Shut Up and Dance your way out of that cave

This week I watched an episode of Black Mirror called Shut Up and Dance. We follow the main character Kenny, a seemingly innocent, harmless young guy. Kenny, and several others are being watched and are told to perform a series of tasks or else some unknown people, only referred to as "they" in the episode, will leak information that they cannot afford to let out to the public.


We are not sure of the full stories surrounding the other characters. We get the picture that Kenny was wrongly caught masturbating on camera, and that they would leak the video to everyone. We as viewers sympathies for Kenny, as it seems he has been unfairly targeted. He is made to do awful things such as robbing a bank at gunpoint and fighting a man to the death.


I cannot help but relate this to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. A group of people spend their entire lives chained in a cave only ever seeing shadows and noises unaware of the entire situation. To them the shadows are the reality. They do not realize that those shadows and noises come from something else, because they've never been shown anything else except of what is right in front of them. Well it turns out, we are the people in the cave. Towards the end of the Black Mirror episode we are hit with revelations that completely change our outlook. It turns out that these people were purposely targeted by a group of somewhat vigilantes who wanted to punish Kenny and the others for what they've done. Kenny it turns out was watching child pornography, so had the man he had to fight. We were given small hints to it during the episode such as him being drawn to the child at the restaurant, and the fact he was so scared of the video leaking. It all at the time just added to the perception that he was a nice and completely innocent guy.


Because we were only shown certain aspects of the story, we believed that to be the reality. At the end you are dragged out of that cave and are shown the light. Just like the acts of the characters in the story. Even though they believed that if they performed certain tasks, their secrets wouldn't get out, the reality is very different. Once you are shown what is outside the cave, your view of reality completely changes.


P.S. I now have a sticker over my laptop camera.

Becoming a Prisoner in Plato's Cave

In today’s age of rapidly occurring advancements in technology, it becomes next to impossible to keep secrets hidden. As shown in Black Mirror’s season three episode “Shut Up and Dance”, one of the strongest forms of punishment can be through the exploitation of the skeletons in our closets. In traditional Black Mirror fashion, there is a redefining moment in the last five minutes of the episode that causes the viewer to rethink everything they have seen up until that point. The revelation that these people were not chosen at random and that they all have secrets which are revealed to be much darker than originally thought causes the viewer to questions everything they have thought throughout the course of the episode. The most shocking being the discovery about why Kenny is so ashamed of his masturbation video and why he will go to such lengths to hide it. 

So why is discovering that Kenny watches child pornography so shocking? It is because the episode presents a sympathetic character who is seemingly being punished for a common activity in which many people partake. Looking back there where subtle signs, such as the way Kenny takes a special interest in the little girl at the beginning of the show, but these are offset by the assumptions that we as viewers make about him. In a way, this episode is very reminiscent of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, only in this situation the viewers of the episode are the prisoners who develop an inability to see the world as it is. Like the prisoners we see in shadows. These shadows being the result of the punishment the characters are undertaking rather than the reality of the purpose behind their punishment. Time and time again Kenny proves to be a sympathetic character, from wetting his pants during the bank robbing scene to being willing to kill himself so he does not have to kill another person, Kenny becomes someone you start to think doesn’t deserve this torture. I found myself as a viewer rooting for Kenny up until the moment his mother reveals that his secret isn’t just a video of him masturbating. After that, I was as disgusted and disappointed as his mother. It amazes me how quickly I can go from being disturbed that someone can put other people through these situations to happy that they received their punishment. 

Unlike Plato’s prisoners, I cannot return to the cave. I just have to face the fact that sometimes when the shade over reality is uncovered, the truth is so much worse.