Christmas is traditionally a time of laughter and warmth, generosity and reconciliation, a time when families and friends come together. But in Britain there’s always been a darker side, festering away beneath the merriment and mulled wine. And while Charlie Brooker’s Christmas instalment of his obliquely bleak Black Mirror isn’t a ghost story in the long tradition of Dickens or M.R. James, it’s a macabre morality tale which embraces the potential misery of the holidays with a wry smirk plastered across its face.
The feature-length episode begins with Wizard’s perennial hit blaring from the radio: “I wish it could be Christmas every day…” Rafe Spall’s character Joe Potter wakes up in what appears to be an outpost in the middle of the arctic tundra; outside there’s nothing for miles and miles but snow. Inside, there’s one other person – Matt Trent (Jon Hamm) who is preparing a traditional dinner in the hope the two can put aside their differences for Christmas.
What follows is portmanteau narrative, with this bleak outpost serving as the frame; the two men begin to talk, sharing stories of their former lives and revealing how they arrived in this voluntary prison. There are three distinct tales – one belongs to Hamm, one to Spall, and a third to Oona Chaplin – but I’m going to refrain from recounting specifics, since so much of the episode’s pleasure derives from seeing its disparate elements connect and intersect, revealing a dense snowflake-like pattern.
It’s more interesting to examine the anxieties and concerns which form the substance of this festive episode. The increasingly intimate nature of technology has fueled some of Black Mirror’s best episodes – see The Entire History of You for a particularly devastating example – and White Christmas continues to tap this rich vein, yielding the show’s most in-depth and harrowing exploration of how technology affects our relationships.
White Christmas focuses on ‘embedded technology’, Black Mirror’s logical and nightmarish take on wearable tech. And so Google Glass mutates into contact lenses which control our perception of reality and cannot be removed. From this single idea a range of unique and compelling dramatic scenarios arises, particularly poignant is the idea of ‘blocking’ someone when these optical implants can control what you see and hear. So if a loved one blocks you, all you see when you look at them is an outline filled with static and all you hear is a muffled voice. It has legal backing and comes with a restriction order; reconciliation is impossible. It’s a devastating extrapolation of an increasingly common aspect of online culture, and when combined with some well-drawn characters in Spall’s tale, Brooker uses it to create some of Black Mirror’s most moving moments to date.
In fact, a lot of White Christmas feels like its preparing for Spall’s tale; he’s the quieter of the two men, and you feel like the twist or revelation lies with him. Again, I’m not spoiling anything by saying that; there’s much more at play.Yet Hamm’s and particularly Chaplin’s stories feel like they’re present to seed concept and ideas; in particular, it feels like there was so much more to explore in Chaplin’s tale, which focusses on the idea of home automation and artificial intelligence. They’re still both compelling and immensely enjoyable, but it’s Spall’s narrative which registers the greatest impact; it's the dramatic and intellectual culmination of everything that has gone before.
Performances are great all-round, Hamm almost functions as the narrator, advancing the story – whether that’s sharing his own tales or coaxing Spall’s character into talking. He’s charming, as you’d expect, but embraces the show’s black humour and is, of course, more than at home flirting with melancholia. Chaplin plays her dual roles well, though her part is definitely the slightest of three leads. But it’s really Spall who shines brightest; over the course of 90 minutes, we experience the full depth of his misery.
