Music, Experience, Life: Discussing Score in "San Junipero" and the Immersion of "The Experience Machine"

Robert Nozick writes of the details and denial, the reasoning behind our hesitation, in using a machine that can emulate life itself. “San Junipero” seems to mirror his doubts in neon lights and decades of imitation, recognizable despite the viewer’s age. The Black Mirror episode begins with experiences that feel familiar, even to an audience that may not have ever felt the desperation or annoyance that Wes and Kelly feel respectively, the chase after someone who doesn’t love you back. Then there is Yorkie, walking alone and expressing a sense of uncertainty even in the way she walks, that feeling just before entering a party that has played across movie screens since film came about--familiar without certain experience. Those reflected experiences reverberate back into the audience, simulating the experience machine Nozick describes without any explanation or background knowledge of Robert Nozick needed. The parallel, once acknowledged, between the idea of the machine and the episode, is striking. Yet San Junipero goes one step deeper, taking the “suicide” described by Nozick as literal.

The score specifically highlights the difference between the machine and life. When inside the machine, the score plays slow and increasing in volume, in long drawn notes, just as in a movie. But in moments of quiet, of muted music, there is a sense of the distance from reality. In the quiet moments, Kelly and Yorkie talk of their lives, talk of sadness and pain. There is loneliness in silence, or minimal sound, and therefore reality as Yorkie is literally reminded of their reality as Kelly disappears at midnight while she is left behind when the music abruptly cuts off. The scenes in reality are all in silence or filled with dialogue, just as in our lives there is no score. Kelly chooses music, chooses neon, and so chooses Yorkie. Yet, as real as the town feels, Kelly earlier pointed out the irony in the machine. It cannot substitute life, but she decided it didn’t matter. Nozick argues that we will not choose the machine because it cannot substitute life--yet San Junipero suggests that perhaps despite that, it would still be chosen especially if it was as if life itself never ended. Even the music follows the similar idea, the couple driving away to the bright singing. It is interesting the San Junipero makes so much use of scoring to explain the unexplainable emotions of life versus the experience machine that Nozick even writes cannot be explained. This score immerses an audience, then breaks immersion, almost exactly as the experience machine might that Nozick describes. Why is the scoring of a film so important? How does a score express unexplainable ideas that even philosophers find difficult to express?