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xandromedovnaCW: infidelity, heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality, problem with no name, suicidal ideation, sexualized violence, assimilation
“Striking Vipers” is clearly a love story, but what’s less clear is whose love story it is: Theo and Danny? Danny and Karl? Roxette and Lance? All five together? The episode neatly wraps up the immediate question—how do the five of them move forward—without addressing the larger issues at play both before and after their lives collide. Most reviewers have noted how the scenario presented in the ep raises several provocative questions about digital sexuality (Mellor; Shaw-Williams), virtual gender (Handlen), Black masculinity (Grant, Young, and McKenzie; Paul), queer fantasy (Griffiths and Jeffery), and bromance (Lodge), among others, none of which are definitively resolved. But I think that’s actually one of the strengths of this episode: an understated approach allows for all these themes to remain complicated and holds space for the messiness of adult relationships. Furthermore, the indeterminacy is part of the point in the queer aesthetic permeating the show, however much it ostensibly is about heterosexuality. Because of the inescapable backdrop of straight suburbia, the contingent, playful approach they take towards navigating it together is satisfying and retains a resistant queerness.
Performance, especially performance of selves, is surprisingly central to this episode. The very first scene, Danny approaches Theo in a bar and pretends not to know her. After we learn from Karl they’re already together, Theo expresses her approval:
Theo: Hey, that little roleplay act, the stranger thing at the bar? Got me hot as fuck.
Danny: Whoa, mental note to self: my baby’s into roleplay.
This scene, taking place about a decade before the main events of the episode, shows Theo, Danny, and Karl being playful and carefree, out for a night of dancing, followed by banter, videogames, and weed at the apartment. This is the energy they’re trying to reclaim throughout the episode, but they are foiled by the demands of everyday life. Theo and Danny are constantly roped into command performances of Macaroo, a children’s book their son Tyler is obsessed with. Karl is successful but lonely, constantly playing games like pinball or later Striking Vipers. Danny usually plays Tetris to unwind—a solitary, passive game—but when Karl invites him to play Striking Vipers X, the VR version, they quickly prefer this kind of roleplay as Roxette and Lance (primarily because it becomes a sexual thing). This interferes with Danny’s relationship with Theo to the point that at the end of the episode Danny and Theo have a yearly arrangement to play with other people: Danny and Karl can meet up in Striking Vipers, and Theo can go out to the bar and play stranger pickup with an actual stranger.
That playfulness, that chance to play together instead of alone or in culturally sanctioned monogamous straight pairs, is identified as the thing glaringly missing from adult life. Danny and Theo have already largely lost it by the time Danny’s 38th birthday rolls around (when the plot begins), fully assimilated into the straight suburbs. Theo’s hair is blonde and relaxed, unlike the dark curls we saw in the prologue. They are bogged down in parent talk, fighting with the dishwasher, and inane small talk with other parent friends. They know it’s a problem: “It’s boring, I get that. Family life? Shit, I find it boring,” Theo concedes when she confronts him on their anniversary. Danny seems to be eagerly awaiting death if only to end the ennui:
party guest: Birthday boy! Congratulations, how old are you now?
Danny: uhh, 38
party guest: llll, forty’s a-coming
Danny, raising his glass as if a toast: Soon be dead, huh?
Karl meanwhile still hasn’t ‘settled down’ and is trying desperately to hold on to that playfulness, except he has no one to play games with and the only intimacy he seems to allow himself until Danny is random hookups with women. All three of them know there’s a problem, but they see no way out of it.
I argue part of the reason things play out as queerly as they did is that the crux of their problem is heteropatriarchy and amatonormativity, and because they’re culturally straight, they have no language or context for how to resist those structures when they are purportedly designed to serve cishets. There is a larger general theme of the biological clock ticking—the bar is called The Year, Karl is starting to feel too old for dating, Theo’s trying to get pregnant again, Danny experiences three birthdays over the course of the episode—but the biggest problem is that they’re comparing their lives to a rigid model of what cishet adulthood ‘should’ look like and feeling like they come up short. Simultaneously, they’re looking back on their old lives and noting how stuck they’ve become. Meanwhile the three are very concerned with their aging bodies and how they present themselves. Danny complains of his trick knee and appreciates the added mobility he has as Lance. Theo is worried that she’s losing her charms as she ages: “I know that I’m not what I was. My body is not what it was since Tyler.” Karl waxes his balls to stay competitive in the dating game, and his experiences as Roxette completely upend his sex life so that she becomes a central part of his body. Ultimately, what they need are queerer models of aging than they had.
The new arrangement allows Danny to be younger, Theo to prove she’s still got it, and Karl to be female. Queer models of non-monogamy, non-procreative sex, and artificial embodiment breathe life into their worlds and provide a solution to the impasse for however long it’s useful. Several reviewers noted that their arrangement is a stopgap instead of a long-term solution (e.g. Handlen; Grant, Young, and McKenzie; Shaw-Williams), but part of the entire problem is this idea that one permanent, til-death-do-us-part solution is possible or even desirable. The reason the new arrangement works is precisely its contingency, its temporariness, its plurality, its relational instead of prescribed nature.
On the one hand, it is a little annoying that here queerness is not a lived reality but an allowance in the context of a larger heteronormative project (Griffiths and Jeffery). But on the other, we cannot dismantle heteropatriarchy or amatonormativity unless we address how they harm everyone, not just queer people. Theo recognizes that the idea growing apart from one’s friends is inevitable is emotionally unhealthy and that you cannot reasonably expect one person to be your entire emotional support system. She keeps encouraging Danny to stay in contact with Karl, even inviting him to dinner when she notices how down Danny is (not realizing they’ve been having an affair). Considering we don’t see any of Theo’s friends or other family, it’s a little frustrating that she doesn’t have the same outlets (Grant, Young, and McKenzie), but regardless she understands that Danny’s relationship with her and his relationship with Karl can coexist because they offer different things. What neither of them question though is the imperative to procreate. Neither Theo nor Danny is particularly interested in sex with each other, at least not at the same time, but they feel compelled to: “The app says that we need to do it within the hour. It’s peak fertility. I’m kinda beat but I guess that we should.” Why do they feel pressured to have a second baby? While she does ultimately get pregnant after Danny ends the affair, there’s little indication they even enjoy being parents. It’s as if Theo and Danny and Karl are stuck on two opposing straight life courses, each afraid of the other’s, unsure what other options there even are between white picket fence and playboy: “he’s downtown at the label, and we’re…out here.”
Danny’s ambivalence about his life plays out in his disinterest in sex with Theo and growing interest in sex with Karl-as-Roxette. Every time Theo tries to initiate sex, Danny comes back with the ‘I’m just tired’ excuse. She expresses her frustration at this considering they’re trying for another kid: “Won’t get pregnant if you don’t fuck me, Danny.” Eventually, she suspects (correctly, though he doesn’t tell her yet) he’s cheating, though she assumes it’s related to his wandering eyes throughout the episode and not whatever his and Karl’s deal is. But because of how complicated and hard to explain their situation is, Danny doesn’t even have language to tell her about it until she picks him up from the police station after his fight with Karl. It’s not just the dissatisfaction with straight time, but also the chronic touch starvation endemic to USAmerican men and the heady affordances of the technology. In meatspace, Danny and Karl don’t know how to interact with each other physically: at the BBQ, Danny goes for a handshake instead of a hug; at dinner, Theo admonishes “Lord, hug each other. Guys are so awkward”; when they kiss outside of the game, there are no sparks and they end up in a physical altercation (paralleling the fighting they were supposed to have been doing in-game). They only have chemistry and an instinct for how to interact when they’re playing Striking Vipers, when they have permission to explore touch.
This partially accounts for why Danny and Karl don’t quite register that their in-game interactions have out-of-game consequences. When they first hook-up, they seem surprised that it’s even possible, let alone that they enjoy it. They part abruptly after making out and don’t discuss it until their next match:
Danny: “Last time we played I was drunk man, from the party.”
Karl: “Me too.”
They do physically fight in-game the first time, but by the second time they posture for about 15 seconds then immediately start making out again, starting an affair. However, it is literally compartmentalized as strictly part of the game: “it’s not cheating, it’s not real. It’s like… porn or something.” They debate whether this makes them gay, but it “don’t feel like a gay thing”, and it’s only when it starts bleeding into meatspace that they start to consider it a problem. Danny catches himself debating whether to put an X (kiss) after his apology for canceling on Karl because of his anniversary. It’s at this dinner that Theo confronts him about cheating, and he promises he isn’t. He ends it after this, only to take it up again when she invites Karl to dinner, which is extremely uncomfortable: “What am I, like your ex-wife or something?” Theo, of course, does consider it cheating, but the three of them work it out because simply making Danny choose would hurt all of them and is ultimately unnecessary because of how unique the setup is.
The larger conceptual deficit the characters have and that queer lifeways could have helped with is Karl’s experience of gender (Karl is an egg, fight me). Even in the past, he always played as Roxette, as Danny always played as Lance. However, when Karl plays as Roxette in Striking Vipers X, he quickly starts to enjoy having a female embodiment, if only virtually. Whereas Danny gets somewhat sucked into Striking Vipers, Karl seems to need it in ways he can’t articulate:
I’ll tell you what’s strange. Nothing matches it, does it? I tried replacing it, man, I tried. I tried fucking the computer-controlled characters, it’s bullshit. […] It’s like a rubber doll, not programmed for any sex stuff, they just sort of lie there. I tried it with real players, other folks controlling Lance. There was this one guy from Holland, he was kinda halfway OK as long as I didn’t think about his accent. But it didn’t get me. It didn’t get me, not like when we were in there, you and me. […] I tried everything: I’ve gone in there as guy players, girl players, multi-player gangbangs, you name it. You know I even fucked Tundra, the polar bear character. I fucked a polar bear and I still couldn’t get you out of my mind.
What Karl is after is the confluence of a female body and a sexual partner who knows him well enough to have meaningful sex with him (although it’s partially the haptic feedback loop seen with Dawson's Sympatic Diagnoser). Karl lacks the language to talk about what it’s like for him to have sex as Roxette, falling back on a trite metaphor of an orchestra, but he knows what he wants, if not its implications. Like many closeted trans people, the virtual world gives us space to explore our genders in ways we can’t always in meatspace, and I think Karl is on a similar journey here (though certainly not a straightforward one).
So far we’ve been talking about the meatspace characters but not Roxette and Lance themselves. If we think about the diegesis of Striking Vipers X, it becomes the story of two people with palpable sexual chemistry who are required by some unknown force to fight but who instead choose to fall in love. In one sense, Karl and Danny (as well as other players) have ‘broken’ the game to make it a sex simulator, making Roxette and Lance operate counter to their programming. But in another sense, Roxette and Lance have hacked Karl and Danny by drawing them into a romantic narrative that works fine if unexpectedly in-game but has a completely different meaning in meatspace, one they ultimately decide is untenable except when they play. Something something, queer love breaking free of the programming and writing its own ending—it’s a major theme of the shows in this dissertation. Roxette and Lance are so in love they flout the rules the game and make it the player’s problem, sexuality and gender be damned.
Luckily for Theo, Danny, and Karl, they’re into that. In fact, it’s just what they needed.
Works Cited
Grant, Jasmine, Danielle Young, and Joi-Marie McKenzie. “Black Mirror’s ‘Striking Vipers’ Episode: All the Theories Broken Down.” Essence, 23 Oct. 2020. https://www.essence.com/entertainment/black-mirrors-striking-vipers-episode-theories-broken-down/
Griffiths, Ali and Morgan Jeffery. “‘Striking Vipers’ Sees Black Mirror Continue to Fail Its LGBTQ+ Characters.” DigitalSpy, 6 June 2019. https://www.digitalspy.com/tv/a27787074/black-mirror-striking-vipers-lgbtq/
Handlen, Zach. “In Its 5th Season Premiere, Black Mirror Presents a New Kind of Fighting Game.” The AV Club, 5 June 2019. https://www.avclub.com/in-its-5th-season-premiere-black-mirror-presents-a-new-1835266052
Lodge, Guy. “Queer Fears: The Problem with Black Mirror’s ‘No Homo’ Episode.” The Guardian, 10 June 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/jun/10/black-mirror-charlie-brooker-striking-vipers
Mellor, Louisa. “Black Mirror Season 5: ‘Striking Vipers’ Review—Mature, Provocative Friendship Drama.” Den of Geek, 5 June 2019. https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/black-mirror-season-5-striking-vipers-review-mature-provocative-friendship-drama/
Paul, Doctor Jon. “Black Mirror’s ‘Striking Vipers’ Gets to the Heart of Black Masculinity and the Longing for Connection.” SYFY Wire, 11 June 2019. https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/black-mirror-striking-vipers-black-masculinity-and-love
Shaw-Williams, Hannah. “Black Mirror Season 5: ‘Striking Vipers’ Ending Explained.” Screen Rant, 7 June 2019. https://screenrant.com/black-mirror-season-5-striking-vipers-ending-explained/
