Black Mirror: Bandersnatch
2018-Dec-29, Saturday 10:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Since this just came out, spoilers:
I tagged this video games, because the first thing I said after we started watching and I heard about the choices was:
Anyway, that was a smaller twist than those in Bandersnatch's storyline.
You may remember the early to mid 90s, where video games had a massive inferiority complex about their relationship to movies. Often this was just using live actors for cutscenes instead of in-game graphics, but some game designers thought that the closer they could get to movies, the better their games would be, so they made what were basically interactive movies. Actors would act out the plot and every once in a while, the player could make a choice. That's what Bandersnatch was, but the secret advantages it had over all those FMV games is that 1) It didn't have to fit on a CD and 2) They had the budget to hire the best actors they could.
Before yesterday I had never seen an episode of Black Mirror, so the only thing I knew about it was the meme "What if X, but too much?" Bandersnatch was "What if predestination, but too much?"--while programming a branching-path adventure game, the protagonist becomes convinced he's in some sort of experiment where his actions are being controlled by external forces, leading to tragedy (by which I mean "murder"). At least, sometimes. The first death we reached was when we told the protagonist to jump off the balcony after he followed the brilliant but quirky programmer Colin home and they both took LSD, so when the movie rewound, we had Colin jump off instead. That turned into a dream, and when it rewound further back to the point where we chose to follow Colin originally, now we could only go into the psychiatrist's office.
The whole movie is like that, with branching paths, and some paths locked off unless you go down a dead end and get sent back. The most obvious one was the child death ending, where we were only able to open the safe and get Bunny out of it after we put in the password PAX and saw the demon, which revealed it to be a dream. The next run around we looked at the family photo instead of the game design book, which unlocked the option to put in the password TOY and find Bunny, which led to time travel shenanigans, which led to death.
I thought that the point of all the choices and rewinds--to go back in time and replace Bunny so that the protagonist's mother never took the late train and so never died. But the time travel ending convinced me I was wrong. This is what comes of never having seen Black Mirror and not realizing that there's no happy ending in store no matter what we do.
We never got the 5/5 ending, but we did get the 2.5/5 ending where the protagonist kills his father and is immediately discovered. We also got the ending where the psychiatrist asks the protagonist why, if his life is really a form of entertainment for some sort of future television program called "Netflix," isn't it more entertaining? Shouldn't it be more interesting? Between "Yes" and "Fuck Yeah," we picked the latter and then watched as the protagonist hurled tea in the psychiatrist's face, the psychiatrist grabbed two wakizashi from her desk, and they engaged in a martial arts duel. There's a full flowchart of all the choices and endings here if you're curious.
All this time, it turns out that the way to make FMV games work is to make them movies first and games second. If only we had figured this out 25 years ago.
I tagged this video games, because the first thing I said after we started watching and I heard about the choices was:
In the year of the Lord 5779, you called me here to play an FMV game?It was at the same place as the Ghost Story Reading with most of the same people, though in a twist one of the attendees was someone I went to high school with! Small world.
Anyway, that was a smaller twist than those in Bandersnatch's storyline.
You may remember the early to mid 90s, where video games had a massive inferiority complex about their relationship to movies. Often this was just using live actors for cutscenes instead of in-game graphics, but some game designers thought that the closer they could get to movies, the better their games would be, so they made what were basically interactive movies. Actors would act out the plot and every once in a while, the player could make a choice. That's what Bandersnatch was, but the secret advantages it had over all those FMV games is that 1) It didn't have to fit on a CD and 2) They had the budget to hire the best actors they could.
Before yesterday I had never seen an episode of Black Mirror, so the only thing I knew about it was the meme "What if X, but too much?" Bandersnatch was "What if predestination, but too much?"--while programming a branching-path adventure game, the protagonist becomes convinced he's in some sort of experiment where his actions are being controlled by external forces, leading to tragedy (by which I mean "murder"). At least, sometimes. The first death we reached was when we told the protagonist to jump off the balcony after he followed the brilliant but quirky programmer Colin home and they both took LSD, so when the movie rewound, we had Colin jump off instead. That turned into a dream, and when it rewound further back to the point where we chose to follow Colin originally, now we could only go into the psychiatrist's office.
The whole movie is like that, with branching paths, and some paths locked off unless you go down a dead end and get sent back. The most obvious one was the child death ending, where we were only able to open the safe and get Bunny out of it after we put in the password PAX and saw the demon, which revealed it to be a dream. The next run around we looked at the family photo instead of the game design book, which unlocked the option to put in the password TOY and find Bunny, which led to time travel shenanigans, which led to death.
I thought that the point of all the choices and rewinds--to go back in time and replace Bunny so that the protagonist's mother never took the late train and so never died. But the time travel ending convinced me I was wrong. This is what comes of never having seen Black Mirror and not realizing that there's no happy ending in store no matter what we do.
We never got the 5/5 ending, but we did get the 2.5/5 ending where the protagonist kills his father and is immediately discovered. We also got the ending where the psychiatrist asks the protagonist why, if his life is really a form of entertainment for some sort of future television program called "Netflix," isn't it more entertaining? Shouldn't it be more interesting? Between "Yes" and "Fuck Yeah," we picked the latter and then watched as the protagonist hurled tea in the psychiatrist's face, the psychiatrist grabbed two wakizashi from her desk, and they engaged in a martial arts duel. There's a full flowchart of all the choices and endings here if you're curious.
All this time, it turns out that the way to make FMV games work is to make them movies first and games second. If only we had figured this out 25 years ago.
