If there’s one thing a Black Mirror plot will do, it’s escalate quickly. The rapid-fire decisions we have to make in “Bandersnatch” – the choose-your-own-adventure film that Netflix released just after Christmas – start out innocuous (Sugar Puffs or Frosties?), skirt around serious issues (Take the medication or flush it away?) and eventually push us into appalling decisions (Bury body or chop up body?) that, understandably, make our Eighties teen protagonist Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead) cry out in agony and ask us, in a meta flourish, if he really, really has to.
Could a system like this be recalibrated for other purposes, such as elections? How about showing voters the possible outcomes of their choice? “That’s the fantasy, isn’t it?” Black Mirror creator Charlie Brooker tells the New Statesman. “Possibly like a virtual reality headset that you have to put on and it boils down the next ten years, then it takes you two minutes to experience that, so you see the ramifications of your decision.” He does admit, though, that even he wouldn’t have been able to script the last two punishing years of Brexit and Donald Trump, no matter how he used Twine, the video game programming language that let him sketch all the alternate realities of Bandersnatch.
Content from our partners
