An essay I wrote for a class on nostalgia

“The Entire History of You” is the third episode of the first season of Black Mirror, aired on the British Channel 4 broadcaster on December 18, 2011. Black Mirror, created by Charlie Brooker, likens to a contemporary The Twilight Zone, exploring possible future states where technological and social progress result in micro-conflicts among everyday people. In “The Entire History of You”, people are able to record everything they see through a chip – a “grain” – installed behind the ear. More importantly, they can playback – “re-do”- everything they see either in their head or projected on a screen. Throughout the episode, we see our main character, Liam Foxwell (Toby Kebbell), gradually ruin his relationship with his wife, Fi (Jodie Whitaker), by using “re-dos” of Fi’s interactions with a past lover, Jonas, at a dinner party they are all attending. The episode culminates in Liam and Fi’s split, and Liam gouges out his grain.

This episode has a particular relationship to time and memory. The ability to totally recall one’s memories both supports and challenges some foundational assumptions that some of our theorists have based their arguments upon – namely, Fredric Jameson, whose notions of nostalgia as a product of postmodernism are supported in this episode. “The Entire History of You” heavily relies on nostalgia to create its emphatic ending; I am mostly concerned with how nostalgia is constructed through the lens of re-dos in other moments in this episode. Nostalgia, as Jameson has pointed out, has always been dependent on memory, and has been further complicated by the introduction of media and methods of temporal/spatial capture (i.e. print, archiving, photography, video, etc). “The Entire History of You” presents a theorized future with perhaps the latest method of memory capture: re-dos, which lie somewhere between memory and material, but with the same capability to be imbued with affective meaning. This paper is dedicated to exploring exactly how re-dos function, and how they fit into Jameson’s postmodern view of society and nostalgia.

Re-dos: Archive and Colleen

As previously stated, re-dos are neither memory nor material, but instead lie somewhere within the two (and perhaps somewhere without). In the ways that memory is unreliable (its fickleness, its impermanence, its malleability), re-dos are not.

At the dinner party, a character, Colleen (Rebekah Staton), who works in grain development, confronts Hallam (Phoebe Fox), a character whose grain was forcibly gouged. Hallam says that she enjoys living life without a grain. Colleen, visibly disturbed, replies: “You know, half the organic memories you have are junk. Just not trustworthy.” Colleen gestures towards the more productive elements of re-dos (productive in the sense of labor produced – i.e. utile). Colleen is wary of living a life affected by manipulated memory.

Our first couple of encounters with re-dos are mostly utile. We first encounter the re-do phenomenon after seeing Liam at a job interview. He gets into a cab on the way to a party, and plays back his interview, watching his interviewers’ reactions to gauge whether he got the job or not. At the airport, we see Liam’s memories run through by security. We then see Liam re-do an interaction with the host of the party to remember the name of the host’s wife. In all of these depictions of re-dos, we see the ways in which re-dos supplement memory, filling in its ontological flaws.

Re-dos are, then, specifically not memory. “The Entire History of You” suggests a future in which we can use re-dos, which are more reliable than memory, allowing users to document every moment of their lives. Re-dos are only similar to memory; they are also similar to videos/video documentation.

However, the difference between video and re-dos is subjectivity. The grain is inseparable from the subject, both in the recording and the re-do process, as it is literally ingrained behind one’s ear. The re-do is imbued with the consciousness and the interests of the subject, inseparable from what the brain commands the eye to do. The camera, however, is an apparatus without the body; the video, then, is further removed from the subject.

Re-dos: Affect, Positive and Negative

Colleen also said to Hallam: “With half the population you can implant false memories, just by asking leading questions in therapy. You can make people remember getting lost in shopping malls they never visited, getting bullied by pedophile babysitters they never had”. Hallam’s response to Colleen is: “I’m just happier now.” While Colleen looked to the more utile elements of re-dos, Hallam looked to the more affective elements of re-dos. As stated before, Colleen was afraid of a life that would be affected by manipulated memory.

Strangely enough, it appears that Hallam and Colleen are both gesturing to the same perceived ‘problem’ with re-dos and memory – the ability to displace emotion through a process of reliving past experiences. For Hallam, re-dos became affectively imbued. Once she was gouged, she found that life was more enjoyable. For Colleen, re-dos are an answer to affectively imbued memory. Memory, for Colleen, is too unreliable. According to Colleen, re-dos imitate life, precisely, in a way that memories cannot.

Still, re-dos are undeniably used affectively in the episode. Paul (Jimi Mistry) suggests that the group watches a re-do of “the Frasier Road days,” hearkening back to a time in the past where they were all partying together. This is not a phenomenon specific to re-dos – this is very similar to the act of reminiscence. Reminiscence, however, is not a simple recall process. It is, specifically, a reliving process of the past. Memories are created of this moment of recollection of memory (the reminiscence). When Paul makes his suggestion, the group cheers, displacing positive emotion onto a past experience. This part of the episode places re-dos in direct relationship with nostalgia, as re-dos serve as a replacement for memory in the function of reminiscence (reminiscence itself being a form of nostalgia).

Re-dos: Formally distinct from memory

Re-dos, however, are not the beginning of nostalgia. As previously mentioned, the subjectivity of re-dos separates it from videos – however, it also is one degree removed from the subjectivity of memory. Memory is embodied. It is in the brain; it is neurologically programmed. Re-dos are without the body. Re-dos are linked to biology (using the eyes to record, and the brain to replay memories in one’s head) but do not themselves produce intra-bodily functions. They are dependent on a technology. They are one step removed, and video is one step further. Paul’s suggestion to the group originates from a memory; re-dos do not themselves perform the labor of recollection. Memories perform this labor of recollection, and then call for re-dos.

Memory is actually just used as a reference point for re-dos. Jameson offers a Lacanian understanding of the relationship between memory and re-dos:

“Lacan’s model is the now orthodox structuralist one, which is based on a conception of a linguistic sign as having two (or perhaps three) components. A sign, a word, a text, here modelled as a relationship between a signifier – a material object, the sound of a word, the script of a text – and a signified, the meaning of that material word or material text. The third component would be the so-called ‘referent,’ the ‘real’ object in the ‘real’ world to which the sign refers – the real cat as opposed to the concept of a cat or the sound ‘cat’” (Jameson 136).

When Liam and Fi return home after the dinner, they start arguing about Jonas. Fi reveals that she saw Jonas for about a month. Liam immediately counters by re-doing the conversation the first time he and Fi had sex, during which they discussed each other’s sexual history. During the re-do, Fi had said she dated Jonas for only a week. Memory is used to recall re-dos. Roughly, the word “remember” is the signifier, memory is the image of an experience (i.e. the signified, the reified concept of the word ‘remember’), and re-dos are the referent.

Near the conclusion of their argument, Liam states: “That was a nice night. Used to be.” Fi responds: “You’re getting obsessed.”

What used to be a positive memory for Liam became a negative memory through an affective reading of a re-do. Here, we see re-dos move closer towards video. Video, since it is removed from the subject and it is material, can be imbued with meaning by the subject depending on the time it is viewed and the state of the subject. Liam used to enjoy this moment of intimacy with him and his wife; upon finding out that she had lied, it no longer was an enjoyable memory.

The Final Scene

In the final scene of the episode, Liam walks through the house after he and Fi split. A couple of important visual tools that the show uses should be pointed out. The show is making a nostalgic appeal to Liam’s former life using these memories as flashbacks. When displaying re-dos, the show is always in a point-of-view, handheld shot. As it intercuts between the memories and present day, it either cuts to a close-up, fixed shot of Liam’s pained face or a to a POV, handheld shot that is a visual match of the previous shot, with different mise-en-scene and color correction.

Liam replays a memory of Fi eating breakfast in the kitchen, which has large windowpanes with yellow sunlight beaming through. The show cuts to the present, with the same exact viewpoint of the kitchen, except the kitchen is cluttered with beer bottles and crumbs, the scene is color-corrected blue, and it’s cloudy outside. Liam looks at the kitchen and looks down, clearly upset. He re-dos Fi approaching him with a smile, turns off the memory, shakes himself, and slowly walks through his completely stripped home, re-doing insignificant but warm memories of their relationship. Throughout the re-dos, we see how bare his home is now. Furniture is missing, the house is far messier than before, and everything is evenly lit in a melancholy blue. He touches his grain. There is a cut to Liam brushing his teeth in the bathroom while Fi changes behind him, which cuts to Liam in present day staring in the mirror. Liam then takes a razor blade and makes an incision behind his ear, through which he pulls out his grain. As he is pulling it out, footage from his relationship with Fi replay rapidly until the show cuts abruptly to credits.

The show is clearly implementing nostalgia to make an emotional appeal to its viewers. As indicated by the camera work, the editing, the mise-en-scene, and the color correction, Liam is in deep regret that his relationship with Fi has ended. Their home, what was once where their relationship flourished, is now merely a cruel reminder of his mistake. Liam, as he walks through the house, retraces the exact steps he took in his re-dos, effectively reliving previous, happier moments of his life. The POV visual match cuts indicate that the present is irremovable from the past. The show clearly states that Liam’s present is far darker and unhappier than his past. Crucially, however, this statement is only and specifically informed by and mediated through his re-dos – a present-day recall of the past.

Conclusion: Where do re-dos fit?

“All of this puts us in the position of grasping schizophrenia as the break-down of the relationship between signifiers. For Lacan, the experience of temporality, human time, past, present, memory, the persistence of personal identity over months and years – this existential or experiential feeling of tie itself – is also an effect of language… But since the schizophrenic does not know language articulation in that way, he or she does not have our experience of temporal continuity either, but is condemned to live a perpetual present with which the various moments of his or her past have little connection and for which there is no conceivable future on the horizon. In other words, schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence (emphasis mine)” (Jameson 137).

“I believe that the emergence of postmodernism is closely related to the emergence of this new moment of late, consumer or multinational capitalism…I will only be able, however, to show this for one major theme: namely the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formations have had in one way or another to preserve” (Jameson 143-144).

Conceivably, with the rise of technology and memory-capturing capabilities (cameras, and in this case, grains), the ability to remember would increase and nostalgia would decrease. This is a future that Colleen points to. Yet, what Jameson suggests is that technological advancement has only blurred the temporal boundaries between the past and the present. Jameson suggests the need for a clear delineation between past and present; without this delineation, it becomes difficult to understand or remember either. Our understanding of the past becomes too specifically linked to specific instances, and thus our understanding of the present is a patch of symbols rather than a cohesive whole, a phenomenon Jameson refers to as “schizophrenia”.

Technology has long had this temporal blending capacity, dating back even to the written word. But the question we are left with is: What exactly do we do with re-dos? Throughout this paper, we have seen that re-dos are like memory in its proximity to subjectivity. Re-dos, however, do not produce, and must be recalled by memory to exist. Further, re-dos, in their materiality, can be replayed precisely and imbued with meaning upon replay, moving them more towards video.

The final scene of this episode presents a future where, if we take Jameson’s word as truth, re-dos indeed further complicate our understanding of the present. It is memory that can be replayed, bringing the personal past into any given moment of the present. It is not just video; it is constant surveillance, mediated through the eyes of the subject. “The Entire History of You” gives us a new future where Jameson’s postmodern state is even more muddled by the addition of re-dos, neither memory nor video, but both.

 

 

Bibliography

Jameson, Fredric, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Foster, Hal (New York: The New Press, 1988) pp 127-144.