san junipero

charlie brooker, samuel beckett, and creating something out of nothing

credit: @billythebutcher on twitter

Content warning for brief discussion of (fictional and hypothetical) suicide.

So I asked some people what to write about this week and out of the four options I offered literally no one chose Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last Tape. Obviously, therefore, my instinct was to write about Krapp’s Last Tape, but out of the goodness of my heart I decided I’d do the most popular option, the Black Mirror episode ‘San Junipero’, instead. Specifically, I want to talk about the way that it’s structured like a Beckett play, because my heart has only so much goodness in it. 

‘San Junipero’ is by far my favourite Black Mirror episode, which has a lot to do with how unlike any other Black Mirror episode it is. Where Charlie Brooker’s series is normally all about dread and despair and how mobile phones are going to steal our souls or whatever, ‘San Junipero’ is obviously and proudly a love story — and best of all, a lesbian love story, set in a world where the closet is a thing of the past and characters can proudly embrace their identities. No sepia-tinted despair about compulsory heterosexuality here. And yes, it’s becoming a theme that I love a lot of the things I love because there’s not much conflict in them. Although it’s happy and warm, though, there’s still a Black Mirror-y undercurrent. Fascinatingly it’s not really about any issue with the underlying concept of the episode — the morals of the idea of a seemingly endless, artificial afterlife/retirement home are never really called into question. Instead, what ‘San Junipero’ seems interested in is how we deal with the pain of living forever, or after there’s no more conflict in our lives. 

This is, of course, a regular concern of your friend and mine, Samuel Beckett. There’s never any real drama in Beckett’s theatre: in Waiting for Godot, for example, Vladimir and Estragon aren’t threatened by much. They just keep returning to the same spot every day, hoping desperately that meaning can come from somewhere. It’s about endless cycles of nothingness and meaninglessness and trying to turn dust into something which signifies anything. In ‘San Junipero’, the world’s a little more visibly happy — people laugh, and dance, and have sex — but there’s just as little meaning. It’s all empty signifiers with nothing behind it. One of the most telling moments in the episode is when Kelly, one of the central characters, takes a drag of a post-sex cigarette and says ‘it doesn’t even taste of anything’. Catullus tells us that it’s vain to speak to ash, because it can’t say anything back. 

In the extended scene in which Yorkie, Kelly’s lover, searches through multiple iterations of the world of San Junipero for the seemingly-disappeared Kelly, it’s remarkable that she only really has one proper conversation with another person — Kelly’s former lover Wes, who seemingly just spends his time wandering around and looking for any available human connection. Nobody else seems to really be real, and just keeps on doing the same things over and over again. Before it’s revealed what exactly is going on in San Junipero — that it’s all a simulation, populated largely by those who are already dead — we find it difficult to know how to parse the repeated comments describing its residents as ‘dead people’. Even though it’s literal, it also seems to describe what it’s like to live there: with no conflict, how are you supposed to find meaning from anything? Why wouldn’t you just spend all of your time dancing, or wandering the streets, or playing games? How are you supposed to become a person? At one point in Godot, Estragon comments that ‘they all change. Only we can’t.’ When you are waiting for something — for a god or for Godot — to come and give meaning to your endless (after)life, how can you change? Aren’t you already dead?

Some of the most dangerous effects of this existential trap seem to be represented by the ‘Quagmire’, a kind of combo bar/fetish club/fighting ring/sensory nightmare which we are only shown very briefly. It seems to be where people in San Junipero go when they can’t deal with the despair of endless meaninglessness, and at one point Kelly asks Yorkie if she really wants to ‘spend forever somewhere nothing matters’ and ‘end up like… all those... lost fucks at the Quagmire, trying anything just to feel something.’ There seems to be a real risk of despair in this world where conflict is over, where the only thing you can do is increasingly self-destructive partying — but without the ability to actually destroy yourself other than leaving the simulation. Doing so isn’t a direct allegory for suicide — it is, after all, an artificial afterlife — but insofar as it is, it’s in a very Beckettian sense. In Godot, when Vladimir and Estragon first discuss the possibility of hanging themselves it’s partially just to give them something to do, something different — and they might even get erections. It’s an attempt to get out of the cycle of meaninglessness they’re trapped in, but they can’t even achieve it — it creates the risks that one of them might end up ‘alone’, and eventually Estragon states they shouldn’t ‘do anything. It’s safer.’ This is exactly the dilemma the residents of San Junipero face: they want to break the cycle, but don’t quite know how, and it feels too dangerous to do so, with the result that when they do something which might be self-destructive, it’s frequently with the aim of some fleeting, sexual gratification. 

But if ‘San Junipero’ and Waiting for Godot pose a common problem, they share a solution: you have to find and make meaning with what’s around you — or, more specifically, who’s around you. The central point of conflict in the former is between Kelly’s desire to leave San Junipero when she reaches the end of her natural life and Yorkie’s determination to stay. After an argument about it, Kelly drives — flees, really — to the edge of the simulated reality, as if acting out her compulsion to get out of the cycles of meaninglessness she fears she may become trapped by. Hitting the invisible wall which marks the limit of her world, she is thrown onto the floor in front of her car; when she opens her eyes a second later, Yorkie is reaching down to help her up. The clock ticks to midnight, and Kelly — who is still alive, and therefore only able to stay in San Junipero until midnight — disappears, leaving Yorkie standing alone. This isn’t the moment when Kelly decides to stay; she takes some time to consider the implications. But in the next scene, after maligning the life of those in San Junipero as meaning nothing, she realises she’s ready for ‘the rest of it’. San Junipero has become, in her eyes, a place where a real life can happen, something which has meaning and value.  And that meaning and value comes from her connection to Yorkie and the bonds of care which, she realises, exist between them. 

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Godot, of course, does not end with ‘Heaven is a Place On Earth’, although it would be funny if it did. Nor does it end when Estragon suggests it might be better for the pair to leave one another, nor after they agree they will hang themselves the next day, it ends when they decide to depart but stay together and ‘do not move’. Vladimir has just reminded Estragon he needs to pull his trousers back on, and I think that it is these bonds of care which keep them together, and keep their lives — slightly, tenuously, but undeniably — meaningful. Heaven is a place on earth, both Beckett and Brooker tell us, but only within and because of other people, and the meaning we find in it is something we have to make together.

I think that’s what I end up constantly returning to in the art which is most meaningful to me. I’m an extremely anxious person, and I’m near-constantly worried that I’ve done something to hurt someone, or that the people I care about are going to somehow reject me — and that they’re going to be right to do so. I’m constantly getting people to read stuff for me before I do anything with it — emails, poems, this literal newsletter I am currently writing and which has already been read by two other people so I can try to persuade myself it’s not awful. But art like this helps me believe that — even as we keep going on to what I can’t help but believe is nothingness, even as nothing is innately meaningful or important, even then — we can still be bound to each other, still care for each other, still create meaning with and for each other. It’s okay to not feel like a real person, sometimes, because you can find yourself in others, and until you do they’ll be there to pick you up off the floor.

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Thanks to Charley and Mia for reading this piece and giving their thoughts. Enjoying tiny mammal kingdom? Consider sharing or subscribing! Have any thoughts about the things I discuss? You can reply to this email, comment below, or message/reply on Facebook and Twitter!