using either a touch-screen device, cursor, or a television remote control—also enable interactors to become accustomed to the interactive element in what closely resembles an in-game tutorial. Neither of the decisions have any real impact on the narrative going forward, but they establish that we are in control of Stefan’s choices, something which, as you might expect, goes unremarked upon by the main character in these initial scenes.5 These early scenes culminate in Stefan being offered the opportunity to make Bandersnatch on-site at the gaming development company Tuckersoft with the support of Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), a prodigiously successful programmer, but only if he can complete it promptly and in time for a potentially financially lucrative Christmas release date. Here, the choices presented are either accept or decline, and one might imagine that Bandersnatch wants us to prompt Stefan to accept the offer given how desperately he wants to get his game made. Indeed, in January, about a month after the release of Bandersnatch Netflix released some statistics around a few of the choices, revealing that 73 per cent of interactors chose to accept the job offer (see Reilly, 2019). However, if you choose to do so, the game is streamlined by the company and it receives a review score of 0 stars out of 5 on a video games review television show. We are then provided with the video game equivalent of a “Game Over” screen returning Bandersnatch to its beginning with a quick montage of previous choices until Stefan reaches the point of his decision to accept or decline once more. However, during the montage, things are changed subtly with earlier conversations repeated and with Stefan, to his incredulity, seemingly somehow aware of the previous events of the first “play through”, just as a player would learn the necessary skills to complete a level of a video game after a few attempts. On its release, several reviewers of Bandersnatch were quick to comment on the intricacies concerning the relationship between Bandersnatch, video games and films. Writing forIGN , David Griffin notes, “Netflix is callingBandersnatch an “interactive movie,” however, it’s difficult to not associate it with video games…every decision you make creates new possibilities for your character” (2018). Likewise, for Simon Parkin, “a video game is a series of interesting choices; in many ways, the multi-branched story is the purest expression of that idea. “Bandersnatch” … demonstrates both the enduring allure of the format promised reviews of the game and also “Psyclapse” and “Miner Willy Meets the Taxman”. The inclusion of the game “Psyclapse” here and “Bandersnatch” itself provides an imbrication with reality that Black Mirror has often experimented with in the sense that they are the names of real- life games developed by Imagine Software (1982–1984) for the Commodore 64 and Spectrum 48k home computers. 5 The Shreddies or Frosties choice does come back later with an advert for the one chosen on screen presented in what might be read as Brooker’s sly jab and cookies and advertising. 276 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY and its exasperating limitations” (2019). These reviewers base their video game comparisons primarily on the film’s interactive element, which is perhaps understandable given that the interactive nature of gameplay is probably the most commonly perceived characteristic that distinguishes video games from other forms of media and cultural forms. This is one of the defining elements of the medium that Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern identify in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (2005). They note, “The ephemeral quality of gameplay, the experience of manipulating elements within a respon- sive, rule-driven world, is still the raison d’etre of games, perhaps the primary phenomenological feature that uniquely identifies the computer game as a medium” (2005, p. 643). In video games, how a player responds on a moment- to-moment basis has an immediate effect, thereby endowing the user with varying degrees of agency within the game world. As Bandersnatch continues, it charts not only the empathetic Stefan’s attempt to create the video game itself but also the precarious state of his mental health. After his father becomes increasingly worried about Stefan’s symp- toms, we are given the choice as to whether he should attend a session with his psychotherapist Dr Haynes (Alice Lowe) or not. Attending the session reveals details of Stefan’s foundational trauma, that his mother (Fleur Keith) died in a train accident when he was a child. Stefan feels partly responsible for her death due to his behaviour on the day, but he also blames his father who was tired of the young boy’s fixation with a stuffed toy and had hid it, which prompted Stefan’s refusal to accompany his mother, leading to her catching a later train, the one which was derailed and led to her death. 6 Additionally, his obsession with creating the game Bandersnatch is connected to his mother explicitly, as he found the book in her possessions after she died, and as it later implies, the interactive element he wishes to construct as a key part of the game is inti- mately connected to some of his own life choices, one of which, as we have already seen, inadvertently resulted in the death of his mother. If interactors had elected not to prompt Stefan to visit the doctor’s office, an act which is eventually made compulsory, Stefan is invited by the programmer Colin to his apartment where they discuss the video games medium before we are given a choice as to whether Stefan should take a recreational drug offered by Colin, with the options being yes or no. Not only is this a significant narrative choice but also for the first time inBandersnatch an ethical one, consider- ing we are now very much aware of Stefan’s mental health problems. As interactors, might it be the case that the choice is as difficult for us as it seems to be for Stefan? Choosing to instruct him to take the drug seems like the wrong path to take, but at the same time, it might result in the most interesting onscreen narrative developments, especially for the purposes of a show like Black Mirror where audiences anticipate and even perhaps hope to be shocked. However, once again the choice is taken out of our hands as regardless of what

6 It appears that this is a real event although later permutations of the game will challenge what it appears to be through his psychosis. CHANGE YOUR PAST, YOUR PRESENT, YOUR FUTURE? INTERACTIVE… 277 we choose, Stefan ends up taking the drugs anyway, as if you elect no, Colin spikes his drink. It is at this point interactors might seem to feel somewhat conflicted about how interactiveBandersnatch really is, with many of their decisions not having as much impact on the narrative as it progresses as they had expected. Yet this is so explicitly framed that there remains a lingering suspicion that it is Brooker’s own commentary on the limited nature of free will and agency within the medium itself. The sequence concludes with another very difficult choice to be made for interactors when Colin, under the influence of drugs, demands that either he or Stefan jump off the balcony to his apartment. This moment is both a striking and disturbing one. We are confronted with the decision to effectively kill off either the protagonist, who in ways beyond that of a traditional narrative film is us, or the engaging and charismatic Colin. If you elect Stefan to jump, he dies and the film comes to a blocked point in the narrative and a game over screen, whereas forcing Colin to take the leap makes Stefan wake up in the car on his way to see Dr Haynes, suggesting that the entire sequence might have been just a vivid hallucination. Once again, Bandersnatch presents us with the sem- blance of free will, but one which is strictly confined by the nature of the medium itself and as much as the praise for it focused on its innovative branching narrative (see Sims, 2018), it is perhaps more accurate to refer to it as what Ernest Adams and Andrew Rollings called “a foldback story” in their book Fundamentals of Game Design (2007) where they explored the various narrative strategies employed by video game developers. They identify two primary modes of storytelling: linear and nonlinear, with the latter further subdivided into branching narratives, foldback stories, and emergent narratives. Of par- ticular interest regarding Bandersnatch is the distinction that Adams and Rollings make between branching narratives and foldback stories, noting “foldback stories represent a compromise between branching stories and linear ones. In a foldback story the plot branches a number of times but eventually folds back to a single, inevitable event” (Adams & Rollings, 2007, p. 227), meaning that while there are several routes for the player, they will eventually reach, or repeatedly return to, a singular defining moment in the narrative that must be acknowledged in some way to proceed. Adams and Rollings go on to state that “foldback stories offer players agency but in more limited amounts. The player believes that his decisions control the course of event, and they do at times, but he cannot avoid certain events no matter what he does” (2007, p. 227 empha- sis added). Significantly, what Adams and Rollings have inadvertently described here bears a strong resemblance to the temporal logic of trauma and this is perhaps fitting given Stefan’s fractured mental state and the tendency ofBlack Mirror itself to return to trauma as one of its central thematic motifs. According to Cathy Caruth in her widely read study of trauma, Unclaimed Experience (1995), trauma is “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (p. 91). Caruth argues that an individual repeatedly returns to the site of a traumatic 278 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY event as a means of attempting to obtain a sense of mastery over the past. For those who undergo a traumatic event, such repetitive behaviour disrupts our common perception of time as a linear flow from past to present in favour of the cyclical experience of traumatic memory. She suggests “a traumatic event cannot be ‘assimilated’ or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (p. 4), which seems like a strikingly accurate description of what happens not just to Stefan, but us interactors who experience the narrative choices of Bandersnatch, often whether we want to or not. In Bandersnatch, Stefan repeatedly returns to his memory of the moments leading up to his mother’s death because he remains perpetu- ally caught in the wake of a traumatic loss that he is unable to overcome and which he is compelled to continuously return, sometimes of his own volition and sometimes because of the interactive nature of the project, that is the choices made by us interactors. This memory reoccurs at several points throughout Bandersnatch but is initially recalled by Stefan during a session with Dr Haynes. Here, a series of flashbacks reveal a younger Stefan to be frantically searching for his favourite stuffed animal minutes before he is due to leave with his mother. She mentions that they will be late and asks Stefan if he is going to join her. At this point, Brooker’s commentary on the nature of free will in the medium becomes its most explicit as when this choice is offered, simultaneously to Stefan and indeed to us, it is presented with only one option rather than two for the first and only time throughout Bandersnatch as instead of a “Yes” or “No” selection, the only “choice” available is “No”. Fittingly, given it is connected to foundational trauma, Stefan is unable to change the past and neither are we. Within the confines of the diegesis, Dr Haynes makes this explicit when she remarks, “The past is immutable Stefan. No matter how painful it is, we can’t change things. We can’t choose differently with hindsight. We all have to learn to accept that”. Yet this notion also extends to the interactor and their experiences with Bandersnatch who is unable to undo their choices throughout without restart- ing the whole thing. What Bandersnatch does, and it is something that might well frustrate those experiencing it, is to offer a correlation between interactors and protagonist in ways which transcend linear narratives and indeed the cinematic medium in some intriguing ways. As Shaleph O’Neill observes in his Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction (2008), a successful interactive movie “transforms the way we think about telling stories” (p. 93) and an immersion in Bandersnatch might well do this. That is to say that the film’s interactive element effectively mimics the repetitive structure of trauma and, in doing so, offers a unique insight into Stefan’s masochistic relationship with the past. Writing for The New Yorker, Simon Parkin suggests that the design of Bandersnatch “offers an antidote to regret” (2019) by endowing us with the omniscient ability to seek out and choose a different path: “There are few such chances in life”, he says, “where we live with our choices and their repercussions”. CHANGE YOUR PAST, YOUR PRESENT, YOUR FUTURE? INTERACTIVE… 279

This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in one sequence that finally allows us to revisit the traumatic event itself. On this occasion, unlike Stefan’s initial recall of this memory with Dr Haynes, when his mother reaches out to her infant son and asks if he wants to come with her, we are now presented with a choice between two options: to allow Stefan to follow his mother, and perhaps die with her, or say no and force him to relive the pain and suffering inflicted by her death. If Stefan goes with his mother, the train inevitably crashes and they both die, but if we decline her offer, Stefan wakes as if from a nightmare. In a range of reviews of Bandersnatch, several commentators seemed to consider the former option as the film’s preferred ending because it is thematically connected to the interactor’s experience of the narrative and also seemed to fit most closely to the parameters of what we have come to expect from what we might refer to as “the Black Mirror experience”. Kyle Turner, for example, remarked that: “What feels significant aboutthis ending is that it makes the rest of the experience … make sense” (2018, original empha- sis), going on to note that “Grief and trauma are a maze, an unending journey that feels like bumping into dead ends, a series of challenges without guidance, a feeling of complete displacement in a world where everyone else seems to know their path”. In this instance, Stefan’s suicide is a viable narrative alterna- tive because it affords a form of closure, for him and us, that otherwise remains illusory for the victim of trauma. Yet, according to the statistics released by Netflix, this narrative thread was the “path least travelled” (see Reilly, 2019), but this is perhaps unsurprising given that this ending was also the “hardest to find” (Strauss, 2019). By this point in the narrative of Bandersnatch, the interactor has guided the plot through many of its reputed “millions of permutations” (Reynolds, 2018), the creation of which Brooker suggested had even caused him a not inconsiderable amount of anxiety during an The Empire Film Podcast #348 when he commented that writing it was “a bit like trying to play Tetris [1984] with scripts in your head” (Brooker, 2019). Just as importantly Stefan has become more and more aware of his status as a character in some sort of narrative and that his decisions are not his own. In a visit to Dr Haynes, the interactor is provided with the seemingly innocuous choice as to whether to make Stefan bite his nails or pull his earlobe. In an ostentatious display of what is commonly referred to as breaking the fourth wall, for the first time in the narrative Stefan surprising elects to reject our command no matter what we choose. With his newfound awareness or at least a growing suspicion that he is fictional, Stefan joins the list of characters in entertainment media who are possessed with a similar ability. These have tended to be divided into three groups: those who use it to comment on the narrative in which they are a part, most often comedically, in films likeAnnie Hall (1977) where Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) asks the audience “What do you do when you get stuck in a movie line with a guy like this behind you?”, or when Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) chides the audience at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day 280 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY

Off (1986) with “You’re still here? It’s over go home!”, or Deadpool (2016) when the eponymous character (Ryan Reynolds) offers a metatextual commentary on his previous role as a superhero, “Please don’t make the super- suit green! Or animated!” The second group are those characters who break the fourth wall to address the audience in a moment of truthful intimacy providing an insight into their motivations, like Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) in House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–2018) or Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) at the end of Vice (2018).7 The final group, which Stefan from Bandersnatch belongs to, are those who learn that they are fictional during the course of the narrative in a process which can be, quite understandably, a traumatic one, like Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), who steps off the cinema screen in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), or Harold Crick (Will Ferrell), who learns he is the character in a novel in Stranger than Fiction (2006).8 What could be more traumatic than learning that you are fictional? Perhaps learning you are an AI as in “White Christmas”? Or learning you are a clone of yourself placed inside a video game as in “USS Callister” (04.01)? Or that you are trapped inside a sadistic reality TV show that repeats everyday as in “White Bear” (02.02)? After this visit to his doctor, Bandersnatch pursues this angle more explicitly coinciding these developments with Stefan’s exacerbating mental health problems and trauma. In what is perhaps the most memorable scene in the whole of Bandersnatch, Stefan directly calls out to us interactors beyond the frames of the screen, asking for some sort of sign to prove that we, not he, exist. Depending on your previous choices, you can select either the Netflix logo or a symbol reminiscent of the one first seen in “White Bear” and again in “Black Museum” (04.06). If you select the Netflix logo, you are forced to engage with Stefan and decide how far we wish to explain to him that even though he thinks he is a “real” person living in London in 1984, he is actually the protagonist of an interactive film produced by Netflix in 2018, leading Stefan to memorably ask “What the fuck is Netflix?” Thus, this and the other strategies Bandersnatch has employed which might be regarded as a “direct address”, which rather than necessarily being a distancing device as they are commonly understood to be, might in fact as Tom Brown, in his Breaking the Fourth Wall (2012) suggested, actually “enrich our appreciation of the fiction and the characters” (p. 18).

7 This second group is actually something of the reverse of what happens in Bandersnatch. In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked Kevin Spacey who he was talking to in those moments and the actor answered “Donald Trump”, Colbert’s answer to his own question was “The person you’re actually talking to of course are people on a ten-hour Netflix binge, sucking on boxed wine” (qtd. in THR Staff, 2015) 8 In Steven Knight’s Serenity (2019), the fisherman and part-time gigolo Baker Dill (Matthew McConaughey) learns that he is a character in a video game. CHANGE YOUR PAST, YOUR PRESENT, YOUR FUTURE? INTERACTIVE… 281

Game Over? Bandersnatch has multiple endings to its narrative and interactors are left to explore them in repeated “play throughs” if they wish, none of which appear to be any more legitimate than the other. As the director Slade suggested, “The question really becomes: how do you get away from a dominant reading because the idea of a dominant reading is really antithetical to the plot” (qtd. in Reynolds 2018). In one ending the whole narrative is revealed to be taking place on a movie set akin to The Truman Show (1998); in another, Stefan goes to prison for murdering his father and the game is never released. The final and most elaborate ending, and perhaps one that is most in keeping with the series overall, and certainly its most “meta”, involves a contemporary news report informing us that the game was released to widespread acclaim but then with- drawn from sale after it was discovered that Stefan killed his father. The report describes how Colin Ritman’s daughter Pearl (Laura Evelyn) decided to remake the experience and release it on an unnamed streaming service with the impli- cation that this is the product we have been experiencing ourselves. In fact, the decision tree we see her mapping out is an exact replica of the ones we have made for Stefan and even footage from our Bandersnatch can be seen on her computer. This moment offers us the last choice for us as interactors, throw tea over the computer or destroy it, but neither of our choices produce a result as the screen fades to black no matter our decision. As Russell McLean, a producer on Bandersnatch, noted “you think you’re choosing your ending, but are you? Black Mirror is choosing your ending” (Streitfeld, 2018). Bandersnatch is a logical extension of the Black Mirror universe not just in the way it is connected to how video games are influencing our culture explored in “Fifteen Million Merits” and “Playtest”, but also in its representation of trauma and how new technologies might be able to exacerbate problems rather than help them as in “The Entire History of You” (01.03). It was widely praised on its release but also criticised by some, writers like Matt Hills suggested that it was “significantly limited” in its portrayal of trauma and mascu- linity (Hills, 2019) and the nature of the choices that interactors are invited to make. Brooker himself seemed aware that the format would not be for everyone, as he reflected on in an interview withThe Huffington Post, “There’s also some people that are like ‘I don’t wanna make decisions’, ‘I don’t want to do any of it’… well fuck off, then. Do something else! And then there’s some people who think ‘oh, it’s too simple as a game’ or ‘games have done this before’—well this isn’t on a gaming platform, it’s on Netflix” (qtd. in Welsh, 2019). Whether Bandersnatch succeeded on these terms or in those offered by writers like Perron and Shaul is ultimately up to those who experienced it as interactors to decide, as Todd Yellin, the VP of product at Netflix, said, “In five years, 10 years, we’ll either say, ‘Wow, Black Mirror was a real turning point for interactive content’, or we’ll be going, ‘That was another false start’” (qtd. in Streitfeld, 2018). What the future holds for interactive movies like Bandersnatch, perhaps rather ironically then, is up to us. 282 T. MCSWEENEY AND S. JOY

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