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xandromedovnaCW: amatonormativity, surveillance, manipulation, compulsory heterosexuality, dissociation, kink
Look, I’m sure the straights are having a lovely time or whatever, but I find it very hard to relate to cishet pairings. For me personally to identify with an m/f pairing, either there needs to be at least one trans, bi, and/or ace/aro person in the relationship, or the story itself needs to be queer in some way. “Hang the DJ” actually gives us both, which is why I love this ep—I’m such a slut for subversive pining, star-crossed angst, AND THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, and critiquing amatonormativity via the soulmate trope. This episode argues that your soulmate is the person you’d fight reality itself to be with, and if that’s not a queer mood I don’t know what is. Yet as a BM episode, there is still an underlying horror in how this ‘rebellion’ is contained and accounted for in the relatively inconsequential (to humans) realm of cookies.
Amy and Frank are set up on a series of dates by Coach, a Siri/Alexa-type assistant who controls nearly every aspect of their lives and provides a countdown to the end of a given relationship. When Amy and Frank are first matched, their relationship is scheduled to last 12 hours before they must part and pursue other relationships. Frank is paired with a woman he hates while Amy has a steady boyfriend then a string of brief sexual trysts, including at least one woman. They are paired together again, break up when Frank causes the counter to malfunction, and are eventually paired with their final match. The night before their matching ceremony, they run away together and try to escape their quickly disintegrating reality, only to dissolve into particles and appear in a room with 997 other versions of themselves. They were all simulations run by an app that determines the Amy and Frank who live in meatspace are 99.8% compatible.
Just like “Nosedive”, “Hang the DJ” distinguishes between LGBT inclusion and queer subversion. The System is inclusive of bi people, as shown by pairing Amy with a woman at one point, though because the purpose of the experiment is her compatibility with Frank, women can only ever be a passing potentiality, what I will call relativistic queerness in the dissertation. Nevertheless, this doesn’t make Amy any less queer, and her inability to fit into the system is actually part of the point. The System is designed to structurally render the querents queer in relation to the contrived society being simulated. Baked into each iteration is a critique of amatonormativity; the ‘successful’ match of Edna and Mike and constant implorations to trust the System’s 99.8% accuracy in identifying a soulmate only serve to make Frank and Amy question whether Coach actually knows what it’s doing:
Amy: But how do you know they’re perfect matches? I mean what if all it’s actually doing is gradually wearing us down, putting us in one relationship after another for random durations in a random sequence. Each time you get a little bit more pliable, a little bit more broken, until eventually it coughs up the final offering and says that’s the one. And by that point you are so defeated and so exhausted that you just accept it, you settle. And then you have to live the rest of your life convincing yourself you didn’t.
Frank: Well done, that’s one of the bleakest things I’ve ever heard.
Frank: I don’t want whoever the System reckons the one is, okay? I want you.
The critique of heteronormative culture is strong, especially in Frank’s relationship with Nicola: why stay with someone you hate? Because you ‘have to’, because you ‘should’? (Or that time Amy completely dissociated during sex with a random guy??) “Hang the DJ” is part of a long tradition of stories about compulsory heterosexuality and arranged marriages, ultimately stemming from the ‘star-crossed lovers’ trope, the subject of most of the Courtly Love stories that codified contemporary ideas of romance in the first place. Consequently, like most other romances, amatonormativity is conjured but the story places the blame on the particular system preventing them from being together and not the underlying principle that one and only one person should be the entirety of your world ‘forsaking all others’ and that romantic love is the necessary and inevitable fulfillment of one’s life. In Courtly Love, the society wins over the lovers, and in contemporary stories like this, the lovers win over the society, but in both, romantisexual love is presented as the ideal to strive for.
The atmosphere in the simulation is stifling, which makes their triumphant escape heartwarming, but the ending also has a fridge horror element, especially when you consider these are likely cookies, constantly being replicated and subjected to innumerable experiments. They do interact with other couples sometimes, such as at the matching ceremony, but for the vast majority of the episode if they’re not talking to their partner, they’re talking to Coach. Their movements are highly regulated, with everything from vehicles to living spaces to what food they’re ordering at the restaurant arranged for them. A giant wall looms over everything separating their life ‘before’ and their time in the experiment. There is also a heavy guard presence, one that makes Frank nervous given how often he eyes them. Eventually this paranoia is justified, but the threat is ultimately imaginary: “Ever since we met, this world has been toying with us, it’s trying to keep us apart. It’s, it’s a test, I swear it is, and the two of us rebelling together is something to do with passing it.” Once they realize this, Amy stops the security guard in his tracks and all of time with it, allowing them to climb the wall.
That said, unlike most other situations with cookies, consent is emphasized throughout the episode. Amy and Frank (iteration 998) talk about why they both elected to join the System, both deciding to give it a try. When they have this conversation, it is both of their first dates in the System—as far as they remember anyway, though as late iterations they subconsciously start to remember. At any rate, this being the first means they have no point of comparison yet and can evaluate all subsequent partners in relation to the intended pairing. When they go to the romantic house, Frank asks Coach “so are we meant to just have sex with each other?”, to which Coach replies, “participants are not required to take any specific action.” Every party has to explicitly register their consent with Coach before having sex. This removes some of the squick factor from the unfortunate implications of the overarching pattern of coercion. Importantly, Amy and Frank don’t even have sex on the first date, only admitting they wanted to fuck each other 10 seconds before their time ends (the disaster queer energy, *chef’s kiss*).
In fact, the breaking of a mutually-agreed-upon pact is what triggers Amy and Frank’s fight. On their second date, Amy suggests they not look at their expiries this time, and they both promise not to look. To see the expiry, both parties have to check at the same time, otherwise it destabilizes the algorithm. Frank and Amy were supposed to have 5 years together, but when Frank peeks it becomes merely hours. Of course, since their rebellion is part of the point, it’s likely that the inevitable draw to peek and the pain of losing time are important benchmarks in the experiment:
Amy: “Why did you have to look at it?”
Frank: “Look, I was thinking maybe we could overcome it somehow.”
Amy: “Why did you have to look at it?”
Frank: “Because I like ya, like properly really, I like ya.”
And in a larger sense, meatsuit Amy and Frank consented to this process by joining the app (at least, one would hope they gave free, prior, and informed consent; the episode doesn’t address Terms and Conditions). The System is designed to combat option paralysis by not only telling them what to do in a safe, controlled environment, but also allowing them the illusion or narrative of rebellion by priming them to trust each other most. In this way, the System reads more like a Dom/sub kink scene. When Frank is debating peeking at the expiry, Coach asks, “would you like me to talk you out of it?”, showing that there is some element of checking in with participants. The System lets them explore how they would react to each other knowing the relationship will end: is the expiry a release date or a death sentence? They consent to have a piece of them become a character, a character given no actual meaningful choice in who they want as a partner (pairing off is what the System wanted anyway) so that they themselves have the free will to decide what to do with the information that 998 times out of a thousand, they would run away together. Do you want to risk the possibility the two who didn’t had the right idea, or do you take your chances? How much do you trust the System, and how much do you trust yourself?
