"What if feelz but too much?" - A San Junipero commentary / picspam of joy
OK so I may have become a little obsessed with the Black Mirror episode "San Junipero", released on Netflix last week. (If you haven't seen it yet, DO NOT READ THIS. INSTEAD, CONSIDER WATCHING THE EPISODE. WITH YOUR EYES AND NETFLIX AND VISUAL CORTEX. There are going to be spoilers.) I'm not the only one; plenty of people on social meeeeeja loved it, were moved to tears and consider it one of the best bits of telly for aaaages. Some of these people are quite unlikely too, such as the Scottish comedian "Daft Limmy", who said "That San Junipero episode of Black Mirror is one of the top 10 things I've ever watched in my whole life." Not only its fans are unlikely, either. Nothing Charlie Brooker has written before anticipated it, not even "Be Right Back", the previous award holder of "not the most depressingly bleak episode of Black Mirror". Some people have pointed out that it comes at a perfect time, during a year in which the killing off of queer women characters in telly shows reached saturation point. Check out Autostaddle's definitive guide if you haven't already:
http://www.autostraddle.com/all-65-dead-lesbian-and-bisexual-characters-on-tv-and-how-they-died-312315/
You might say "San Junipero" isn't a conscious reaction to this, given that it was in development before this blew up. But the "Bury Your Gays" trope (I won't link to TV Tropes, thank me later) has been building for a long ass time and Brooker is easily media-savvy enough to have been aware of it. That he wrote a happy ending for a lesbian/bi couple is great. That they get the happiest ending Black Mirror has available is astonishing. This puts it best:
http://possibilistfanfiction.tumblr.com/post/152231091766/almost-every-show-on-tv-see-those-lesbians-what#152231091766
But it isn't just a heart-warming queer lagoon in the middle of an otherwise disturbing season. It's one of the most densely packed episodes of TV I can remember, with almost every moment doing two or three things at once, many of them not apparent on a first watch or operating subconsciously. So, because I like to smash up things I love, we're going to go through this, Lego brick by Lego brick, looking at the deftness of the writing, cinematography, direction and performances.
"Camp engages in a redefinition of cultural meaning through a juxtaposition of an outmoded past alongside that which is technologically, stylistically, and sartorially contemporary." - Andrew Ross
1. When The Night Falls Down
Unlike some episodes we don't get a "cold open" scene before the episode title, so this caption doubles as a location marker. In the background we can hear waves lapping, which we then cut to.
(Google maps informs me that the only place in our cold, stoopid world called San Junipero is a street in California called San Junipero Drive. It's not very gay. The sainted Junípero Serra himself was an 18th century Franciscan friar canonised by Pope Francis around this time last year, despite opposition from some native Americans who felt that his role in their ancestors' forced conversion was maybe not the loveliest thing ever. According to wikipedia, a state senator tried to get a bill through to replace a statue of Serra with one of bisexual astronaut Sally Ride, but it was kicked into the long grass (the bill, not the statue). It's almost as if Brooker went, "no, leave the statue where it is, I'll just paint a MASSIVE FUCKING RAINBOW on it". Or maybe he just thought San Junipero sounded like the typical name of a Californian town. I don't know.)
Our first time marker comes with a shot of a cinema poster of The Lost Boys, released in the summer of 1987. It's a horror film (so far, so Black Mirror), but it also falls into the "eighties nostalgia" hybrid-genre due to its brace of Coreys, and other famous eighties kid actors. Eighties nostalgia is in this year, but more than some shows - hi, Stranger Things - "San Junipero" is partly about nostalgia at the level of theme. In this shot are the main colours of our palette, pastel pink and turquoise. As the shot develops we see they belong to the disco "Tucker's", and we hear Belinda Carlisle singing "Heaven is a Place on Earth".
As this point it's worth introducing a couple of ideas. Firstly, I have a pet theory that in the most satisfying stories, moments in the first half are balanced by harmonic moments in the second half, and the point at which something appears mirrors the point at which it's returned to; that is, the earlier in the first half something is introduced, the later in the second half the moment of balance should ideally come. I'm going to call these pairings "balance points", though I'm prepared to accept there might already be a posh technical term I don't know about. Therefore, one of the reasons that the use of this song at the end is so powerful is its early seeding here.
Second, there's a convention that left-to-right travel across the screen denotes travelling on an outward journey, right-to-left back home. You see this in for example the Lord of the Rings movies. It's probably because in the west we read from left to right. Yes, it's a subconscious thing, but think how odd it is when a side-scrolling platformer scrolls from right to left. I mention this because we now see our heroine, Yorkie, enter the screen from the left walking to the right. She's not home, she's on a journey, she's got somewhere to be.
But she doesn't know it yet, because she hesitates. The sound of the radio is replaced with ambient music and sound, including her own sigh. This environment isn't hers, yet.
While we're still on her we hear Kelly's voice, establishing that she only wants to have some fun. As we do, the close ups on Yorkie reveal that her colours are pastel pink and turquoise, like the club. Perhaps she belongs here after all, or will. Meanwhile, the background is out-of-focus, detached, abstract.
Kelly is introduced walking towards us, the background in focus, before heading off to the left. She belongs here, or at least we think she does. Wes says "we've only got a couple of hours, so let's use it". The important of time as a valuable and limited resource will be focussed on as the story develops, but here it's not given any particular prominence; we have no reason to believe that the world we're looking at literally stops at midnight, at least for these characters. Kelly heads into the pink and turquoise portal. Yorkie, of course, follows. Once inside, she moves from right to left. She sticks out amongst the clientele, but perhaps belongs here more than the rest of the party-goers do.
WE LOVE THIS GUY. He just wants to talk video games. "It's got different endings... depending on if you're in one or two player". Here he lays out the central dynamic of the story. He recommends "Top Speed", in which a red car crashes. Yorkie doesn't like this. Red (and crashing) cars will also recur, but the one this one most resembles doesn't show up until the end of the episode. Balance again, and also redemption: Yorkie turns a car that crashes into one that doesn't, and one that she refuses to take control of into one where she is firmly in the driving seat.
Yorkie says she just wants to get her bearings. Right now, we're reading her character, trying to fit her into an established type. It's not too hard: she's tall, socially awkward but pretty; and she's a redhead in the eighties, so there's a dollop of Molly Ringwald.
It's also not hard to interpret the "meet cute" scene that follows with Kelly, in which Yorkie helps her get away from a creepy guy by claiming she has five months to live. She's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, perhaps she takes the awkward girl under her wing and shows her that without the glasses, she's hot. We might also, depending on how savvy we are, be thinking she's the greedy, hedonistic bisexual stereotype who doesn't do "feelings". Maybe, we're thinking, Yorkie is the closeted baby-dyke afraid to come out to her folks. These are all reasonable assumptions from this and several subsequent scenes, but they're completely wrong: Yorkie isn't confused or bicurious, and she already came out to her folks; Kelly had a monogamous long-term relationship. This is what the screenwriter J Michael Straczynski once called "falling for the okey-doke" - you think you're a step ahead of the writer, but you're not. Straczynski gave us one of the earliest long-form examples of this on TV in Babylon 5's Londo Mollari. He's also co-creator of Netflix's Sense8 which has a couple in it not a million miles away from Kelly and Yorkie; Gugu Mbatha-Raw and her opposite number in that show, Freema Agyemen, played sisters on Doctor Who; and Sense8's other co-creators, the Wachowskis, as well as been as queer as a jug of giraffes, gave us The Matrix. Finally, there's a similar intentionally misleading character-dynamic towards the start of one of my favourite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film that explores environments that exist only in the mind and which turns out to be surprisingly romantic compared to the other output of its writer, another cynic called Charlie. None of this is particularly relevant, but it shows how a viewer interprets what they see by pulling in things that seem to work in harmony.
"Five months to live", by the way, is actually a cautious estimate, if the rest of the episode is anything to go by. Possibly at this point we're wondering if the twist is indeed that Yorkie is dying. This is also misdirection; the actual twist is that they're both reaching the end of their lives. We're five minutes in at this point, and at the "balance point" five minutes from the end, Kelly is wrestling with the dilemma of what to do about her own passing.
"Do I have to red-light you?" Kelly asks Wes. Another part of the okey-doke for a sci-fi anthology show is the game of what, exactly is the sci-fi part and how does it factor in to what we're seeing. The line is specific enough to hint that the eighties we're looking at is on some level ersatz, but not specific enough to guarantee it. Some Black Mirror episodes lay it out early on, this one derives some of its interest on first watch from drip-feeding the ideas. Given that this is a character-driven story rather than plot-driven like "Hated in the Nation", that's a good idea. It encourages you to pay closer attention.
(It's worth pausing here a moment to note how odd it is that in a lot of publicity for the show, including the early pre-publicity for season three, this still has been used to represent the season instead of a more typical Black-Mirrory shot culled from an episode such as "Men Against Fire" or "Playtest". Perhaps they sensed that this was going to be a special episode. Or perhaps they just thought that Gugu was rocking that purple jacket, and the world needed to know.)
By the way, I love the moment when Kelly mishears "Yorkie" as "Yurgie". I love my fictional characters to have odd names. While we're on names, Kelly calls the bar-tender "blondie", which he scoffs at. Does he not know? Has he not looked in a virtual mirror? Is he bald in his other life? Why is he even working, anyway? Does he enjoy it? Or is he a simulated avatar? Has she just broken his programming by causing him to ponder the philosophy of hair?
2. I Wait For You And You Come Around
While at the bar, Kelly explicitly does what we're doing. "I'm... regarding you." She decides that the glasses are an affectation, but an appropriate one, and the rest of Yorkie's ensemble is authentic. There's quite a bit to unpack here. Since the world is virtual, there is presumably no need for glasses. On the other hand, while everyone else is cosplaying the eighties and trying too hard, Yorkie is being herself. We later conclude that Yorkie probably doesn't remember dressing much differently; she's just stepped out of the eighties as well as just stepped into them. Kelly, we might later conclude, enjoys the eighties at least partly in a detached, ironic manner. However, the surface reading works, too; even during the actual eighties, or any other time, most people dress to fit in.
While she's being regarded, pink and turquoise Yorkie is framed by pink and turquoise neon and even the glasses, that do nothing else, reflect the same colours like a mirror. Everything about her effortlessly fits. A trope subversion - she doesn't need to remove the glasses to be attractive. But we'll come back to that.
"Dance floors aren't my thing." Another okey-doke; we think it's confirming that she's a shy ingénue. In the other world, she's actually tetraplegic. It's not quite at the balance point, but at the end she'll be just as at ease as Kelly on the dance-floor. This isn't just a queer love story or a biracial love story, it's also a senior-citizen love story and, in its own, idiosyncratic way, a love story about disability (others are more qualified than me to develop that part of the analysis, so I'll leave it there).
Meanwhile, we get a series of beautiful POV shots that serve to emphasise the relationship between the two characters despite how far apart they currently are. This extreme version of shot reverse shot is fairly common these days, but used to be a signature of Jonathan Demme, as in the famous Clarice / Hannibal scene in The Silence of the Lambs. It serves to ramp up the intensity of the moment by drawing us into it, but also positions the characters as equal audience-surrogates, making Kelly a co-protagonist from this point. But Yorkie is still favoured, the slow-motion and ambient sound bringing back her sense of alienation from the opening sequence.
"You're stupid!" "Thank you!" Later, Kelly will greet Yorkie in the other world with "Hello, stoopid!" Outside, in the rain-soaked, neon-soaked back alley, we get a taste of Yorkie's back-story. To us, it sounds like her family is very strict. To Kelly it must seem extraordinary, knowing that Yorkie must be old or dead. She presumably thinks by family Yorkie means her children. (At the balance point, we hear about Kelly losing her daughter and her husband's refusal to come to San Junipero.) But Kelly comes on too strong and is rejected. (At the balance point, Yorkie comes on too strong and is rejected.) And... scene.
I didn't pick up on it on first watch, but in the background to this caption, you can hear muffled voices and machinery, perhaps our first flavour of the other world.
A clothes change montage, including an explicit Molly Ringwald reference! A little meta-textual humour, perhaps, on a second watch, once we realise that people in San Junipero can change clothes at will and thus we might be watching this happen in something a lot closer to real-time than we first thought. Each "look" is without the glasses except her default look, a variation of which she eventually returns to. Significantly, though, whereas for example her "Addicted to Love" look resembles an extra from that video, her default look is introduced by "Girlfriend in a Coma". In hindsight it seems like a obvious clue, but it passed me by completely on first watch (probably because I was too busy going "Yay! The Smiths!"). The return of her default look, though, is accompanied by "Wishing Well". So something has changed: she's gone from dwelling on her present predicament to wondering about a better future.
Meanwhile, Kelly is still trying to shake off Wes. We start to get bigger clues now. "The locals? They're like... dead people. [...] I don't want some kind of boring romance, OK? Like, Jesus, 'put us in a retirement home' deal." The song playing in Tucker's is "Living in a Box" (A song by Living in a Box... Boxception!). A bar-bore tells Kelly that "both my kneecaps had kind of just worn down". While on the dance-floor, INXS tell us "All you got is this moment / The 21st Century's yesterday".
In the bathroom, Yorkie and Kelly are separated by the gap between two mirrors. "Just make this easy for me," says Yorkie.
Kelly reaches out, making a connection; but in the mirrors, both are still visibly distinct. At the balance point, in the other world, Kelly asks Greg if she can make a brief, unauthorised connection with Yorkie. Driving away from the disco, Kelly tells Yorkie "I'm a tourist, just like you." Shortly after, they're run off the road. At the balance point, Greg tells Kelly in the other world about Yorkie's accident.
3. And The World's Alive
Kelly's home-from-home is an empty beach house. (They enter it from right-to-left.) It reminds me of the important role an empty beach house plays in Eternal Sunshine. Yorkie picks up a photo of Kelly's daughter, assuming it's Kelly's mother. Kelly doesn't correct her, but does pull her in for a kiss. We can't know this now, but perhaps there's a part of Kelly that never fully accepted her loss, that this moment in particular and San Junipero in general is an escape from things she isn't ready to face up to. At the balance point, Kelly kisses the forehead of Yorkie, their first physical contact in that world.
As an aside, I like that the sex scene isn't overlong and explicit. I have nothing against nudity, but I do tend to think that contemporary television gets carried away with its freedom to be edgier than used to be allowed, with the excuse that it's more adult.
The next scene is dark. Not "edgy" dark, or "TV dark" where there are still lots of lights on (Elementary, I'm looking at you - wouldn't like to see Sherlock's electricity bill), but dark as in we're using our rods and not our cones. As a result the image is naturally desaturated. At the balance point there is also an absence of hue, but by contrast the facility is all whites and greys. Kelly tells us about her bisexuality, her husband who didn't stick around, and how she's just here to have a good time. "Time's nearly up," and we get a sudden burst of colour from the alarm clock that says 11:59pm, evoking both Groundhog Day (another story that uses a fantasy concept to tell a love story) and Cinderella. "Then let's lie here," replies Yorkie. She's been just lying somewhere for decades, but now that Kelly's there with her, it's all she wants to do. We watch as the clock changes to midnight, and suddenly it's one week later again. End of act one.
4. With The Sound Of Kids On The Street Outside
Yorkie heads straight into Tucker's, but Kelly's not there, possibly because she would be ashamed to be seen with someone sporting double denim. She's advised to try The Quagmire, a place of both giggity giggity and giggity goo. Also snek! My first real complaint is that this place could be edgier, or at least more overtly hedonistic. Still, the point is made.
Yorkie bumps into Wes there, who quickly reads her: "You too, huh." He advises she try a different time, the first real indication of the nature of this place. Oddly he doesn't recommend 1983, the year of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". I guess they couldn't get the rights? Thus begins another montage.
One thing that appears to be established here is that part-timers at least can't switch eras mid-stream, so Yorkie's quest to locate Kelly takes several real-life weeks. Amusing era-appropriate caption fonts add another, more immediate layer. In 1980, there's an old car advert playing. In the nineties, multiple Alanises (Alanes?) are mucking about in a car, which is dangerous and they should know better. Although we don't hear it, the lyrics open with an unfortunate story about an old man who wins the lottery and dies the next day. In fact, most of the lyrics have something to say about the story, but Yorkie isn't listening, which is a little too ironic, don't ya think? This era's teen horror film is the painfully self-aware Scream, and it's during this sequence that I realise I still dress like it's the nineties.
She finally tracks Kelly down to 2002 where she is playing with Video Game Guy, who just looks so happy and I want to cuddle him. Yorkie accuses Kelly of hiding from her. "How is this your era?" How is it anyone's? Did they even have music in 2002? (Yes, I know "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is playing. It was released in 2001. I do, though, at this point wonder whether the DJ is trolling the characters. Maybe God is the DJ.) Did they have anything? If you wanted to pick a non-year, it's a great choice. (Gugu is still rocking the look, though, damn her.) Kelly tries to tell Yorkie she feels nothing, but she's lying. At the dead centre of the story, she punches the mirror and it cracks. The brief opening credits for Black Mirror show glass cracking, but after we tilt down to see Kelly is physically unharmed, we tilt back up to see the mirror whole and restored. For once, this Black Mirror refuses to stay broken. Time for the second half of the story.
Yorkie is sitting on the edge of the roof. "Please tell me you've got your pain sliders set to zero." Although by this stage we're sure we're looking at a virtual world, this is arguably the biggest indicator that they're not time travellers instead. They also discuss how many of San Junipero's clientèle are "full-timers", i.e. actually dead - Kelly suggests at least 80%. She adds, "I don't know how long there is," the first hint that she is dying.
They go to the beach house. It's brighter, warmer, than before, more like a real home. Kelly tells Yorkie she is dying of cancer, and that she isn't going to stay in San Junipero full time. When asked why, she says that when her husband died two years ago, he refused to do so himself. As they discuss this, the shallow focus causes the background to become more abstract than ever before, San Junipero dissolving into a mere idea, something distant and conceptual. This reminds me of the way Canal Street was shot in the first few episodes of Queer As Folk UK, turning an ordinary Manchester road into something bigger, deeper, richer, more iconic. Only now do they talk about the possibility of meeting in the other, more concrete world. Yorkie is set against the idea, but Kelly insists.
5. When You Walk Into The Room
Our first real look at the other world. Kelly emerges from behind a sign that says "Assisted Living". Although this carries its surface meaning, it also hints at the counterpart, assisted dying, i.e. euthanasia. You could argue that scheduling a passing into San Junipero on a specific date could be described as "assisted living".
The deeper focus and more naturalistic colour grading establishes this place in contrast to San Junipero; as its foil. Note that it's still picturesque; the contrast is not between a nice place and a nasty one. If anything, it's refreshing, a moment of relief. On her journey towards Yorkie, Kelly travels from right to left.
When she enters Yorkie's room, the most colourful things are Kelly's jacket and a pastel pink light at the head of Yorkie's bed, bathing her old, unfamiliar, unresponding face in Yorkishness.
(At this point I wonder, does Yorkie ever blink? Do they put drops in her eyes? Or was the first thing she said to Greg via the comm-box "My eyes are really itchy, can something be done about that?")
Now we finally meet Greg. His conversation with Kelly pays off a lot of what has been set up thus far, but in a way that propels the narrative forward into the third act. He tells her Yorkie's been in the same physical state for over forty years, since she was 21, having just tried to come out to her parents, with little success. In addition, Kelly mentions that one of the purposes of San Junipero is to help Alzheimer's sufferers by immersing them in nostalgia. Although she doesn't give her opinion of that, it feeds into her attitude towards the place, that there is something phoney about it, that it tries too hard, that it's only useful for fleeting fun. "Uploaded to the cloud, sounds like heaven", she says, with a trace of sarcasm. Time, an untrustworthy concept already, is against her: Yorkie is scheduled to pass the following day. Had she hid somewhen other than 2002, they might never have touched in this world. She persuades Greg to give her and Yorkie an unauthorised moment together.
6. You Pull Me Close And We Start To Move
Although both characters are protagonists, in the first half we were mainly following Yorkie, in the second half mainly Kelly. This can be subtle since they spend a lot of time together, but here, as we return to San Junipero, we begin behind Kelly as she runs out onto the beach to find Yorkie. Only when the camera moves a little to one side is Yorkie revealed.
Kelly gets down on bended knee to propose that Yorkie marries her instead. "Why not someone you've connected with?" The choice of words is oddly hesitant for such a moment. Perhaps she's telling herself that this is all just temporary. But Yorkie has no such reservation. She joins her on her knees, emphasising their commonality, the way they mirror one another.
We dissolve into the wedding ceremony; the two worlds literally blurring together. She passes as a single tear rolls down her face, the only physical movement she has made in this world.
From her perspective we see that world dissolve effortlessly back to San Junipero. We hear her take her first full-time breath in this world, as we heard her take her first part-time breath at the beginning. Sitting on the beach, she finally discards her glasses, the last remnant of the other world.
Kelly arrives in a white wedding dress, but something's wrong. Although she's discarded the glasses, Yorkie's still in her standard look. At Kelly's prompting, she switches to a white wedding dress, so they mirror each other again. The dress comes complete with a veil, but she's evolved past those, so she pulls it off and lets the wind take it. Since the sun hasn't set yet on San Junipero, the tone is a hybrid of the two worlds, importing from the other world whites and light greys, with everything more or less in focus. Kelly's red car stands out from its surroundings more than before.
7. And We're Spinning With The Stars Above
But this is at least a little illusionary. Kelly and Yorkie are not quite on the same page. As the sun sets and San Junipero resumes its blurred, dreamlike quality, their differences come to a head. Yorkie doesn't want a few hours a week, followed by nothing. She wants forever. "Who can even make sense of forever?" says Kelly. Note that the argument here is not the one we might typically expect, that San Junipero is fake, a virtual place, not the real world. Elsewhere - including elsewhere in Black Mirror - we would dwell on that frankly rather tired notion. When Yorkie says "this is real", she's talking as much about the connection between her and Kelly as the environment around them. Yorkie points out that in needn't mean forever; unlike Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, and you can leave. Kelly's refusal to spend any time in San Junipero after she passes over begins to seem selfish - could she not spare a few weeks or months? What's this really about? Yorkie touches a raw nerve, bringing up Kelly's late husband. "He chose to leave you."
(Gugu's reaction to this, and indeed every choice she makes from here to the end of the scene, is incredible. She has to sell the idea of being someone who lived a long, full life, with everything that entails, and is now facing the natural end of her existence. She has 100% conviction the whole way through. Please give her all the awards, thank you.)
Yorkie goes too far, accuses Kelly's husband of selfishness. Kelly slaps her. Then we start to get at the real core of this. She was with him for 49 years. "The bond, the commitment, the boredom, the yearning, the laughter, the love of it, the fucking love." But there's more. She tells Yorkie of their daughter who died at 39. "We felt that heartbreak as one." She tells Yorkie that Yorkie can't understand. It's true, but it's also unfair. Yorkie never got the chance to have that experience. She thinks she's starting out on a version of that very journey now. Finally, we get to Kelly's real objection. Richard refused to go full-time in San Junipero because their daughter died before it was an option. He wouldn't go because she couldn't. Now Kelly won't because he didn't. She doesn't believe in an afterlife, or at least, not a spiritual one. Her objection is a personal one, based on loyalty to someone she now believes is "nowhere". She changes tack, accuses people like Wes of wanting to spend forever where nothing matters. "All those lost fucks at The Quagmire, trying anything to feel something." But this reveals more about herself than about Wes; it was her, not him, who insisted on fun with no consequences. The real dilemma she's now faced with is not whether she betrays Richard by going full-time in San Junipero for at least a little while, but whether meaning can be found there, and whether she's prepared for it if it is. The answer to at least the first question ought to be obvious; meaning can be as easily found in this world as the other.
That's when she takes off. Speeds away. Crashes. (Let's take a moment to say how beautifully executed the crash is.) Perhaps, subconsciously, having tried to get Yorkie to understand her pain, she now wants to start to understand Yorkie's. She lies still for a moment, maybe much the same as Yorkie did once, a long time ago. The difference this time is that there are hands extended to pick her up. Connection. Redemption. But fleeting; it's midnight, and Cinders has to leave.
8. And You Lift Me Up In A Wave Of Love
Back in the other world, Kelly's body continues to degenerate. If she's going to change her mind, she doesn't have long. "Well, OK then," she murmurs, as if talking to someone who isn't there. "All things considered, I guess I'm ready." Her carer is confused. "For what?" "For the rest of it." Cut to San Junipero, where Yorkie gets in her swish red sports car and drives off to the strains of Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth".
End credits.
WHAT? HANG ON, WHAT? Oh, wait. There's more. They just decided to troll us with the possibility that we might be in for another pessimistic, or at least ambiguous, Black Mirror ending. But no. The credits are intercut with shots from both San Junipero and the other world.
A literal "bury your gays" moment, as Kelly's coffin is lowered into its grave. But there's an ironic subversion of the trope going on, too: though the engraving links her to her dead husband and daughter, she's distinct, as well; her engraving is fresh, new.
Yorkie pulls up to the beach house, from right to left; coming home. ("I reach for you, and you bring me home", Belinda is singing.) For a heart-stopping moment, we dare to hope. Then our wish comes true; Kelly steps out of the house and joins her, and together they drive off at Top Speed. ("In this world we're just beginning / To understand the miracle of living".)
(It's been suggested that this part is a little rushed; that we ought to see a proper reconciliation scene between the two. I would argue that the undeniable emotional power of the ending partly comes from the fact that we are held in suspense until the last possible moment, and all the feelz can gush forth at once like a dam bursting.)
In the other world, as Belinda hits the chorus, a robotic arms plugs a couple of nondescript little dongles into a vast blank of twinkling lights. In San Junipero, Yorkie and Kelly dance, now completely in sync, feeling the music as one.
As they spin around one another, we match-cut to a close up of the two dongles, side-by-side, mirroring one another, their lights spinning in harmony.
In our final shot, we pull back and back and back from the rows of lights, universalising our story, leaving us with the idea that this isn't just a happy ending for our protagonists, but potentially for thousands upon thousands of others we never get a chance to meet.
Some people, WRONG people, have interpreted this intercutting as ambiguous, suggesting that it emphasises the cold, prosaic nature of the facility, leaving us with a sense how small and trivial our story was after all, and that our friends are now nothing more than zeroes and ones in an ocean of other zeroes and ones. That's fine. Good endings probably should leave a little something open to interpretation. I tend to think of this as being, as Q Magazine used to say, "the spoonful of medicine that helps the sugar go down". My interpretation is best, because Belinda's still playing, and the joy of kitsch is part of the camp aesthetic. Besides which, "White Christmas" is a very popular episode with fans of Black Mirror, and you can't accept the negative power of that episode's ending without also accepting the corresponding positive power of this episode's ending, since one is a black mirror of the other. (One player versus two player.)
So there we are. (This turned out longer than at least one of my degree dissertations, crikey. And I still feel like I only just scratched the surface.) San Junipero is a place of Joy and Joyness, my favourite episode of the series, my favourite "thing" of 2016 and I love it to tiny pieces, which it is now in.
NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S BLACK CAT TAX:
http://www.autostraddle.com/all-65-dead-lesbian-and-bisexual-characters-on-tv-and-how-they-died-312315/
You might say "San Junipero" isn't a conscious reaction to this, given that it was in development before this blew up. But the "Bury Your Gays" trope (I won't link to TV Tropes, thank me later) has been building for a long ass time and Brooker is easily media-savvy enough to have been aware of it. That he wrote a happy ending for a lesbian/bi couple is great. That they get the happiest ending Black Mirror has available is astonishing. This puts it best:
http://possibilistfanfiction.tumblr.com/post/152231091766/almost-every-show-on-tv-see-those-lesbians-what#152231091766
- almost every show on tv: see those lesbians? what a great representation. we are gonna kill them now, cause isn't this realistic??
- black mirror, a show with literally none happy endings whatsoever: this beautiful interracial wlw couple is gonna live forever.
- almost every show on tv: but-
- black mirror: FOREVER
Click to viewBut it isn't just a heart-warming queer lagoon in the middle of an otherwise disturbing season. It's one of the most densely packed episodes of TV I can remember, with almost every moment doing two or three things at once, many of them not apparent on a first watch or operating subconsciously. So, because I like to smash up things I love, we're going to go through this, Lego brick by Lego brick, looking at the deftness of the writing, cinematography, direction and performances.
"Camp engages in a redefinition of cultural meaning through a juxtaposition of an outmoded past alongside that which is technologically, stylistically, and sartorially contemporary." - Andrew Ross
1. When The Night Falls Down
Unlike some episodes we don't get a "cold open" scene before the episode title, so this caption doubles as a location marker. In the background we can hear waves lapping, which we then cut to.
(Google maps informs me that the only place in our cold, stoopid world called San Junipero is a street in California called San Junipero Drive. It's not very gay. The sainted Junípero Serra himself was an 18th century Franciscan friar canonised by Pope Francis around this time last year, despite opposition from some native Americans who felt that his role in their ancestors' forced conversion was maybe not the loveliest thing ever. According to wikipedia, a state senator tried to get a bill through to replace a statue of Serra with one of bisexual astronaut Sally Ride, but it was kicked into the long grass (the bill, not the statue). It's almost as if Brooker went, "no, leave the statue where it is, I'll just paint a MASSIVE FUCKING RAINBOW on it". Or maybe he just thought San Junipero sounded like the typical name of a Californian town. I don't know.)
Our first time marker comes with a shot of a cinema poster of The Lost Boys, released in the summer of 1987. It's a horror film (so far, so Black Mirror), but it also falls into the "eighties nostalgia" hybrid-genre due to its brace of Coreys, and other famous eighties kid actors. Eighties nostalgia is in this year, but more than some shows - hi, Stranger Things - "San Junipero" is partly about nostalgia at the level of theme. In this shot are the main colours of our palette, pastel pink and turquoise. As the shot develops we see they belong to the disco "Tucker's", and we hear Belinda Carlisle singing "Heaven is a Place on Earth".
As this point it's worth introducing a couple of ideas. Firstly, I have a pet theory that in the most satisfying stories, moments in the first half are balanced by harmonic moments in the second half, and the point at which something appears mirrors the point at which it's returned to; that is, the earlier in the first half something is introduced, the later in the second half the moment of balance should ideally come. I'm going to call these pairings "balance points", though I'm prepared to accept there might already be a posh technical term I don't know about. Therefore, one of the reasons that the use of this song at the end is so powerful is its early seeding here.
Second, there's a convention that left-to-right travel across the screen denotes travelling on an outward journey, right-to-left back home. You see this in for example the Lord of the Rings movies. It's probably because in the west we read from left to right. Yes, it's a subconscious thing, but think how odd it is when a side-scrolling platformer scrolls from right to left. I mention this because we now see our heroine, Yorkie, enter the screen from the left walking to the right. She's not home, she's on a journey, she's got somewhere to be.
But she doesn't know it yet, because she hesitates. The sound of the radio is replaced with ambient music and sound, including her own sigh. This environment isn't hers, yet.
While we're still on her we hear Kelly's voice, establishing that she only wants to have some fun. As we do, the close ups on Yorkie reveal that her colours are pastel pink and turquoise, like the club. Perhaps she belongs here after all, or will. Meanwhile, the background is out-of-focus, detached, abstract.
Kelly is introduced walking towards us, the background in focus, before heading off to the left. She belongs here, or at least we think she does. Wes says "we've only got a couple of hours, so let's use it". The important of time as a valuable and limited resource will be focussed on as the story develops, but here it's not given any particular prominence; we have no reason to believe that the world we're looking at literally stops at midnight, at least for these characters. Kelly heads into the pink and turquoise portal. Yorkie, of course, follows. Once inside, she moves from right to left. She sticks out amongst the clientele, but perhaps belongs here more than the rest of the party-goers do.
WE LOVE THIS GUY. He just wants to talk video games. "It's got different endings... depending on if you're in one or two player". Here he lays out the central dynamic of the story. He recommends "Top Speed", in which a red car crashes. Yorkie doesn't like this. Red (and crashing) cars will also recur, but the one this one most resembles doesn't show up until the end of the episode. Balance again, and also redemption: Yorkie turns a car that crashes into one that doesn't, and one that she refuses to take control of into one where she is firmly in the driving seat.
Yorkie says she just wants to get her bearings. Right now, we're reading her character, trying to fit her into an established type. It's not too hard: she's tall, socially awkward but pretty; and she's a redhead in the eighties, so there's a dollop of Molly Ringwald.
It's also not hard to interpret the "meet cute" scene that follows with Kelly, in which Yorkie helps her get away from a creepy guy by claiming she has five months to live. She's the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, perhaps she takes the awkward girl under her wing and shows her that without the glasses, she's hot. We might also, depending on how savvy we are, be thinking she's the greedy, hedonistic bisexual stereotype who doesn't do "feelings". Maybe, we're thinking, Yorkie is the closeted baby-dyke afraid to come out to her folks. These are all reasonable assumptions from this and several subsequent scenes, but they're completely wrong: Yorkie isn't confused or bicurious, and she already came out to her folks; Kelly had a monogamous long-term relationship. This is what the screenwriter J Michael Straczynski once called "falling for the okey-doke" - you think you're a step ahead of the writer, but you're not. Straczynski gave us one of the earliest long-form examples of this on TV in Babylon 5's Londo Mollari. He's also co-creator of Netflix's Sense8 which has a couple in it not a million miles away from Kelly and Yorkie; Gugu Mbatha-Raw and her opposite number in that show, Freema Agyemen, played sisters on Doctor Who; and Sense8's other co-creators, the Wachowskis, as well as been as queer as a jug of giraffes, gave us The Matrix. Finally, there's a similar intentionally misleading character-dynamic towards the start of one of my favourite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a film that explores environments that exist only in the mind and which turns out to be surprisingly romantic compared to the other output of its writer, another cynic called Charlie. None of this is particularly relevant, but it shows how a viewer interprets what they see by pulling in things that seem to work in harmony.
"Five months to live", by the way, is actually a cautious estimate, if the rest of the episode is anything to go by. Possibly at this point we're wondering if the twist is indeed that Yorkie is dying. This is also misdirection; the actual twist is that they're both reaching the end of their lives. We're five minutes in at this point, and at the "balance point" five minutes from the end, Kelly is wrestling with the dilemma of what to do about her own passing.
"Do I have to red-light you?" Kelly asks Wes. Another part of the okey-doke for a sci-fi anthology show is the game of what, exactly is the sci-fi part and how does it factor in to what we're seeing. The line is specific enough to hint that the eighties we're looking at is on some level ersatz, but not specific enough to guarantee it. Some Black Mirror episodes lay it out early on, this one derives some of its interest on first watch from drip-feeding the ideas. Given that this is a character-driven story rather than plot-driven like "Hated in the Nation", that's a good idea. It encourages you to pay closer attention.
(It's worth pausing here a moment to note how odd it is that in a lot of publicity for the show, including the early pre-publicity for season three, this still has been used to represent the season instead of a more typical Black-Mirrory shot culled from an episode such as "Men Against Fire" or "Playtest". Perhaps they sensed that this was going to be a special episode. Or perhaps they just thought that Gugu was rocking that purple jacket, and the world needed to know.)
By the way, I love the moment when Kelly mishears "Yorkie" as "Yurgie". I love my fictional characters to have odd names. While we're on names, Kelly calls the bar-tender "blondie", which he scoffs at. Does he not know? Has he not looked in a virtual mirror? Is he bald in his other life? Why is he even working, anyway? Does he enjoy it? Or is he a simulated avatar? Has she just broken his programming by causing him to ponder the philosophy of hair?
2. I Wait For You And You Come Around
While at the bar, Kelly explicitly does what we're doing. "I'm... regarding you." She decides that the glasses are an affectation, but an appropriate one, and the rest of Yorkie's ensemble is authentic. There's quite a bit to unpack here. Since the world is virtual, there is presumably no need for glasses. On the other hand, while everyone else is cosplaying the eighties and trying too hard, Yorkie is being herself. We later conclude that Yorkie probably doesn't remember dressing much differently; she's just stepped out of the eighties as well as just stepped into them. Kelly, we might later conclude, enjoys the eighties at least partly in a detached, ironic manner. However, the surface reading works, too; even during the actual eighties, or any other time, most people dress to fit in.
While she's being regarded, pink and turquoise Yorkie is framed by pink and turquoise neon and even the glasses, that do nothing else, reflect the same colours like a mirror. Everything about her effortlessly fits. A trope subversion - she doesn't need to remove the glasses to be attractive. But we'll come back to that.
"Dance floors aren't my thing." Another okey-doke; we think it's confirming that she's a shy ingénue. In the other world, she's actually tetraplegic. It's not quite at the balance point, but at the end she'll be just as at ease as Kelly on the dance-floor. This isn't just a queer love story or a biracial love story, it's also a senior-citizen love story and, in its own, idiosyncratic way, a love story about disability (others are more qualified than me to develop that part of the analysis, so I'll leave it there).
Meanwhile, we get a series of beautiful POV shots that serve to emphasise the relationship between the two characters despite how far apart they currently are. This extreme version of shot reverse shot is fairly common these days, but used to be a signature of Jonathan Demme, as in the famous Clarice / Hannibal scene in The Silence of the Lambs. It serves to ramp up the intensity of the moment by drawing us into it, but also positions the characters as equal audience-surrogates, making Kelly a co-protagonist from this point. But Yorkie is still favoured, the slow-motion and ambient sound bringing back her sense of alienation from the opening sequence.
"You're stupid!" "Thank you!" Later, Kelly will greet Yorkie in the other world with "Hello, stoopid!" Outside, in the rain-soaked, neon-soaked back alley, we get a taste of Yorkie's back-story. To us, it sounds like her family is very strict. To Kelly it must seem extraordinary, knowing that Yorkie must be old or dead. She presumably thinks by family Yorkie means her children. (At the balance point, we hear about Kelly losing her daughter and her husband's refusal to come to San Junipero.) But Kelly comes on too strong and is rejected. (At the balance point, Yorkie comes on too strong and is rejected.) And... scene.
I didn't pick up on it on first watch, but in the background to this caption, you can hear muffled voices and machinery, perhaps our first flavour of the other world.
A clothes change montage, including an explicit Molly Ringwald reference! A little meta-textual humour, perhaps, on a second watch, once we realise that people in San Junipero can change clothes at will and thus we might be watching this happen in something a lot closer to real-time than we first thought. Each "look" is without the glasses except her default look, a variation of which she eventually returns to. Significantly, though, whereas for example her "Addicted to Love" look resembles an extra from that video, her default look is introduced by "Girlfriend in a Coma". In hindsight it seems like a obvious clue, but it passed me by completely on first watch (probably because I was too busy going "Yay! The Smiths!"). The return of her default look, though, is accompanied by "Wishing Well". So something has changed: she's gone from dwelling on her present predicament to wondering about a better future.
Meanwhile, Kelly is still trying to shake off Wes. We start to get bigger clues now. "The locals? They're like... dead people. [...] I don't want some kind of boring romance, OK? Like, Jesus, 'put us in a retirement home' deal." The song playing in Tucker's is "Living in a Box" (A song by Living in a Box... Boxception!). A bar-bore tells Kelly that "both my kneecaps had kind of just worn down". While on the dance-floor, INXS tell us "All you got is this moment / The 21st Century's yesterday".
In the bathroom, Yorkie and Kelly are separated by the gap between two mirrors. "Just make this easy for me," says Yorkie.
Kelly reaches out, making a connection; but in the mirrors, both are still visibly distinct. At the balance point, in the other world, Kelly asks Greg if she can make a brief, unauthorised connection with Yorkie. Driving away from the disco, Kelly tells Yorkie "I'm a tourist, just like you." Shortly after, they're run off the road. At the balance point, Greg tells Kelly in the other world about Yorkie's accident.
3. And The World's Alive
Kelly's home-from-home is an empty beach house. (They enter it from right-to-left.) It reminds me of the important role an empty beach house plays in Eternal Sunshine. Yorkie picks up a photo of Kelly's daughter, assuming it's Kelly's mother. Kelly doesn't correct her, but does pull her in for a kiss. We can't know this now, but perhaps there's a part of Kelly that never fully accepted her loss, that this moment in particular and San Junipero in general is an escape from things she isn't ready to face up to. At the balance point, Kelly kisses the forehead of Yorkie, their first physical contact in that world.
As an aside, I like that the sex scene isn't overlong and explicit. I have nothing against nudity, but I do tend to think that contemporary television gets carried away with its freedom to be edgier than used to be allowed, with the excuse that it's more adult.
The next scene is dark. Not "edgy" dark, or "TV dark" where there are still lots of lights on (Elementary, I'm looking at you - wouldn't like to see Sherlock's electricity bill), but dark as in we're using our rods and not our cones. As a result the image is naturally desaturated. At the balance point there is also an absence of hue, but by contrast the facility is all whites and greys. Kelly tells us about her bisexuality, her husband who didn't stick around, and how she's just here to have a good time. "Time's nearly up," and we get a sudden burst of colour from the alarm clock that says 11:59pm, evoking both Groundhog Day (another story that uses a fantasy concept to tell a love story) and Cinderella. "Then let's lie here," replies Yorkie. She's been just lying somewhere for decades, but now that Kelly's there with her, it's all she wants to do. We watch as the clock changes to midnight, and suddenly it's one week later again. End of act one.
4. With The Sound Of Kids On The Street Outside
Yorkie heads straight into Tucker's, but Kelly's not there, possibly because she would be ashamed to be seen with someone sporting double denim. She's advised to try The Quagmire, a place of both giggity giggity and giggity goo. Also snek! My first real complaint is that this place could be edgier, or at least more overtly hedonistic. Still, the point is made.
Yorkie bumps into Wes there, who quickly reads her: "You too, huh." He advises she try a different time, the first real indication of the nature of this place. Oddly he doesn't recommend 1983, the year of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". I guess they couldn't get the rights? Thus begins another montage.
One thing that appears to be established here is that part-timers at least can't switch eras mid-stream, so Yorkie's quest to locate Kelly takes several real-life weeks. Amusing era-appropriate caption fonts add another, more immediate layer. In 1980, there's an old car advert playing. In the nineties, multiple Alanises (Alanes?) are mucking about in a car, which is dangerous and they should know better. Although we don't hear it, the lyrics open with an unfortunate story about an old man who wins the lottery and dies the next day. In fact, most of the lyrics have something to say about the story, but Yorkie isn't listening, which is a little too ironic, don't ya think? This era's teen horror film is the painfully self-aware Scream, and it's during this sequence that I realise I still dress like it's the nineties.
She finally tracks Kelly down to 2002 where she is playing with Video Game Guy, who just looks so happy and I want to cuddle him. Yorkie accuses Kelly of hiding from her. "How is this your era?" How is it anyone's? Did they even have music in 2002? (Yes, I know "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is playing. It was released in 2001. I do, though, at this point wonder whether the DJ is trolling the characters. Maybe God is the DJ.) Did they have anything? If you wanted to pick a non-year, it's a great choice. (Gugu is still rocking the look, though, damn her.) Kelly tries to tell Yorkie she feels nothing, but she's lying. At the dead centre of the story, she punches the mirror and it cracks. The brief opening credits for Black Mirror show glass cracking, but after we tilt down to see Kelly is physically unharmed, we tilt back up to see the mirror whole and restored. For once, this Black Mirror refuses to stay broken. Time for the second half of the story.
Yorkie is sitting on the edge of the roof. "Please tell me you've got your pain sliders set to zero." Although by this stage we're sure we're looking at a virtual world, this is arguably the biggest indicator that they're not time travellers instead. They also discuss how many of San Junipero's clientèle are "full-timers", i.e. actually dead - Kelly suggests at least 80%. She adds, "I don't know how long there is," the first hint that she is dying.
They go to the beach house. It's brighter, warmer, than before, more like a real home. Kelly tells Yorkie she is dying of cancer, and that she isn't going to stay in San Junipero full time. When asked why, she says that when her husband died two years ago, he refused to do so himself. As they discuss this, the shallow focus causes the background to become more abstract than ever before, San Junipero dissolving into a mere idea, something distant and conceptual. This reminds me of the way Canal Street was shot in the first few episodes of Queer As Folk UK, turning an ordinary Manchester road into something bigger, deeper, richer, more iconic. Only now do they talk about the possibility of meeting in the other, more concrete world. Yorkie is set against the idea, but Kelly insists.
5. When You Walk Into The Room
Our first real look at the other world. Kelly emerges from behind a sign that says "Assisted Living". Although this carries its surface meaning, it also hints at the counterpart, assisted dying, i.e. euthanasia. You could argue that scheduling a passing into San Junipero on a specific date could be described as "assisted living".
The deeper focus and more naturalistic colour grading establishes this place in contrast to San Junipero; as its foil. Note that it's still picturesque; the contrast is not between a nice place and a nasty one. If anything, it's refreshing, a moment of relief. On her journey towards Yorkie, Kelly travels from right to left.
When she enters Yorkie's room, the most colourful things are Kelly's jacket and a pastel pink light at the head of Yorkie's bed, bathing her old, unfamiliar, unresponding face in Yorkishness.
(At this point I wonder, does Yorkie ever blink? Do they put drops in her eyes? Or was the first thing she said to Greg via the comm-box "My eyes are really itchy, can something be done about that?")
Now we finally meet Greg. His conversation with Kelly pays off a lot of what has been set up thus far, but in a way that propels the narrative forward into the third act. He tells her Yorkie's been in the same physical state for over forty years, since she was 21, having just tried to come out to her parents, with little success. In addition, Kelly mentions that one of the purposes of San Junipero is to help Alzheimer's sufferers by immersing them in nostalgia. Although she doesn't give her opinion of that, it feeds into her attitude towards the place, that there is something phoney about it, that it tries too hard, that it's only useful for fleeting fun. "Uploaded to the cloud, sounds like heaven", she says, with a trace of sarcasm. Time, an untrustworthy concept already, is against her: Yorkie is scheduled to pass the following day. Had she hid somewhen other than 2002, they might never have touched in this world. She persuades Greg to give her and Yorkie an unauthorised moment together.
6. You Pull Me Close And We Start To Move
Although both characters are protagonists, in the first half we were mainly following Yorkie, in the second half mainly Kelly. This can be subtle since they spend a lot of time together, but here, as we return to San Junipero, we begin behind Kelly as she runs out onto the beach to find Yorkie. Only when the camera moves a little to one side is Yorkie revealed.
Kelly gets down on bended knee to propose that Yorkie marries her instead. "Why not someone you've connected with?" The choice of words is oddly hesitant for such a moment. Perhaps she's telling herself that this is all just temporary. But Yorkie has no such reservation. She joins her on her knees, emphasising their commonality, the way they mirror one another.
We dissolve into the wedding ceremony; the two worlds literally blurring together. She passes as a single tear rolls down her face, the only physical movement she has made in this world.
From her perspective we see that world dissolve effortlessly back to San Junipero. We hear her take her first full-time breath in this world, as we heard her take her first part-time breath at the beginning. Sitting on the beach, she finally discards her glasses, the last remnant of the other world.
Kelly arrives in a white wedding dress, but something's wrong. Although she's discarded the glasses, Yorkie's still in her standard look. At Kelly's prompting, she switches to a white wedding dress, so they mirror each other again. The dress comes complete with a veil, but she's evolved past those, so she pulls it off and lets the wind take it. Since the sun hasn't set yet on San Junipero, the tone is a hybrid of the two worlds, importing from the other world whites and light greys, with everything more or less in focus. Kelly's red car stands out from its surroundings more than before.
7. And We're Spinning With The Stars Above
But this is at least a little illusionary. Kelly and Yorkie are not quite on the same page. As the sun sets and San Junipero resumes its blurred, dreamlike quality, their differences come to a head. Yorkie doesn't want a few hours a week, followed by nothing. She wants forever. "Who can even make sense of forever?" says Kelly. Note that the argument here is not the one we might typically expect, that San Junipero is fake, a virtual place, not the real world. Elsewhere - including elsewhere in Black Mirror - we would dwell on that frankly rather tired notion. When Yorkie says "this is real", she's talking as much about the connection between her and Kelly as the environment around them. Yorkie points out that in needn't mean forever; unlike Hotel California, you can check out any time you like, and you can leave. Kelly's refusal to spend any time in San Junipero after she passes over begins to seem selfish - could she not spare a few weeks or months? What's this really about? Yorkie touches a raw nerve, bringing up Kelly's late husband. "He chose to leave you."
(Gugu's reaction to this, and indeed every choice she makes from here to the end of the scene, is incredible. She has to sell the idea of being someone who lived a long, full life, with everything that entails, and is now facing the natural end of her existence. She has 100% conviction the whole way through. Please give her all the awards, thank you.)
Yorkie goes too far, accuses Kelly's husband of selfishness. Kelly slaps her. Then we start to get at the real core of this. She was with him for 49 years. "The bond, the commitment, the boredom, the yearning, the laughter, the love of it, the fucking love." But there's more. She tells Yorkie of their daughter who died at 39. "We felt that heartbreak as one." She tells Yorkie that Yorkie can't understand. It's true, but it's also unfair. Yorkie never got the chance to have that experience. She thinks she's starting out on a version of that very journey now. Finally, we get to Kelly's real objection. Richard refused to go full-time in San Junipero because their daughter died before it was an option. He wouldn't go because she couldn't. Now Kelly won't because he didn't. She doesn't believe in an afterlife, or at least, not a spiritual one. Her objection is a personal one, based on loyalty to someone she now believes is "nowhere". She changes tack, accuses people like Wes of wanting to spend forever where nothing matters. "All those lost fucks at The Quagmire, trying anything to feel something." But this reveals more about herself than about Wes; it was her, not him, who insisted on fun with no consequences. The real dilemma she's now faced with is not whether she betrays Richard by going full-time in San Junipero for at least a little while, but whether meaning can be found there, and whether she's prepared for it if it is. The answer to at least the first question ought to be obvious; meaning can be as easily found in this world as the other.
That's when she takes off. Speeds away. Crashes. (Let's take a moment to say how beautifully executed the crash is.) Perhaps, subconsciously, having tried to get Yorkie to understand her pain, she now wants to start to understand Yorkie's. She lies still for a moment, maybe much the same as Yorkie did once, a long time ago. The difference this time is that there are hands extended to pick her up. Connection. Redemption. But fleeting; it's midnight, and Cinders has to leave.
8. And You Lift Me Up In A Wave Of Love
Back in the other world, Kelly's body continues to degenerate. If she's going to change her mind, she doesn't have long. "Well, OK then," she murmurs, as if talking to someone who isn't there. "All things considered, I guess I'm ready." Her carer is confused. "For what?" "For the rest of it." Cut to San Junipero, where Yorkie gets in her swish red sports car and drives off to the strains of Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth".
End credits.
WHAT? HANG ON, WHAT? Oh, wait. There's more. They just decided to troll us with the possibility that we might be in for another pessimistic, or at least ambiguous, Black Mirror ending. But no. The credits are intercut with shots from both San Junipero and the other world.
A literal "bury your gays" moment, as Kelly's coffin is lowered into its grave. But there's an ironic subversion of the trope going on, too: though the engraving links her to her dead husband and daughter, she's distinct, as well; her engraving is fresh, new.
Yorkie pulls up to the beach house, from right to left; coming home. ("I reach for you, and you bring me home", Belinda is singing.) For a heart-stopping moment, we dare to hope. Then our wish comes true; Kelly steps out of the house and joins her, and together they drive off at Top Speed. ("In this world we're just beginning / To understand the miracle of living".)
(It's been suggested that this part is a little rushed; that we ought to see a proper reconciliation scene between the two. I would argue that the undeniable emotional power of the ending partly comes from the fact that we are held in suspense until the last possible moment, and all the feelz can gush forth at once like a dam bursting.)
In the other world, as Belinda hits the chorus, a robotic arms plugs a couple of nondescript little dongles into a vast blank of twinkling lights. In San Junipero, Yorkie and Kelly dance, now completely in sync, feeling the music as one.
As they spin around one another, we match-cut to a close up of the two dongles, side-by-side, mirroring one another, their lights spinning in harmony.
In our final shot, we pull back and back and back from the rows of lights, universalising our story, leaving us with the idea that this isn't just a happy ending for our protagonists, but potentially for thousands upon thousands of others we never get a chance to meet.
Some people, WRONG people, have interpreted this intercutting as ambiguous, suggesting that it emphasises the cold, prosaic nature of the facility, leaving us with a sense how small and trivial our story was after all, and that our friends are now nothing more than zeroes and ones in an ocean of other zeroes and ones. That's fine. Good endings probably should leave a little something open to interpretation. I tend to think of this as being, as Q Magazine used to say, "the spoonful of medicine that helps the sugar go down". My interpretation is best, because Belinda's still playing, and the joy of kitsch is part of the camp aesthetic. Besides which, "White Christmas" is a very popular episode with fans of Black Mirror, and you can't accept the negative power of that episode's ending without also accepting the corresponding positive power of this episode's ending, since one is a black mirror of the other. (One player versus two player.)
So there we are. (This turned out longer than at least one of my degree dissertations, crikey. And I still feel like I only just scratched the surface.) San Junipero is a place of Joy and Joyness, my favourite episode of the series, my favourite "thing" of 2016 and I love it to tiny pieces, which it is now in.
NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR'S BLACK CAT TAX:
