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xandromedovnaCW: racism, blackface, torture, incarceration, racialized violence, Nazis, body horror, sexual assault, ableism, euthanasia, death, white supremacism, self-harm
One of the major themes of my dissertation is the ethics of audiencing. How do we balance our desire/need for a story with the well-being of its characters? What, if anything, do we as an audience or content creators owe to characters? How does becoming a unilateral audience character-ize people as a form of stripping agency and power? And, as “Black Museum” asks, how does this process operate at the intersection of queerness and white supremacy?
There is of course plenty of research documenting not just how Black people in general are turned into objects of consumption but how a significant part of contemporary entertainment was founded on blackface and turning blackness into a caricature for the pleasure of white audiences instead of reflecting a lived reality (see Lott). BM addresses this throughout the series by calling into question what—or who—gets treated as an object, a character, or a person, as well as what white structures of the gaze might be operating. In “Black Museum” and “White Bear”, the predominantly-white audiences are presented as unaffected consumers completely removed from complicity in whatever they’re witnessing. And in the one instance where a white audience is created outside this model (i.e. Carrie in Jack’s brain and then in the stuffed monkey), it is because she is a captive audience through no fault of her own and in turn also ends up an exhibit:
Rolo: Well, the monkey is the crime. See, a couple of years back, the UN made it illegal to transfer human consciousnesses into limited formats like this. Gotta be able to express at least five emotions for it to be humane, apparently. Human rights for cookies, right Carrie?
Carrie: Monkey needs a hug. [‘no’ or, in context, ‘go fuck yourself’]
Nish: She’s still in there?
Rolo: It’d be illegal to delete her too, so, yeah. Go figure.
In any case, whiteness is constituted by appropriating Black bodies as modes of experience and catharsis.
In “Black Museum”, there is an undercurrent of queer monstrosity to this that on one hand can be read as somewhat queerphobic, namely to do with gender, but on the other asks us to consider the ways white queers are just as complicit in white supremacy. Both Dawson and Carrie are sexually doubled, Dawson by the Sympatic Diagnoser and Carrie by being implanted in Jack. Carrie and Jack both have to adjust to being two people in one body, to being “us”, as Carrie insists on calling them. Jack is often in the position of telling Parker “Mommy loves you” and “Mommy needs a hug” and becomes Mommy in that moment. Carrie, for her part, has to adjust to sensations common to a cis male body: “oh cut the shit, I know when your hormones are flowing, okay? Our balls are brewing up a blow load as we speak.” Eventually sharing a body becomes untenable and Carrie is transferred into the stuffed monkey, where she resides to this day. Jack can only move on when the queerness of his situation is resolved.
For Dawson, at the beginning he and Madge had an active and satisfying sex life thanks to the Sympatic Diagnoser: “Son of a bitch was experiencing male and female orgasms at the same time.” However, after he experiences the moment of death when a patient dies while wearing the helmet, he can only become sexually and emotionally satisfied with pain and fear. He tries sadomasochism with Madge, which turns out to be a hard limit for her. The first time we see him enjoy a patient’s pain, it’s a Black man. When the other doctors get wise to what he’s doing and have him removed, he begins self-harming to try and recreate the endorphin rush, but ultimately he goes out to torture and sexually assault a homeless man: “Dawson was practically cumming when they found him.” The episode specifically ties sexual contact between men to sexual assault and white power fantasies. Dawson’s sexual interest in the homeless man is more about the pain he can inflict and experience second-hand than gender-based attraction. Similarly, for the Nazi who tries to jack off watching Clayton be executed, the sexual lure is a Black body in pain. At its core, all sexual assault is about abuse of power, but here it is mapped onto queerness in troubling ways. This is partially an artifact of the homoeroticism of making themselves audiences to male pain, but it is also a commentary on queer white masculinities—a tired and harmful one, but nonetheless one that asks queer people to take seriously our audiencing habits. What makes such displays of pain homoerotic? How might homoeroticism for white queer audiences be structured around racialized pain and voyeurism?
These themes are a continuation of another episode, “White Bear” from season 2, which it references several times. The first exhibit to appear is a picture of Victoria Skillane, the Black protagonist of “White Bear”. In that episode, Victoria wakes up alone in an apartment with no memory of her life. As she tries to track down help, she notices all of the people around her are watching her through their phone cameras and refuse to interact with her. She tries in vain to get through to them but runs off when a man with a gun chases her. She finds Jem who ‘helps’ her, leading her to the power station generating the signal that is making everyone act like this. When they reach the power station, it’s revealed this is all a performance in the vein of The Truman Show meets Sleep No More, and Victoria is an exhibit in a “justice park”, a zoo-like enclosure where there is a daily performance of this adventure and the patrons pay to watch her be tortured. This punishment was given to her because of how she just stood there and filmed her boyfriend abducting and killing a girl.
“White Bear” raises a lot of questions about social media and depersonalization, the distinction between justice and revenge, repertory performance, and what ethical obligations audiences have to characters and vice versa. And while the episode doesn’t make it explicit, the fact that the one being tortured for an audience is Black while her white boyfriend isn’t points out the ways Black women especially are not shown the same empathy as are men or white people, as well as the ways white supremacy is woven into western models of audiencing and storytelling. Victoria is doubly dehumanized; on the literal level, she is hunted like an animal and trapped in an exhibit, moved around like a prop instead of a person, and talked about instead of to. She tries to appeal to the audience’s humanity: “help me, please! I’m a human being!” But not only is she dehumanized as a body, she is also performatively turned into a work of fiction instead of a human. In a storytelling environment where audiences are assumed completely separate from the story except specific prescribed moments, where being turned into a story with a moral lesson is a fitting punishment for the most heinous of characters, where there is no recognized ethical entanglement of audience and character, to be treated as a character (or even a performer) is to cease to be human.
“What’s wrong with those people?!” Victoria asks, “why aren’t they helping us? They’re just watching!” This is not just an indictment of the attendees of the justice park or non-fictional instances where people get turned into characters. “Black Museum” contains shout-outs to every extant episode at the time, asking us to consider our own complicity as an audience in the same logics of voyeuristic impersonality and Black pain, and starting with a picture of Victoria is a pointed conjuring of “White Bear”’s thematic questions (Beggs). Despite being composed of three vignettes, the episode is organized by a frame narrative featuring another example of disproportionate justice, the Museum’s main attraction: a cookie of Black death row inmate Clayton Leigh that patrons can electrocute at will, complete with commemorative keepsake cloned anew at the moment of highest pain. This forces us to think about GIFs as torture, about aesthetics of Black pain (see Ebrahimji), about personal and institutional blame for the prison-industrial-complex (Parham; Robertson) about why we keep watching (Beggs), about the line between justice and revenge (Gilbert).
What’s fascinating about how “Black Museum” addresses this line is its emphasis on how historical events and relations don’t just happen unchallenged but are heavily shaped by the narratives we tell—or don’t tell—about them. In “White Bear”, one gets the impression that the entire society is on board with the Park’s treatment of Victoria, but the Black Museum contains both a picture of Victoria and a wax dummy of the hunter with a ski mask. It does not absolve Victoria of her crimes, but neither does it absolve those who created the “justice park”; clearly there was resistance to Victoria’s treatment or its remnants wouldn’t be housed in a crime museum. In “Black Museum”, Nish similarly notes the resistance to Clayton’s treatment counter to the celebratory note of Rolo’s explanation:
You left some parts of the story out, Mr. Haynes. Why is that? You forgot to mention the protests. His wife started a campaign, got some momentum behind it. Guess you’d call it virtue-signalling bullshit but I know it hurt your attendance. And even the protesters got bored after a while. As soon as it was clear the state wouldn’t do a damn thing about clearing him, they just moved on to the next viral miscarriage of justice they can hang a hashtag off of. But they did their job, right? This place was on the shit list. Who was your core clientele after that? You lost the daytrippers, the tourists, fun family crowd, who was left? Loners, sadists, the supremacist sicko demographic.
Both episodes raise a poignant question: who is the intended audience for these performances of torture? At the White Bear Justice Park, families would bring their kids as if this were all-ages entertainment. This wasn’t a once-and-done public ritual but a repertory performance with infrastructure—it had a cast, rules for audience participation, daily maintenance of props and sets (despite her screams), built-in times for eating and drinking, and many other markers of participatory theatre. In the auditorium scene, the audience applauds as Victoria is brought out and the cast bows. They’re cheering her performance as much as theirs in the sense that her pain was entertaining, “like spectators who don’t give a shit about what happens”. In the Black Museum, tourists gave way to niche fetishists and racists. Even in the case of Dawson, there is a question of audiencing. Every time he places the net on someone else, he experiences their physical sensations vicariously; he starts as a witness to pain and ends as a generator of pain for his own satisfaction. What do audiences actually get from these performances of character(ized) pain?
Dawson’s case mirrors the larger concern in “Black Museum” with casuistry as an ethical model/inevitability. In medicine, especially the type of experimental embodied medicine that Dawson invented, ethical considerations on a case-by-case business fit seamlessly into the flow of diagnoses. Similarly, the Black Museum is a monument to failures of casuistic ethics, where today’s missteps and indignities in uncharted ethical terrains become the historical abuses of tomorrow that served as watersheds for current ethical best practices. Importantly, “Black Museum” isn’t necessarily saying that this approach to ethics is inherently bad, or even avoidable, but that it lends itself to a sedimentation of these kinds of stories. Dawson’s Sympatic Diagnoser saved countless lives and gave rise to cookie technology—it also made him a nascent serial killer. Carrie was the first cookie (shaping discussions of ethics for decades to come) and the technology allowed her different lifeways when her physical body went into a coma—until she was implanted in the stuffed monkey and was reduced to the same mode of engagement as where she started. White Bear Justice Park was an effective and poetic punishment for Victoria’s crimes—until the punishment became more abhorrent than the crime. And through all of this, “Black Mirror” points out how the onus of being the guinea pigs in this ethics lab tends to fall on racialized, queer(ed), and disabled people. They become cautionary tales that both terrify and thrill, cursed to relive their miseries as stories eternally for an audience that may soon forget the life behind the characters. If they even saw them as alive in the first place.
(Monkey needs a hug.)
Works Cited
Beggs, Scott. “Is Black Mirror’s ‘Black Museum’ a Cry for Help from Its Creator?” Nerdist, 29 Dec. 2017. https://nerdist.com/article/black-mirror-black-museum-recap/
Ebrahimji, Alisha. “Some Say Sharing Videos of Police Brutality against Black People Is Just ‘Trauma Porn’.” CNN, 25 Aug. 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/25/us/police-brutality-videos-trauma-porn-trnd/index.html
Gilbert, Sophie. “Black Mirror: ‘Black Museum’ Is a Throwback to Episodes Past.” The Atlantic, 31 Dec. 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/black-mirror-black-museum-is-a-throwback-to-episodes-past/549389/
Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Oxford UP, [1993] 2013.
Parham, Jason. “Why Black Mirror’s Most Controversial New Episode Is Its Most Important.” Wired, 6 Jan. 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/black-mirror-black-museum/
Robertson, Adi. “In Black Museum, Black Mirror Finally Finds a Single Person to Blame for Technology.” The Verge, 3 Jan. 2018. https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16845504/black-mirror-black-museum-review-netflix-season-4-douglas-hodge-letitia-wright
