«Black Mirror», artificial intelligence and the myth of Narciso-Corriere.it

The first episode of the sixth season of Black Mirror«Joan is terrible», written by the creator and producer of the series itself, Charlie Brooker, makes you want to throw yourself a little into the theory, thought as it is to «reflect» on the contents created by artificial intelligence, on algorithms as engines of life, on the use of deepfakes of famous actors, on the risk of losing control of one’s image due to contractual technicalities that are difficult to understand.

A start-up executive (Annie Murphy) not particularly nice, she returns home and discovers that on the Streamberry platform (very similar to Netflix), the one that broadcasts Black Mirror) a series is being aired with Salma Hayek as the protagonist that reproduces her life, the personal and professional moments she recently experienced (“they happened about ten minutes ago” comments an astonished Joan).

At this point the mirror comes into play, the perfect metaphor both of human knowledge (we know only per speculum in aenigmate) and of the way we express ourselves in appearance (“The mirror, in the world of signs, becomes the ghost of itself, caricature, mockery, memory”, U. Eco, «On mirrors»). The mirror is metanarrative: Streamberry is Netflix’s reflection, Annie Murphy’s Salma Hayek, the fiction of reality that is already fiction itself, in a swirling construction in the abyss. Inevitably, the duplication implemented by artificial intelligence has a significant impact on private life, breaking emotional ties which, however, perhaps were already broken. There is even the almost parodic attempt to explain the changes with an analysis session where the main theme is the search for a “life story”, which, being fatally duplicated in the series, creates a redundancy of interpretations.

Artificial intelligence brings back an ancient problem, already addressed in the past: the myth of Narcissus has always been read as a sermon on vanity. Narcissus is not killed by languor for an impossible love, but by his own double disguised as Narcissus. It is from that moment that the mirror generates ghosts, “reflecting” on reality.