Fade in.
Gentle waves, tinted with pale, orange and purple shadows, caress a nocturnal beach. Transition. The shadow-caster comes into focus: a distant, seaside town, night lights crawling upward in search of flat land, mourning the passage over sea. Cut. Club district: streets vibrant with life, but ghostly in every other way. A Lost Boys poster rules over the midtown kingdom of washed out neon and youthful exuberance as Yorkie drifts, faintly disoriented, to the window of an electronics shop, quizzically beckoned by the antics of Max Headroom. Belinda Carlisle drives past on a sports car’s radio, loving in the key of E major, her bright and playful vibes crashing unsettlingly against the scene’s ambient, melancholy backdrop of musical and visual chords. Welcome to San Junipero.
Yorkie stumbles into the arcade room of a local club. She inserts a quarter and the machine Bubble Bobbles to life. An ambitious suitor approaches, frizzy-haired and bespectacled; only a bow tie would complete the package. A cloud of awkwardness descends upon the scene. “It’s got different endings, depending on if you’re in one or two player”, he says. His interruption prompts a premature game over and he invites Yorkie to a game of Top Speed. She considers the proposition, but an on-screen car crash startles her and she declines.
Yorkie settles into an empty booth to get her bearings straight. The Platonic form of awkwardness herself, bearings misalign easily. A second controller drops in next to her. “Whatever I say, go along with it”, Kelly says. Yorkie proves exactly the distraction Kelly needs to drop a recent fling, clearly looking for something more permanent than she. “My friend’s dying soon,” she says, “we need to catch up.” The chemistry between the two is apparent, and flamboyant Kelly is comfortable enough in her skin for the both of them.
Kelly takes the boundaries of Yorkie’s comfort zone to be a sort of implicit challenge, but it’s more than that. She also finds something novel – something substantive – in Yorkie’s awkward authenticity. Kelly’s met a thousand people who are right at home in this place. Yorkie is alluring precisely because she’s not at home in this place. She coaxes Yorkie onto the dance floor (apparently Yorkie’s first ever visit to a dance floor) and, while it appears at first that the ice may be breaking, Yorkie becomes overwhelmed by the situation (not to mention the sexual energy) and retreats abruptly, having gotten in way over her head.
What’s interesting about this introduction isn’t just that the setting is so intimately well-crafted (both narratively and visually) as to constitute a third character in its own right, but that it hints that there’s something crucial to learn about these characters from the different ways in which they interact with the setting. These seeds of mystery will germinate over the course of the episode.
Yorkie is spellbound by the setting; it has a kind of power over her. Her speech and even the motions of her body seem intensely considered and pregnant with consequence, as if the fate of the entire world hung on every choice she made. Kelly, by contrast, is effortless and fluid. She’s a master of this domain, and has spent so much time bending it to her will that she almost seems to have become bored by the project. Her environment is a place where nothing ought be taken too seriously, and every moment is a free-spirited mission to extract frivolity and enjoyment from her circumstance. She disparagingly mentions “The Quagmire” to a bemused Yorkie, later revealed to be a BDSM club frequented by people who are “desperate to feel something”, and comments that she had met her aforementioned fling there. The implication is that even BDSM, the final frontier of extreme stimulus, has lost its allure. Kelly’s reached the outer rim of hedonism. Where does an explorer go once the map is filled?
All this being established, the closing scene of the first act can present itself as an exchange between two people, while functioning as an exchange between two modes of being.
Kelly finds Yorkie outside in the rain, basking in conflicted resignation. Yorkie expresses reservation over the public image of two girls dancing together, alluding to some historical baggage related to her being gay. Kelly playfully dismisses these concerns and apologizes for getting inpatient; “Saturday nights, once a week – it’s, like, no time.” Yet, Yorkie persists with more concerns. Yorkie, as we suspected, has never been on a dance floor. Never. As far as her family’s concerned, she can’t do anything. It’s clear what she wants to do now, and Kelly opens the door by inviting her back to her place. “Midnight’s only two hours away”, she says. “Oh, that’s not long”, Yorkie responds.
Time. What is all of this time doing here?
Again Yorkie breaks, but it’s clearly more complicated than it first appears. She has a fiance, she says, and he’s “really nice”. Sounds like true love. The two part, and Yorkie is last seen standing, defeated, in the rain, mouthing a self-critical “shit” to herself, a neon sign hanging symbolically over her head. We don’t know exactly what defeated her, but we know it didn’t come from outside herself.
From this point on, time and setting begin to toy with us, upsetting whatever comfort we’d managed to extract from the episode thus far. “One week later”, opens the scene, but a decade has passed in that time. Sequin and denim have come to power, with tiki decor vying for the throne. A montage suggests that, despite Yorkie’s hang-ups, Kelly’s proposition is growing on her. Yorkie returns to the club to find Kelly and, after a bit of stalking, manages to connect. “I don’t know how to do this,” Yorkie confesses, “can you just make this easy for me?”
Kelly’s house is secluded, and sits uncomfortably close to the coastline – almost a testament to impermanence. The stillness of the location is striking. Set under moonlight, the scene has a haunting, unearthly quality. There’s a melancholic irony in setting a love scene in a place that feels like purgatory. From pillow talk we learn that Kelly had a husband whom she was in love with, but he “chose not to stick around”. As for Kelly, she’s just passing through, and before she leaves, she wants to have a good time. Midnight ends the scene…on the dot.
Another week, then another, then another. Every week Yorkie looks for Kelly in another decade and comes up short, until she eventually turns up, unexpectedly, on a DDR machine, Kylie Minogue playing in the background. “You hid from me!” Yorkie exclaims. Kelly denies this, and emphasizes that, in any event, she owes Yorkie nothing. The scene carries into the restroom, and the dialogue, as you’ll come to see, is a brilliantly concise summary of the central conflict of the episode:
Yorkie: It’s not about who owes who, it’s about manners. You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what this means!
Kelly: This means fun – or it should. And this? This is not fun, okay? This is not fun.
Yorkie: So, you don’t feel bad? Maybe you should feel bad…or at least feel something.
Yorkie retreats from the room in heartbroken frustration. Kelly punches a gaping crack into the bathroom mirror – a trademark in the Black Mirror series – and a broken reflection of herself stares back at her. She gazes down at her fist to find no blood, and then back up at the mirror, now in perfect repair only seconds later. None of it mattered. We now see the understanding advance across Kelly’s reflected face. None of this…matters.
Kelly tracks Yorkie to a rooftop to apologize and come clean about the state of her soul. “In the time I’ve been here,” she says, “I promised myself I wouldn’t do feelings. I didn’t want to like anyone. It’s just, I don’t know how long there is. I wasn’t prepared for you. I wasn’t prepared for wanting somet…” Yorkie interrupts her with a kiss. The allusions to Dostoevsky are just getting started. Back at the beach house, Kelly reveals that she’s dying of cancer. Further, she has no plans to stay in San Junipero after she’s dead, hinting that it has something to do with her late husband. Yorkie reveals that, without San Junipero, she’d never have met anyone like Kelly. “If we met,” she says, “if we really met, you wouldn’t like me. “Try me”, Kelly responds. She’s dying, after all. What monsters are left to fear?
The next act opens to the present day, and the pieces quickly come together. Kelly, in fact, is an elderly woman, living approximately in the year 2040. San Junipero is a cloud-based, virtual reality program for the dead and dying. An individual can choose, before passing, to have their consciousness uploaded into the cloud and live out an eternity as a virtual avatar of themselves in the prime of their life. For the dying, it’s “nostalgia therapy”. For the dead, it’s heaven. Living users are limited to 5 hours a week for fear that too much exposure may spawn dissociative disorders. 7 p.m. to Midnight, every Saturday.
Yorkie, also elderly, has been in a comatose state since the age of 21. After coming out to her disproving parents, a fight ensued. She stormed out of the house and, eventually, into a car accident. Being her only means of exercising basic autonomy, to say nothing of falling in love, Yorkie wants to expedite her entry into San Junipero, but euthanasia requires a family member’s consent and her family refuses to give it. Enter her fiance, Greg, a staff member at the nursing facility who has offered to become her family, and sign off on her passing.
As Kelly, for reasons we don’t yet know, has decided to refuse digital immortality and intends her 5 hours a week in the town to be a “last hooray” of drink and merriment, the chance meeting between the two was mutually inconvenient. Yorkie gives Kelly something to live for. Kelly gives Yorkie something to die for. If both of their plans come to fruition, the relationship is severed. They exist – meaning (qua relationship) exists – in a state of paradoxical tension, already fated by their choices to unravel in short order.
Upon learning simultaneously of Yorkie’s medical, matrimonial, and existential condition, Kelly opts to do something that matters: she proposes. If Yorkie’s going to get married, she figures, it might as well be to someone she loves. Kelly and Yorkie complete two ceremonies in that nursing home room: one of eternal union, and one of earthly separation.
The honeymoon takes place in San Junipero. Yorkie has an eternity to honeymoon. Kelly has 5 hours. The newlywedded bliss proves even more short-lived than that, however, when Yorkie realizes that Kelly was serious about her decision to die at the time of her death. The specter of mortality now steps in to rob Yorkie of her dreams at precisely the moment when immortality has granted them to her. Worse (so she thinks), it isn’t fate that’s to blame…it’s a person. It hurts so much more when it’s a person.
An argument ensues and Yorkie accuses Kelly of abandoning her. The language of manners comes into play once more as the two, again, argue over the nature and priority of their obligations. Yorkie trains her sights directly on the ultimate focus of Kelly’s perceived commitments: her late husband. “What is it? You feel bad because your husband isn’t here? He left you!” Yorkie charges. “You can’t see it, but what he did, it was selfish actually!”
An incensed Kelly responds with a smack across Yorkie’s face, followed by a devastating monologue that completes the final piece of the puzzle. They had a daughter. She died at 39, far too young for death, but also too young for the invention of San Junipero. “How can I!?”, said Kelly’s husband, when offered immortality in his final days, “when she missed out, how can I!?” Kelly wishes she could believe that her husband and daughter are united in eternal life, but she doesn’t. She believes they’re “nowhere”.
Kelly doesn’t believe in an immortal realm. She just believes in honor, and commitment, and dedication, and love, and moral obligations to the dead, and marital bonds that outlast time, and the transcendent value of relationship. For Kelly, suffering, mortality, and the bonds of promise and obligation give life meaning. “You want to spend forever somewhere nothing matters?” she asks Yorkie, rhetorically, “go ahead, but I’m out.” Kelly has chosen to follow the people she loves into permanent death, precisely because it matters. You see, to say that meaning is a great good isn’t to say that all meaningful things are good. That’s the uncomfortable truth of Kelly’s story. You want a meaningful life, you say? Are you sure?
Heaven was the place Kelly went, for 5 hours a week, to escape the oppressive, crushing weight of meaning. In a world where everything matters, heaven is a place where nothing does. Oh, glorious heaven.
Yorkie’s meaninglessness, by contrast, is found on Earth – or, better put, is thrust upon her by the Earth. Honor? Commitment? Dedication? Love? The very earthly things that gave Kelly a lifetime of meaning are precisely the things that the Earth has withheld from Yorkie. For Yorkie, heaven is a precondition for these, and therefore, a precondition for meaning. Mortality was a chain around her neck, tying her to an existence where she could do nothing, and for that reason, where nothing she did, could matter.
Heaven was the place Yorkie went, for 5 hours a week, to escape the oppressive, crushing weight of meaninglessness. In a world where nothing matters, heaven is a pace where everything does. Oh, glorious heaven.
How about you, dear reader? What is your heaven? Does the world crush you with its meaninglessness, or does it crush you with its meaning?
The scene closes with Kelly driving off and, with utter and complete deliberation, straight into a concrete barrier. It’d be an act of suicide if it wasn’t San Junipero. So, what was it? Midnight strikes just as Yorkie reaches out to lift her to her feet, and Kelly’s avatar disappears. Back in present day, we find a Kelly now evidently in the late-stages of cancer. “I’m ready,” she tells her social worker, “for the rest of it.” Credits roll in San Junipero with Kelly and Yorkie driving into the sunrise to the tune of “Heaven Is a Place on Earth”.
The first and final tragedy of the San Junipero saga came off-screen when, in an unexpected twist, show creator Charlie Brooker effectively canonized the “happy ending” interpretation in interviews with E! News, among others. This had the effect of transforming an ambiguous and thought-provoking irony into something far less interesting. Through his work on the series he’d theretofore demonstrated himself a devastatingly incisive commentator on the twoness inherent in the human condition. I can’t, however, bring myself to begrudge the man his heaven. I can forgive him this slight, for the world is crushing him with meaning too.
Nice piece. Thanks you!
Thanks for reading Paul, glad you enjoyed it!
Great review Jarrod.
So much going on in this episode, hard to know where to start, I guess I’ll start at the end. 🙂 I think some of the questions the episode is mulling over is the relationship between transcendence and immanence, heaven and earth. If, as Kelly believes, and as the repeated negative portrayals of religion suggests, the transcendent has been evacuated, can we find a meaningful existence within immanence? The episode plays with questions of nihilism, time and eternity, “story” vs “reality” ect. This is a exploration of the modern condition, to use Charles Taylor’s language, an exploration of our secular age, of life within an immanent frame.
You called your blog post “meaninglessness in a meaningful world,” I think I would have called it, “meaninglessness in a meaningless world.” The world of San Junipero is nihalistic, nothing is of consequence, nothing matters in the end. I was struck by the repetitive Sisyphean quality of Yorkie’s search for Kelly, where she wanders into the same bar, to encounter the same scene, only clothed in similar garb. Just as meaningless is the techno utopian, placeless old folks home, where nameless people are fed and kept alive. The only escape, the only way to see the image of God in another person, is to escape to the world of San Junipero.
It’s striking to see whats missing from the San Junipero world, everything that modernity has no place for, has been evacuated. There are no old or disabled people, there is no God or religion, there is no commitment, there is no particular place, all thats left is youth and freedom. Its striking that in contrast, the “real world” features old people, and references some kind of religious remnant. And yet, even the “real world” has a strange, unreal, smooth and shiny, manicured, “Apple Commercial” like feel to it. We see old people being cared for in a state of the arc facility, all is clean and tidy, there is no particularity, it feels like a stock photo. The technology that the episode centers on is used in the least objectionable, most responsible way imaginable, its hard to argue with old people being given “nostalgia therapy” in controlled doses. But that to me is what makes the exploration of technology in this episode so strange, why is it being presented in such a clean, utterly unproblematic, utterly responsible way? It all seems so clean and innocent that the episode seems to be going purposefully over the top, inviting us to deconstruct their unproblematic presentation of the technology. Its a sort of propagandistic, unreflective view of technology and modernity: look at how nice and clean everything is, how dare you complain? Not even a shadow flutters across this vision, and indeed, the lighting contrast between the dark San Junipero and the light “real world” is quite stark. Whats going on here? We could say that San Junipero is needed for the elderly residents–these are the only people (besides their care takers) that we see in the “real world”–because even though all their needs are met, their lives have no meaning. This is perhaps a commentary on the modern condition in the technelogical society. We are the old people in the old folks home, all our needs are met, we are isolated, abstracted individuals, not grounded in any place, and utterly superflous. These residents needs some kind of escape from this meaningless reality, and that is why they spend so much time on the San Junipero system, which is roughly analagous to our internet. They live a kind of double life, the meaningless “real” one where reality is a fake, plastic construction AND the meaningful “fake” one, in a constructed reality. In both places, atomistic individualism rules, and people are disconnected from reality.
And so we come to the tension between Kelly and Yorkie. You put it well: “Yorkie gives Kelly something to live for. Kelly gives Yorkie something to die for.” For Yorkie, the freedom offered in SJ offers an escape from the tyranny of the “real world.” For Kelly, the meaning she found in the real world, is more real that the nihalism of SJ. SJ is like Grand Theft Auto, Kelly is the like the guy who goes on a rampage, Yorkie, like the person who follows the speed limit as she crawls down the highway–a difficult thing to do in a nihalistic world. Yorkie wants to bring manners to the wild west, Kelly knows the wild west will always be the wild west.
With the ending, the episode tries to make a truce with the secular age, with modernity and the technological world. Its tries to find transcendence WITHIN immanence, to have heaven, not COMING to earth, but heaven as a PLACE on earth. In a purely immanent world, where there is no transcendence, no heaven “above us only sky,” questions of mortality, ethics, eschatology and time need to be answered. The episode tries to do this by constructing a “Secular heaven.” There is, a duality between the platonic world of consciousness and the embodied real world, and this platonic world plays the role of religion, transcendence, and “heaven” in a purely secular frame. The meaningless technological old folks home world is given meaning by religious escape, when, for 5 hours a day, transcendence breaks in. People can go “to heaven” after they die. Its interesting that secular heaven is a functional but not real eternity. The post mortom bliss of the dead, depends on a finite physical system that is keeping their platonic existence going. The physical system could be wiped out by some kind of a natural or human disaster, or perhaps, the second coming of Christ. This is then, a finite eternity. The episode come to a resolution when Kelly decides to end her embodied existence, to commit to a eternal life with Yorkie in San Junipero. We see the two conflicting persons come together: the free Yorkie and the constrained Kelly (or vice versia), the meaningful Yorkie and the meaningless Kelly, join together in SJ to find meaning in commitment, in a nihalistic world.
And yet, this ending, I believe, is deconstructed by the episode. This is not, in the end a balanced, unifying place to end up. This is no joining of paradoxes into a new unity, this is the collapse of one poll into the other. Kelly has to give up her embodiment, and her real world commitments to join Yorkie. The “heaven” they end up in, is not resurrection, but a disembodied plane.(though it certainly feels embodied) I think this is even hinted at by the fact that this is a lesbian couple. There is no heaven and earth unity bringing new life as in a hetrosexual union, but rather, the fruitless unity of earth and earth. Despite its wrangling over questions of meaning, heaven, and transcendence, the episode ends up collapsing into immanence, the transendence firmly bracketed out. The movie ends with the happy couple, riding off into the sunset, the song “heaven is a place on earth” sounding in the background. Kelly’s resistance to technology, gives way into a sweet embrace, and both give up their embodyment so that technology can be all in all. In the hyper modern world of the machine, it is not in God in whom we live and move and have our being, but rather, we live and move and have our being within the immanent machine.
Great analysis Julian!
I think there’s a lot to be done here with the conflict (and you’re right to note that it is a conflict, in the episode) between transcendence and immanence. My read on Kelly isn’t so much that she thinks transcendence has been evacuated as that she doesn’t recognize it as a discrete, ontological category in its own right. I just don’t think she’s given it much thought, and to the extent she has, that she takes it to be dependent on the immanent. It’s the immanent, in her view, that allows for the transcendent. She strikes me as a person thoroughly immersed in the world. Not “worldly” exactly, but definitely in the world.
But to that extent, I think your comments are extremely astute. You mentioned elsewhere about the episode’s apparent obsession with presenting a sanitized, measured, and calculatedly optimistic version of the future (or, in the episode, the present), complete with “Apple commercial” aesthetics. I think that maps nicely onto your comments about immanence. I actually think both Kelly and Yorkie’s characters and the existential problems inherent to the San Junipero software should be read as a sort of “push-back” against this “present” – they expose deep flaws and yearnings in the human condition that aren’t exactly acknowledged or satisfied by the narrative logic of the “present”. The software is an outgrowth of that. In that way, I think it’s a pretty standard demonstration of the Black Mirror formula…technology steps in to try to solve or enhance some aspect of humanity or society, but smashes headfirst into the human condition which doesn’t play by any of those neat little rules. I think that speaks to the question you asked about why the writers seemed to go so far out of their way to make the characters’ most proximate impulses rather unobjectionable. I think it’s both: 1) Trying to draw our attention to their underlying impulses, and 2) Arguing that even our best impulses yield corruption when mediated through the union of human nature and a technology that threatens to endow us with the powers of a god – powers we’re not equipped to responsibly use.
I also think, in many ways, San Junipero is a lot more in harmony with the human impulse than the utopian future in the episode, where it seems every problem has been solved save for that pesky, meat-sack biology that continues to taunt man’s perceived dominance over nature. San Junipero is more like the broken world a human being would make for themselves, complete with all of the ills human beings write into the worlds they create for themselves.
So, my title was a double-entendre that also offered a clue as to my own position on some of the questions I laid out. On one level, I’m claiming that the real world is a meaningful place, and San Junipero (being a computer program), is a meaningless place which was literally created in the world. It’s also a statement about Kelly’s soul (which I take to be a place firmly acquainted with the virtues and perils [though mostly perils] of meaning), and that the effects of a love affair with meaningless are beginning to take root in that soul.
But, it’s also a hint that I resonate a lot with Kelly’s existential situation. Her struggle with meaning wasn’t that there wasn’t enough, but that there was way, way too damn much of it. She lost a daughter and a husband, both of whom she was absolutely in love with and attached at the hip to, then was diagnosed with cancer and left to face it all alone. Meaning just wouldn’t let up on this poor woman.
In that vein, I’m also suggesting that we can learn a lot about what a person struggles with on Earth by looking at what they long for beyond it. It strikes me that there are a lot of parallels between San Junipero, and the Platonist conception of heaven favored by a so many folks these days – a place of endless, (one might also say) oppressive bliss. I’m not making any statement about what heaven is or would be here, just drawing an association between how it is conceived of by any given person, and what it suggests they may be struggling with. This applies as well to the non-religious, who often themselves have a conception of heaven which they then go on either to mourn the absence of, or reject. Either way, it tells us something interesting about them as well.
I loved your comments about San Junipero being a place that dispenses with all the things that modernity has no room for. I think that’s a profound observation. What do you make of the symbolism of darkness/grit and light/sanitation under that observation – that the real world is manicured and bright with all its elderly and disabled, and San Junipero is gritty and dark with all its youth and freedom? Do you think your point is subtly acknowledged by the episode? “Not even a shadow flutters across this vision” is an absolutely beautiful and concise expression of this notion.
I take it that Yorkie’s embrace of San Junipero was understandable, if tragic. Nobody would fault the woman her choice. But, what do you make of Kelly’s perceived change of heart at the last minute?
Her initial disposition made sense to me. Her heart, oppressed as it was by meaning, craved a little digital nihilism. But to plunge eternally into nihilism? It isn’t as if she didn’t know exactly what she was doing. Her critiques of San Junipero were the most strident of anyone in the episode, by far. What’s your read on her, specifically, with regard to how and why it all changed for her?
I also thought you were quite right to note just how mutable this supposed heaven is, after all. A loss of power? A natural disaster? A species-level extinction event? All these hang over the “immortal” lives of San Junipero residents in exactly the same way death hangs over the lives of the living. Even atemporality is contingent on the temporal, in this grand ontological experiment.
I thought your analysis of the ending was fantastic. Yes, what an irony it is to deliberately pursue meaning in the context of nihilism. Does this suggest a certain hopeless condition of the characters – that nihilistic meaning is the only kind they both have access to, and can bring themselves to stomach? We could certainly understand why this would be so. The notion of a full-scale collapse into the immanent is both profound imagery, and perfectly descriptive of the actual narrative.