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.

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.

Thanks for reading Paul, glad you enjoyed it!