"So much simpler when it's all mapped out."
"Hmm."
Hang the DJ is Black Mirror's take on Modern Love --
and it's surprisingly more hopeful than we might expect,
at least in the context of Black Mirror.
"Sorry.
Fork."
"Amy."
"No, no, my name's not fork."
"I guessed.
It was just --"
"It's Frank."
The Season 4 episode works through our shared anxieties
and mixed feelings about the age of dating apps.
It paints the picture of an increasingly
mathematical approach to love --
and expresses our society's fears that we could be
bringing about the death of romance.
"OK, seriously, what are we meant to do?"
"Query too broad.
Please narrow."
"Well, I mean, are we just meant to, I don't know,
like, just go at it?"
"Define 'go at it.'"
[Scoffs]
But in the end, Hang the DJ arrives at a
sweetly heartwarming place.
It's Season 4's San Junipero for its successful romance
featuring a couple who, in some form, end up together.
It reassures us that -- even if some aspects
may change drastically, and get a bit creepier --
the heart's will to find love can overcome the obstacles
we throw at it.
Because nothing helps love more than having
a good strong obstacle to fight against.
"Ever since we've met, this world has been toying with us.
It's trying to keep us apart."
Before we go on, be sure to hit subscribe
and click the bell to get notifications on all of our new videos.
Hang the DJ follows Amy and Frank inside a mysterious "system"
that promises to pair them with their perfect match,
through studying how they respond to arranged relationships
of predetermined lengths.
"Shall we check our expiry date?"
One thing that makes Hang the DJ a very successful episode
is the chemistry between the two leads,
played by Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole.
"One of us should get undressed first."
"Why only one of us?"
"It will be funny."
Even though they have so little time to get us invested
in the romance,
they quickly make the viewer want to see them together.
So the episode has the urgency of a good romance --
and it has a strong antagonist to the romance in "the system"
which is supposedly finding the perfect person
that Amy and Frank are each "meant" to be with.
The couple ultimately decide to rebel against the system --
to choose each other over their
mathematically calculated soulmate.
"I don't want whoever the system reckons the one is, okay?
I want you."
"I want you."
But the irony inherent in the test is while the couple think
they're bucking the system,
refusing to let it tell them their perfect match,
really they're digital copies in a contrived simulation
to mathematically tell people their perfect match.
"What if that's us and we're stuck in a simulation?"
"Well, how would we know?"
It's a clever contradiction within the matchmaking app
that for the copies to "win" the simulation
and come out as a match,
they have to disobey the system and escape together.
"It's a test, I swear it is, and the two of us rebelling together
is something to do with passing it."
The copies have to do a very human-feeling, reckless,
boldly romantic thing.
"Over the wall..."
"Right over it, no matter what's out there..."
As Amy and Frank climb up the ladder
to escape their controlled reality,
briefly it looks like we're in the final scene
of The Truman Show --
who knows what great unscripted life awaits them beyond.
But instead it's revealed that this bold romantic gesture
was also part of the simulation, part of the math --
paradoxically, it's what they're supposed to do.
It's worth noting that building the obstacle into the matchmaking
isn't as new as it might seem.
We can actually see this idea in Shakespeare.
In The Tempest, Prospero realizes
that his daughter Miranda is falling in love
with the new guy who's arrived on their island, Ferdinand.
But Prospero knows that love struggles to succeed
without obstacles.
So he purposely pretends to oppose the match
in order to give the young couple a chance.
"They are both in either's powers; but this swift business
I must uneasy make, lest too light winning
Make the prize light."
The app in Hang the DJ is essentially doing the same thing
Prospero does for his daughter --
making it hard for the couple, so they can decide
if they care enough to fight for their love.
Thus the idea of encouraging the couple
to see the system as their antagonist
is entirely logical.
And if we look at romantic stories
from Romeo and Juliet to Casablanca,
from The Odyssey to Brokeback Mountain --
in pretty much all of these the characters' love is strengthened
because they have to fight against huge obstacles
that make them realize how much they really do love.
The title "Hang the DJ" comes from the Smiths song "Panic"
that plays at the end of the episode.
We hear the lyrics.
"Burn down the disco / Hang the blessed DJ."
So these words refer to the couple's decision
to not let the system, or the DJ, choose which music
they should dance to,
which person they should love.
Incidentally, Charlie Brooker's idea for the episode
apparently came from imagining a dating app
that works a lot like Spotify's algorithm.
But the irony of course is that this couple is not only
listening to a song that some kind of DJ digital
or human has chosen,
but they're also relying on this app to tell them
if they belong together --
so maybe their copies did, but the real humans
are not at all hanging the DJ.
The point is that true love feels like it's rebelling against
the big world that won't let it be together --
even if that's not really the case.
And if it was okay for Prospero to help Miranda and Ferdinand,
what's wrong with a really good algorithm
playing benevolent god to young lovers.
Amy and Frank hear the words "hang the DJ"
repeated over and over at the end,
"Hang the DJ / hang the DJ / hang the DJ..."
so they still feel like they're choosing,
like they're rebelling --
because love feels like a revolution every time.
Hang the DJ is raising questions about fate and free will
that have always been a part of romance --
especially when it comes to the concept of soulmates.
Are two people "meant to be" together?
And if so, who means them to be?
Is there a fate, some kind of god or creator,
who's making people to be perfect matches?
Amy and Frank think they're choosing each over fate itself,
but it turns out "fate" is encouraging them to do that --
it's just that this fate isn't god or destiny --
it's the algorithm of some dating app.
Meanwhile, in addition to these thoughts about fate,
it's so important that free will is part of the equation
in any love.
"Wait, um, can we not check the expiry date?"
"Er, why?"
"I'm just sick of it.
Like, the System's just bounced me
from bloke to bloke."
If we're told for sure that someone's our soulmate,
then by being with them we're just following instructions,
basically acting like machines,
like a robot obeying an algorithm.
So always there's this tension between on the one hand
finding or holding out for "The One" --
that person who's a perfect match --
"Do have faith in the System, because it does deliver."
and on the other hand, following our own wills and hearts,
taking a risk by choosing somebody and not knowing
if this is ordained by anything,
knowing simply that it's what I want.
"Frank.
I choose Frank."
So free will is why it's key that the simulation couple
needs to defy the system in order to pass the test,
because real love moves us to take fate into our own hands.
The 99.8% match Amy and Frank get means their copies
escape together almost every time they take the test.
That "almost" is key -- because 99.8% is not 100.
Just as the couples decide to be together instead of
holding out for whoever the system tells them is perfect,
the original humans who have just got this result
on their dating app will have to decide
if they choose the 99.8%, or hold out for some
theoretical 100.
This element of choice, the bold decision to be with someone
and not wait for the math to tell you it's an inevitability,
is still part of the picture, and has to be a part of love.
Given that the app clearly understands
the paradoxical complexities of romance,
it may not even have a 100% match option
for these reasons.
And perhaps the Amy and Frank who are using the app
may actually struggle more as a couple
than the copies in the simulation did --
because they don't have any bigger obstacle than
the 0.2% missing from their score.
What's interesting here is the way Hang the DJ rehashes
these age-old questions of romantic fate and free will
through applications of technology.
So we get a version of the idea of soulmates,
of being together in multiple lives or planes of consciousness,
of always finding each other again and again --
but this is manifested through tech.
"It felt right.
It felt like something locked into place,
like we'd met before."
"Like it's happened before, like it'll happen again
1000 times over and over again."
Even before they meet in person, it's like Amy and Frank
have lived this whole story many many times
and maybe on some remote spiritual level they sort of know it.
Maybe somehow they almost remember what they've been through
in those 998 other versions of themselves.
And that's part of what they're communicating
in this glance at the end of the episode.
Despite all these romantic ideas and the presumably happy ending,
there's also a much darker reading to the story.
Some viewers might focus on the fact
that the actual couple we follow turn out to be
digital copies who are presumably deleted,
or you might say, killed if they truly are sentient copies
of Amy and Frank's consciousness.
Some viewers might feel let down that the stakes of this big sacrifice
the couple went through weren't what we thought.
We felt like this was happening over years,
but in our world it was just two people
checking each other out on their phones in an instant.
It's all smaller and less momentous than we'd hope.
We have to quickly transfer our hopes
from the specific digital copies of Amy and Frank
we've gotten to know onto their human originals,
So the viewer might feel confused because the way
we process the romance narrative
is very much about investing ourselves into
a specific pair of people, and them coming together.
Yet even though it's dark that the digital copies
of Amy and Frank just get erased,
their reality does end with the joy of coming together.
And even though digital copies sound less substantial to us
than a so-called real person,
numerous episodes of Black Mirror have proven to us by now
that if the copies are sentient,
then we shouldn't see them as any less real.
What copy Amy and Frank lived through happened.
So Hang the DJ isn't glossing over the creepiness
of some developments in modern or future love.
"Everything happens for a reason."
"What reason?"
"The system will be assessing your reaction to
the painful premature termination of a treasured relationship
and will adjust and improve its profile
of your eventual chosen one accordingly."
"You're a great comfort."
But it is giving us some hope that -
like we saw in San Junipero --
tech actually does have the ability to help us
connect better with each other,
even if we more often use it to make things worse.
Hey, if an algorithm could really help you find our soulmate,
is it really such a bad thing that an "app"
isn't what you used to think of as romantic?
Charlie Brooker said of the ending --
"I hope the takeaway is that it's playful and hopeful."
It's easy to predict the death of true romance
in the age of swiping right,
or to go the other way and say now dating
should be easy, simple and perfect.
"Must have been mental before the system.
People had to do the whole relationship thing themselves."
But this episode of Black Mirror preserves that tension
between our anxieties and hopefulness
about the tech-driven future of love.
Sometimes we may feel like throwing out the DJ
and going back to just finding music on our own.
But we can take comfort that there always have been
matchmakers in one form or another,
and lovers will always feel like they're breaking through
and rebelling against the matchmaker.
Hang the DJ gives us new spins on
the age-old questions of romance --
do we really want to be with the person
that we're perfectly compatible with
if that takes away our feeling that we've dared to choose?
And even if we think we're making the brave choice
to follow our hearts, are we really free --
or just following the mathematical certainties of fate, anyway.
As romance evolves with our technology,
some good things may be lost,
some bad things could improve, and underneath it
all the age-old questions of what the heart wants
and what's meant to be will continue to manifest
in one form or another.
"Yeah, let's not check the expiry then."
"Yeah.
It's a deal."
"Deal."
"OK."
"Bring on les fishcake."
I'm Debra.
I'm Susannah.
We're the creators of ScreenPrism.
If you like our videos, please subscribe.
Down there!
For more infomation >> VALENTINE'S WEEK BAKCHODI || What is Valentine's Day ? - Duration: 12:07. 
For more infomation >> ¡¡PELIGRO!! Si al Abrir Una Sandía Encuentras Estas Grietas en Ella… ¡NO LA COMAS! - Duration: 3:31. 
For more infomation >> Weekend Update: Leslie Jones on Her Perfect Man - SNL - Duration: 4:46. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét