L’épisode « San Junipero » de Black Mirror : les miroitements du post-humain

• Main Author: Hélène Machinal
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Groupe de Recherche Identités et Cultures 2018-12-01
• Series: TV Series
• Subjects: Black Mirror; defamiliarization; hybridity; interface; metafiction; mise en abyme
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/tvseries/3169

The third industrial revolution is currently triggering a redefinition of human identity through evolutions in biotechnologies and screen culture. Television series, especially shows dealing with speculative fiction, reflect the potential evolution and mutation of humanity towards various forms of hybridization, among which the new perspectives opened by the posthuman. This article will focus on “San Junipero”, episode S03E04 of the anthology series Black Mirror (Charlie Brooker, Channel 4, Netflix, 2011-), which it will read as a synecdoche for the entire show. The latter indeed rests on a process of defamiliarization often triggered by a novum introduced in the episode – in “San Junipero”, the possibility of a virtual eternal life after death. The episode can be analysed as hybrid because it plays on the conventions of both science fiction and the fantastic. It is also highly metareflexive: the viewers play a central part, as the show confronts them virtually, through their screens, to their own posthuman desires: from augmented humanity and digital enhancement to the dystopian mass production of human beings. Through cognitive defamiliarization, the episode under study exemplifies a dialectics of alterity and identity, humanity and posthumanity, fiction and reality.