WRITING
Use the Power of “Black Mirror” To Supercharge Your Fiction
“Black Mirror” uses literary devices and storytelling techniques to pull its audience in. Why not learn from them and do the same?
Just last month, the creators of Black Mirror released Death to 2020. If you haven’t watched it, it’s really not necessary, unless you are one of those people who love mockumentaries about very real and current things.
The release of the movie made me go back over the series itself, and I learned a thing or two about how to write. Black Mirror is a masterclass in evocative storytelling, speculative fiction, and so much more.
Black Mirror has a lot to offer viewers but even more to offer storytellers. While watching, I kept my eye on different elements of storytelling. As writers, it’s these types of techniques that we need to utilize if we are to knit tight stories. Even if you’re not a fan of the show or speculative fiction, these storytelling techniques work for fiction, nonfiction, and any genre.
Designing a Villain
Villains are how we know who the heroes are.
They teach us about the darkness lurking deep within ourselves and those around us. We interact with villains in our daily lives to some degree. Bullies, gatekeepers, tyrants, and assaulters are all real-world villains.
In stories, we can use villains to represent a whole group of people in the way Black Mirror has been doing for years. By doing so, we make the horror and fear more real for the audience. We make it so the readers and viewers know what is truly at stake for the characters.
“U.S.S. Callister” is Black Mirror’s fourth season opener that takes a shot at gaming and tech culture for its sexist practices and behaviors. It’s funny, scary, and beautiful all wrapped up into one space epic package. When the hero of the episode begins working at Callister Inc., they meet one of their coding idols. They express fangirl energy like anyone meeting an inspiring person in their field would.
The villain takes a disturbing interest in the new hire, and when he feels that she has disrespected him, he steals her DNA and uploads it into his own personal Star Trekesque computer game, Star Fleet. In this world, he controls everything. After many attempts to escape from the game, the characters trapped inside—led by the hero—finally break free into the real world via the online game.
When introducing a villain, there’re different routes storytellers can take. Some start with a strong introductory scene where the villain is performing some dastardly deed that shows how evil they are. Then there is, of course, saving the big reveal until the end so that the audience is constantly wondering which of the characters is the evil one.
The creators of Black Mirror decided to introduce their villain by showing him operating in his own fantasy world. By doing this, they don’t show us at his worse, but at his best. There, he is commander and ruler. After having his subjects praise him for his heroic feats, things quickly flip to the real world so that we can see how he is treated in his everyday life.
The real-world side of the villain is quiet and reserved. He is often picked on by the people he works with and overlooked by others. In a way, you start to pity him, feeling bad for the fact that his genius isn’t recognized and appreciated by those around him. We begin to relate with him finding solace in an imaginary world.
After suffering through his day at work, he returns home and to his world where he is the hero. This is when things take a disturbingly sinister turn. We realize that he is using his video game program as a means to torture the people in his everyday life the only way he knows how: by writing them as living code within the game. As living code, the villain is able to torture, kill, maim, and do whatever he wants to the people in his daily life.
This introduction to the episode’s villain does a lot for the story, but the main thing that it does is show us who the villain really is… and they make us empathize with him.
They make him relatable. The creators could have had him mistreat his replicated coworkers right from the beginning, but instead, they show him being treated poorly by them in order to build sympathy for the character.
Having a villain that elicits any form of sympathy from the audience adds tension as the events unfold.
Each time the audience thinks that the villain can’t get any worse, that he’s not that bad, he does do worse, until the final act or revelation of how deeply disturbed and rotten the villain is. At that point, the audience takes any sympathy that they have and bury it while they cheer on the hero. They won’t listen to that voice inside asking them: Could I do something that evil? But the whole while, that emotion, that question will be working at them, forcing them to keep following the story until it meets its end.
“Black Mirror” crafts a captivating villain by:
- Making him relatable to the audience
- Connecting him to the hero through a shared skill
- Raising the stakes for the hero and other characters throughout the story
- Deepening the despicable acts of the villain
- Making the audience sympathize with him
In your own fiction, reflect on these questions before crafting your memorable villain:
- What about them is relatable?
- How are the villain and hero connected?
- How can I make the audience feel bad or sympathize with my villain?
- Does my villain change and grow worse throughout the story?
- How can the stakes ramp up throughout the story?
Links to writing advice about villains
- 5 Tips for Writing Superbad Villains
- What Makes a Good Villain
- Your Guide to Writing a Convincing Villain
Designing an Unreliable Narrator
Unreliable narrators are POV characters that lie or mislead the readers for personal or story reasons.
Sometimes they are aware that they are untrustworthy and other times it's just human error. Emotions, biases, and past experiences cloud our memories and views of the world so that it’s hard to tell who is being honest and what is the truth.
We are all unreliable narrators by default.
Sometimes storytellers use this fact to add tension or depth to their stories. To do so takes skill and a bit of subtlety. Black Mirror’s third season has many unreliable narrators, in general, but none as unreliable as the main character from “Shut Up and Dance.” Like many of Black Mirror’s character introductions, we are made to relate and feel a little bad for him.
The episode opens up with us seeing him living with his mom. He’s constantly annoyed with his little sister getting into his stuff, he gets bullied at work and is painted to be a commonplace loser. As the episode wraps up its introduction, the main character is caught masturbating on a webcam by hackers.
Another literary technique at work here is that of the red herring. When the hackers are introduced, we’re made to think they are the ones not to be trusted. They instruct the main character that they are in control of him now.
If he does all of the tasks the hackers ask, then they promise they will delete the footage. On the other hand, if he refuses, they’ll leak the video to his family and the whole world. After that all is said and done, it is revealed with only about five minutes to spare in the episode that the main character is a pedophile. The episode ends with him being arrested for all of the crimes he committed trying to make sure his secret didn’t get out and having it be revealed anyway.
The thing about using an unreliable narrator is it allows storytellers to control the flow of information. Most people will believe the narrator telling us the story until given a reason not to trust them. Subtlety and a slow build-up to the truth always amp up the drama due to the fact that as an audience we’ll search the text for the odd feeling we have.
An attentive audience is a captivated audience
At the beginning of the episode, the main character is shown as a hapless individual and that’s pretty much all we are given. But if you look closer at the opening sequence of scenes we see that he shows an interest in two things: kids and privacy. These are all shown in his actions; most of the time he keeps to himself but will interact with children at his fast-food job. Later when he is describing what he is being blackmailed with, the main character appears to be overly pained by the truth of his actions.
At the beginning and up until the very end, we don’t really get what it is that he is holding back. After everything the character is forced to do, the ending revelation comes as almost no surprise. The creators of Black Mirror use the world around the story’s main character and his action to show us who he really is: a coward and a pervert.
If the audience knew from the beginning that the main character was a pedophile, there’s a good chance many people would not have followed the rabbit hole down to the conclusion. It really wouldn’t have been a good story had we, the audience, known.
“Shut Up and Dance” would have been about a pedophile trying to hide who he was from the world by performing crimes and odd tasks, which is sort of what happened in the episode just without the audience really knowing.
The way they created it makes it more about us as humans feeling the need to step outside our lives and do the taboo, even though it may ruin our lives and turn us into people we don’t even recognize.
What “Black Mirror” does right:
- Relate the character to the audience
- Makes the character someone the audience feels bad for
- Uses the character’s reactions and interactions with the world to show who he is
What you should ask when crafting an unreliable narrator:
- When is it revealed that the character is unreliable?
- What traits does the narrator have that are easily relatable?
- How does the character interact with the world?
- How do the world and other characters react to your character?
Links to writing advice surrounding unreliable narrators
Craft a Dual Narrative Within a Frame Story
A dual narrative is when one story is built around two or more different stories or perspectives that create the larger story.
Frame stories are stories that surround or encapsulates another story, sometimes more than one.
Season two of Black Mirror closes with a Christmas special called “White Christmas” that uses the above literary devices to tell one complicatedly good story. The episode focuses on two people in a snowed-in cabin on Christmas Day. It’s obvious from the start that they have been there for a few years and that they don’t talk much.
In an attempt to get the other one to open up, one character goes into a story about what got him sent to the cabin. It’s another great example of using an unreliable narrator because the story the character tells is a very edited version of the real events.
Eventually, the other character opens up about himself and his own journey to the cabin. Again, the words that the character uses makes him seem like a reasonable person, facing obstacles in his way the best he can (and in a way, that is what the story is about.)
The stories each character tells has no real connection besides being the reason that they are there and set in the same world. Those are the dual narratives while their time in the cabin is the frame story.
Setting up a dual narrative within a frame story is a hard task to do without losing information or getting the audience confused by what information is important to the overall story and each individual story told within it. The creators of Black Mirror kept their stories tight by telling them each in order.
One of the first things that the audience is introduced to is the cabin in which the two characters are housed in. So, the creators show the frame story before breaking into the dual narratives. Then we get our first character story followed by the other.
It’s done very neatly and simply. No Mulholland Drive, Lynchesque storytelling. It’s all laid out for the audience.
To build something this complex, storytellers must first plot out each separate story so that they can find where each part overlaps, connects. There would be no frame story if there wasn’t a connecting narrative between the two characters that make the frame story possible or relevant and vice-versa.
Why would anyone choose to do such a complicated story?
With one like “White Christmas,” it would still be a great story if we took out the dual narratives and only got a one-sided view of cabin life and the characters’ main motivation for being there. Or if the audience was only given the frame story of a future prison interrogation, we’d still be enthralled by the narrative. But by choosing both dual narrative and frame story techniques, the creators ramp up the tension and give the audience a complex and multilayered story.
How “Black Mirror” did this:
- Laid events out in an easy way to follow
- Made sure each story and device was connected
- Utilized multiple literary devices to pull the reader through the stories
What questions to ask of your work to make this type of story:
- When are the readers aware that there is a frame story?
- How long before the dual narrative is revealed?
- Are the narrative and frame story connected?
- What other techniques or devices am I using to enthrall the reader?
Links to writing advice about dual narratives and frame stories
- Writing Dual Narratives
- Understanding Frame Stories
- How to Write a Frame Narrative
- Effects of a Frame Narrative
Craft Believable Background Characters
Background characters are different than other types of secondary characters because they have no bearing on the plot. They are there to fill in and color the world.
They are just the people moving around in the background of a story, like a bagger at a grocery store or the random person that crosses the street in front of your character’s car. Storytellers need to fill their world with more than just the important people to make it a believable world.
If you as a writer and storyteller want to create more immersive and believable worlds, you need to make your background characters do more than fill the space.
In the first season of Black Mirror the episode “Fifteen Million Merits” has interesting main characters that are all captivating on their own, but the creators of Black Mirror use the background characters to make the future closed-in dystopia real.
The episode follows a love-obsessed person while they attempt to woo another, all while the two main characters try and pursue dreams in a world where nothing is free. The background characters that move around our main and secondary characters are all stereotypical versions of the people they are supposed to represent, (the people-pleaser, the unnoticed love interest, and the obnoxious jerk).
Except Black Mirror doesn’t stop there. The background characters are all the worst parts of those people. The people-pleaser follows the crowd so much that they express no remorse or feelings of their own that aren’t what the majority feels. There are moments where they seek out acceptance from others, unprompted, and show a small glimpse of their true sad selves.
Sitting constantly in the background gazing at the main character, the person who pines never does much more than stare with lovesick or jealous eyes. They express a wide range of unrequited love emotions without even speaking. The background jerk is the most vocal out of the trio and for good reason. In real life, that person truly has no filter or volume control.
By only focusing on these three stereotypes and allowing the audience to see them as the story progresses, the creators of Black Mirror layer in real-world effects. The audience wants to roll their eyes at the pleaser, verbally shake the love interest and tell them to move on, and reprimand the jerk for their fatphobic commentary. When storytellers use these techniques to add texture to their world, it invites the audience to truly feel what it is like in that environment.
How “Black Mirror” created believable background characters:
- Concentrated personality traits to their extremes
- Made them a constant staple in the environment
- Picked people the audience would be familiar with
Questions to ask to create your own stellar background characters:
- What world is my story inhabiting?
- What reoccurring background characters can populate the world?
- What are some real-world archetypes that could be present in your world?
Links to writing advice about background characters
Short Close to a Long Post
When we strive to produce art, learn from the greats. Black Mirror has so much to teach us as storytellers. The way the creators design the plots and build the characters speaks volumes about our world and the dangers that we are facing.
There is one common thread that runs through all of these techniques: relatability. Whether you’re writing speculative fiction or a memoir, you have to ask yourself how it relates to readers. If readers can’t connect with your characters, then they won’t be able to connect with your story.