Black Mirror: Men Against Fire, a review
Rage and Resentment, Punishment and Surveillance
“It is easier to shoot when you’re shooting at the boogeyman.”
— as it indeed it is easier for one to justify its means when we are confronted with differentiation; not firing against enemies even under threat is what led the whole story in its ripeness. We see the protagonist: Stripe, a new-made military man — anticipating his first kill, then, Stripe, ill at ease, struggling to encompass his fragmented perceptual view of what reality is.
The story is anchored against what it means to perceptualize something different and to be ‘the different’ — how resentment encircles around the justification of dissimilarity and how technology has been one of the means to survey, inflict and reign.
As brutal as it seems, the military reinforcement justifies killing a roach, because they are different — an infiltration for hostility. Towards the end, it was revealed that these roaches were human, but in their blood, filth flows in genetics; how similar to the ideologies of the history, which have been quite evident from matters such as the holocaust (supreme race), structuralized racism, and genocide.
In these situations, rage and resentment have been the driving point– to be seen inferior, incapable of worthiness, sterilized for unfavorableness and indifference. These thymotic aspects have been the prevailing force and capital of the military towards human “cleaning” and their main reason for augmented perceptual is for human empathy to be stripped away and to see the roaches as different:
For men not to be against, but to fire.
It must also be taken into point that the Danish villagers have not been compelled to wear the MASS, however they resent these roaches personally, with or without the lenses, for rage and resentment works contagiously and garners in time.
Moreover, technology has been used for dehumanization and weaponization in this episode (also easter-egg “Heidekker” the man with the beard, as somehow an appease for Heidegger’s view of modern technology as ‘enframing’ human — in reference to a time wherein we may use ourselves as means of resource as well — human weaponization). Concerning another narrative to the episode, we may somehow see Foucault’s internalization of how “prison and punishment” are implied on technology (MASS).
Punishment/torture as a physical entity for consequence and rehabilitation & surveillance as an entity for one’s mind. Towards the end, Stripe has been given the choice to either put his body in confinement but not letting his mind rest in guilt (prison) or be controlled and modulated by their military institute — MASS as means of constraint to see reality: rehab, surveillance, and institutional control (their sexual dreams were controlled too — it seemed like a reward for their service). Although we may see that Stripe has altered his fury from roaches to the military force, there wasn’t much anything to vent his anger to, for his reaction will still be constituted by the military institutional force — to be in stagnated with guilt or to be augmented, to devote his anger to the military or be reprogrammed to be eaten (again) by the system, imprisoned by your mind or imprisoned by the system, nevertheless, in a general sense, both are still prison.
Instead of being motivated in rage to do something about his reality, he’s driven by the system, therefore he can’t be “free” to be entitled to his rage.
In the end, we were given a dream-like post-service scene — sadistic enough to prove that he chose to reprogram his MASS, the house as a fraud of reality, the girl as a glorification and gratitude for his service — just like the integrated illusions in his dreams; while everything seemed real, his tears were a reflection that his subconsciousness is still aware of what reality is.
~ A review I submitted for philosophy class :)
2020
