Title: “Nosedive”
Series: Black Mirror
Season: 3
Year: 2016
Writer(s): Charlie Brooker, Rashida Jones, Michael Schurr
Storyline: In a world of the - probably not too distant - future, Lacie, like everyone, is obsessed with rating on phone apps, and getting ratings. Everyone wants to be rated five stars, and most are. The quest for positive feedback consumes the lives of everyone on Earth, but this of course is a two-edged sword. Get enough negative feedback and you are toast. One of Lacie’s co-workers, Chester, is being ostracised for his breakup, with everyone “on the side of” the other party, and nobody is rating him. He’s slipped to a score of 3.1, unheard of and socially really dangerous in this image-important world.
Lacie wants to move to an upscale area, but the high price tag is off-putting, However, if she can raise her rating to 4.5 she will get a discount. This won’t be easy though and she will have to start moving in more rarefied circles to meet the “quality people” she needs to “boost” her rating in time to meet the requirements for her new house. Her chance comes when her old friend Naomi, now a model or actress or something, invites her to be her maid of honour. She knows that there will be all top A-listers at the wedding, and although her brother reminds her that she and Naomi were less than friends when younger - Naomi was very mean to her and slept with her boyfriend - she can’t turn down this chance and so pretends he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Hell, the girl lives on her own private island! Getting to 4.5 will be a breeze!
Ah but maybe not. Things start to go wrong for her as soon as she leaves her house. She bumps into a woman, who immediately gives her one star (the horror!) and then at the airport her flight is cancelled, and losing her temper and using profanity gets her docked until she’s at 3.1. There’s not only no way she can’t fly now, she is instructed by airport security to leave the airport! So now she has to rent a car, but because of her reduced rating she can only get a piece of crap. Still, at least she’s on her way. Until the car’s battery runs out and she discovers that it’s such an old car that the charging station doesn’t fit it. She then has to hitch-hike and nobody will pick her up as she is now down to 2.8. Eventually a truck driver stops - she’s 1.4, and for a moment Lacie considers not taking the lift, but she does and the trucker, a woman called Susan, tells her how she lost faith in this whole rating system, how empty and hollow it revealed itself to be, and how she no longer gives a damn about ratings.
Naomi calls Lacie and tells her not to come to the wedding as she’s now only a lowly 2.6. This was not unexpected by me, but Lacie seems to be surprised. She decides to go ahead and crash the party anyway, wanting to deliver her speech in order to get the votes she needs. Of course it all goes wrong: she’s downvoted to zero, especially when she picks up a knife and has to be arrested and thrown in jail. There, bereft of the cameras in her eyes (were there cameras in her eyes? I think there were cameras in her eyes) and her phone, she is free finally to tell people what she really thinks about them, not what she thinks they want to hear; free to think, rather than just rate, to actually express her opinion without the fear of what it will cost her.
Comments:
Black Mirror is seldom less than wonderful, and this is another case in point. Brooker shows us in all its stark, naked, supremely stupid reality the kind of world we’re heading for, where our consumerist, image-conscious, ratings-obsessed slavery to social media ends up dumbing down the human race till all we are in the end is a statistic on someone else’s phone. People are now discriminated not by colour or race, but by rating. Shows you how empty, hollow and really faceless and grey Facebook and Instagram and all that **** really is. I hated this for the image it portrayed of society, or rather for showing me the truth, but I loved it for the very same reason. If there’s one man who tells it like it is and does not give a ****, it’s Charlie Brooker. Excellent story, even if the behaviour of the characters made me grind my teeth. I imagine I was supposed to.
Slightly disappointed in the ending: A bit downbeat but with a clever and important message. I would have liked to have seen Lacie spill out Naomi’s secrets and that resulting in all her friends downvoting her, making her as miserable and as much an outcast as Lacie, perhaps losing her husband.
Rating: A++