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GAME OF THRONES, BREAKING BAD SPOILERS!! Sorry, forgot to put a bumper on the vid. Generally I feel like you should expect spoilers on the topic I’m covering, but people had no idea that stuff about other shows was gonna be in there. Mea culpa.

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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Aristotle’s Poetics:d

Northrop Frye’s “Anatomy of Criticism”

“Charles B. Daniels and Sam Scully” Pity, Fear, and Catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics
Noûs, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Jun., 1992), pp. 204-217

Angela Curran, “Brecht’s Criticisms of Aristotle’s Aesthetics of Tragedy”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Spring, 2001), pp. 167-
184

source

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

31 COMMENTS

  2. At 0:56, "Fifteen Million Merits" is credited as being the sixth episode in the third series; it's the second episode of the first series.

    I think it's telling that there were few, if any, clips from "The Waldo Moment" used. To me that's the only bad episode of the series to date.

  8. Black Mirror is not a tragedy, unless not getting what you want is tragic. It is about the darkest implications of technology, the limitations of using technology as a substitute for reality. Comparing it to Game of Thrones is just odd. Black Mirror is not about tragedy so much as it's about trying to overcome loss and the limitations, shortcomings and consequences. A better comparison would be that it's about the future after the downside has been revealed: Facebook, not when it was hey! I can stay in touch with all my friends, but Facebook with algorithms for advertising to antisemites, it's use by Russian intelligence to undermine American democracy. If I had to write a Black Mirror episode that was five minutes long: Someone finds the perfect mate using an advanced online dating app, they meet, everything is amazing, except one person likes Grand Theft Auto, the other person asks on the way to dinner, 'Can you wait while I run into the bank?" then robs it, starts a shoot out and as police close in hops back into the car.

  14. Black Mirror seems to me like a good example of cyberpunk, with the emphases on advancing technology and the resulting dystopian elements, especially in regards to economic class. However, I think the more plausible sub-genre of science fiction is a sub-genre known as "post-cyberpunk," in which the sheer number of issues stay the same; some problems are solved with technology while new ones arise. This, I believe, is what we've seen with past advances in technology. For example, the development of antibiotics was a profound achievement in medicine, but it is also because of those antibiotics that we now worry about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I did recall that the various iterations of "Ghost in the Shell" are an example of post-cyberpunk, especially the Stand-Alone Complex series. I think the sub-genre of post-cyberpunk has a lot of potential, perhaps even involving stories analogous to other sub-genres. Imagine, for example, a space opera, except instead of being set in space, it's set in a vast sea in the distant future, where the design elements of the sea-borne vessels and the marine life can often overlap…

  15. I actually really regret watching black mirror, it just lingers as a dark spot i my mind. I think that if we want honesty, there is plenty to go around, but in entertainment this is just not for me at least. (Not meaning all honesty, but the total display of "parade of tragedies") This does not make the show inherently bad, but I do think that for many people like myself, we just do not want or need to occupy our time with it. I don't find it challenging or developing in any way, it has just conjured grief and unease.

    I still loved your composition of the video, and I am a huge fan of your content. I just wanted to give you maybe a (less intellegent, less researched and shortly formulated) different view on it.

  17. "We don't like hearing about tragedies in real life."

    You know that's a lie. People get amped up. News outlets go crazy with all the sensation. It's a circus. People LOVE tragedy, it's just faux paus and socially damaging to admit it.

    You don't admit it because being a personality is how you eat, and how people perceive you determines how well you eat.

  18. I'm sure Nerdwriter is not unaware of the irony of the content of this video and the sponsor of the video.

    I hope people can learn to go to the market and find their own ingredients. Perhaps think for themselves.

  24. Yea not concerned about this happening to me : every time I bleed I die and reincarnate (so they're all fucked if I turn into the ultimate god of infinite universes for eternity by accident and no one will know about it!)

  28. Spoiler alert for the following: Season 3 Episode 1,3,&5, Season 1 Episode 3 of Black Mirror as well as Oedipus. Hopefully you’ve read it by now.

    I don’t think anyone is actually going to read this but if you would like an opposing viewpoint to this article, please continue. I’ll try to keep it brief, this is a youtube comment after all.

    So I feel like you’re slightly off on your point. When you talk about Catharsis around the 1:10 mark you say that Black Mirror only has Catharsis when the characters in the story experience relief which happens in season 3 episode one and season 3 episode 6. If you look back at Oedipus for example you actually don’t have that experience, when Oedipus experiences his anagnorisis he has blinded himself and is banished from Thebes. My point is, to evoke Catharsis you don’t need a moment of relief or a happy ending, you need peripeteia where the protagonist’s fortune changes from good to bad and an anagnorisis where the protagonist has a shift from ignorance to knowledge, which Black Mirror has, for example the ending of “Shut up and Dance” when Kenny is caught by the police.

    Also just to throw my hat into the ring about the meaning of Catharsis. If you take a look at Greek society when they embrace the idea of ideal forms. This part of Greek society did not believe in an afterlife so they believed the only way to achieve immortality was through being remembered which typically meant through wars. The idea of Catharsis was to purge emotions such as pity and fear from the audience so that they were not seen as weak and could become ideal men.

    All of this being said I would assert that Black Mirror has a closer resemblance to the roman playwright Seneca as opposed to Aristotle. The first big difference between Seneca and Aristotle was that Seneca allowed violence to be displayed on stage. For example in his version of Oedipus when Jocasta realizes what has happened she rushes to the front of the stage, cuts open her uterus and bleeds out on stage as opposed to Aristotle having her hung off stage. As we have seen in several episodes throughout the series, they are not afraid of horrific displays of violence on screen, they even make reference to this in “Men Against Fire.” Seneca’s plays would also have moral harangue which is similar to season 3 episode 6 of Black Mirror where Bing gets his own show at the end of the episode where verbally assaults his audience about how they participate in the society they are all in. Also on an unrelated note, Seneca had a fascination with the super natural, much like Black Mirror's fascination with technological dystopias.

  31. All people are asking for is a spoiler alert. No one is asking you to move a fucking mountain. Damnnit Evan. And I really liked you and your content but if this is how it's gonna be from now on, I will never watch a Nerd Writer vid ever. Unsubbed and disliked. Fucking asshole

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