The Charlie Brooker effect: How everything went all Black Mirror

Up until last week, the participants of Big Brother Germany had no idea that the outside world was entering lockdown. Instead they gossiped and plotted, topped up their tan lines and coughed all over one another without a care in the world (the footage of them finding out about coronavirus went viral). For many observers in the UK, such an unusual scenario brought to mind Dead Set, Charlie Brooker’s 2008 series about a similar group of reality TV contestants who’d been left unaware that a zombie apocalypse had occurred beyond the cameras.

“OK, f*** it,” Brooker tweeted in response, finally exhausted by the endless claims that his work regularly predicts the future. “This is happening so frequently I’m just going to have to accept that I’m a soothsayer or a mystic or whatever you want to call it.”

As creator of Black Mirror, Brooker has become shorthand for prescient storytelling, where productivity equals currency and memes can become MPs. Remember, for example, a genuinely weird moment of precognition in Black Mirror – the episode about the British prime minister having sexual relations with a pig? Today, almost a decade after Black Mirror first debuted on Channel 4, however, everything seems to be a Charlie Brooker script: it has spawned an entire subgenre of horror-fantasy that merges technological dread with the fantastical and otherworldly, and it is everywhere you look in film and TV.

The latest of these is Vivarium, a brilliantly bizarre bit of paranoid sci-fi cinema starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots, released this week. They are a young couple driven to a mysteriously empty planned community made up of identical houses and gardens, and who find themselves physically unable to leave. It’s a film that nods to the creepiness of modern conformity, millennial restlessness and corporate drudgery. And it reflects a life of endless, circular monotony, where the only distraction is empty noise via a TV permanently turned to static.

Brooker isn’t involved in any capacity, but Vivarium unmistakably bears his DNA – it’s in the film’s slippery menace, black humour and its thematic ties to reality. Traces of Brooker were found in The Invisible Man earlier this year, too, the Elisabeth Moss thriller that uses outlandish tech as a means to tell a very earthbound story of domestic violence and harassment. Likewise, Boots Riley’s 2018 film Sorry to Bother You was rooted in the horrors of the gig economy and corporate exploitation, while spinning them into their most nightmarish outcomes. And the “modern witch-hunt” thriller Assassination Nation (2018) similarly took cancel culture, internet misogyny and gun violence to their not totally farfetched endpoints.

UK screens, meanwhile, have become awash in Black Mirror-alikes, among them Channel 4’s Electric Dreams, the dystopian BBC series Years & Years, and Jordan Peele’s reboot of The Twilight Zone – the original 1959 series that was an obvious influence on Brooker himself. None, however, have as successfully probed our modern woes.

It’s somewhat appropriate that Brooker’s influence has best been reflected in content decisions determined by algorithms – meaning the mysterious viewership data that informs how a streaming service like Netflix operates, and the content it produces.

The popularity of Black Mirror on the platform, Netflix having adopted it from Channel 4 in 2016, has given way to a cottage industry of films and series dripping in Black Mirror-ness: the Armie Hammer thriller Wounds (2019) used a phone as a portal to a terrifying mirror-world full of cockroaches and severed heads. The Discovery, starring Jason Segel and Rooney Mara and released in 2017, took place in an alternate universe in which the existence of the afterlife has been proven – driving many to suicide as a result. I Am Mother (2019), starring Hilary Swank, was similarly Brooker-esque, revolving around a young girl raised in a dystopian bunker by a robot tasked with repopulating the Earth.

This attempt to probe our modern woes isn’t entirely surprising. Black Mirror has always worked so well because, as well as being a slick monster hit, it feels keenly attuned to the creeping insanity of everyday technology and the terrors of present-day capitalism. While we weren’t looking, privacy became an afterthought, our workloads increased while our wages declined, and tech transformed from something invaluable to a strange and unsettling bug to bear.

Modern life is terrifying, in sinewy, subtle ways often directly linked to the phones we have in our pockets. It therefore makes sense that we find storytelling inspired by it so captivating, and why Brooker has so often been credited with predicting the future. If anything, he has always just parlayed present-day madness into its obvious next steps.

In terms of Black Mirror scenarios, holograms of dead musicians like Whitney Houston were in the pipeline long before a fictional pop star played by Miley Cyrus was plopped into a coma while her holographic duplicate went on tour. Bryce Dallas Howard’s crazed hunger for “likes” in the “Nosedive” episode wasn’t much different to the tiny dopamine hits we get every time someone retweets us. “​Hated in the Nation”, an episode in which social media controversies lead to real-life mass murder, could only have been written in the wake of Twitter pile-ons already having become the norm.

That so many of them seem to come true is less a reflection of Brooker’s soothsaying, and more capitalism’s inherent thirst for ways to destroy us all. And what could be more horrifying than that?

Vivarium is available on iTunes, Amazon, Sky Store, BFI Player and a number of other digital platforms now