Season 6 of Netflix’s Black Mirror is out, with a whole new assortment of creepy (and uncomfortably familiar) parallel worlds. The season premiere, “Joan is Awful,” might feel like it hits a little too close to home. Why?
Warning: Spoilers for “Joan is Awful” ahead!
In “Joan is Awful,” Joan (Annie Murphy) is an average woman who finds out that a Netflix-like streamer called Streamberry has created a show about her life. The series, written by AI and titled Joan Is Awful, uses data from her phone to create a drama about her in realtime, with each episode covering that day’s events. The AI uses a deepfake version of Salma Hayek to play Joan, and when Salma and Joan storm Streamberry’s headquarters to shut the show down, they find out that the streamer uses a quantum computer to create fictional worlds. Joan, it turns out, isn’t even the original Joan. She’s a fictional version played by a deepfake version of Annie Murphy.
The best—and worst—part of the show is that it wildly distorts everything Joan does, making her look much more awful than she actually is. In real life, she accidentally drops her cigarette on the head of the employee she just fired. In the show, she intentionally flings it off the balcony. In real life, she meets up with her ex, who’s been texting her, but tells him to leave her alone. In the show, they fall into each other’s arms and kiss. The AI writing the show is clearly ramping things up for dramatic effect, and ruining Joan’s life in the process—since everyone watching the show assumes it’s real.
Does that dynamic sound eerily familiar? Partly, it’s because the episode explores the implications of entrusting storytelling to AI, which is one of the issues at the heart of the WGA writers’ strike. Joan is essentially the author of Joan Is Awful, but she doesn’t get paid a cent for her story, nor does she have any control over it.
It’s also because this kind of distortion happens online every day.
Anyone who spends too much time on Twitter is probably familiar with the “Main Character” phenomenon: every day, Twitter has one main character, and you don’t want it to be you. Sometimes, someone really is as awful as they seem—see, for example, any random tweet by Donald Trump or Ben Shapiro. Sometimes, though, one poorly worded tweet, or even a completely harmless one, gets blown out of proportion until its author seems to turn into a mustache-twirling villain.
Who can forget “Garden Coffee Lady,” the woman who tweeted about spending mornings in the garden with her husband? Sure, that tweet might be a little annoying to read after your hellish commute to your 8:00AM job, but was she really the uber-capitalist gazillionaire people made her out to be? Or how about “Chili Lady,” the woman who made her neighbors dinner and somehow morphed into an ableist, racist, transphobic monster? Online drama often hinges on inflating someone’s supposed crimes (not working mornings, or failing to ask about food allergies) until the person is almost unrecognizable. After all, where’s the fun in dragging a person who’s just as average as you?
Of course, “Joan Is Awful” diverges from its Twitter allegory by taking an unexpected turn at the end. It turns out that Joan’s show is a pilot project for a whole series, in which every single viewer will be shown a personalized series about how awful they are. Everyone wants to watch themselves being awful, Streamberry’s CEO explains.
Is that true? It’s hard to say, but Joan does watch Joan Is Awful, religiously, every night, despite her lawyer’s advice to ignore it. She ostensibly watches to keep up with what’s happening so that she can fight it, but she’s still watching. Is she driven by guilt? Does the show feel like a strange sort of confession? Or is it just fascination at how wildly cruel Streamberry’s AI can be?
Here’s an even more unsettling question: Is Streamberry right? Are we all awful?
Well … yeah. Of course we are. Everyone’s at least a little bit awful. I’m a little awful, and so are you. The people who think they’re not at all awful are usually the most awful.
Hopefully, we can all separate our authentic awfulness from the cartoonish personas that people around us might create for a fleeting thrill. It’s okay that you’re a little awful. Don’t listen to the haters—just embrace the fact that you’re average, just like Joan.
(featured image: Streamberry Netflix)
