Cervantes’s Black Mirror

• Egginton, William ^[1]
  1. [1] Johns Hopkins University

     Johns Hopkins University

     Estados Unidos

     
• Localización: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, ISSN-e 0277-6995, Vol. 40, Nº. 2, 2020, págs. 175-190
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen
  • español

    Miguel de Cervantes se sirvió de estrategias narrativas similares a las de la serie británica Black Mirror para indagar en las prácticas mediáticas de la “cultura guiada” española de principios del siglo XVII, aunque en su caso la técnica fue más cómica que oscura. En este ensayo examino algunos paralelismos entre la exploración cervantina de las instituciones teatrales y ficticias que estaban afectando la dinámica sociopolítica de la primara modernidad española, y cómo Black Mirror aprovecha de recursos parecidos para analizar nuestra propia saturación mediática actual

  • English

    Where the cable TV series turns, for example, our captivation by the fleeting popularity of "likes" on social media into a dystopic vision of socio-digital domination, Cervantes's takes the early-modern obsession with the world as appearance as a platform for displaying how easily subjects can be coaxed to violating their own self interests. In what follows I present a kind of transhistorical and transcultural conversation between three episodes of Black Mirror and three concrete works or moments in Cervantes's oeuvre: "Playtest," in which a man experiences multiple virtual reality environments before it is revealed that basically no time has gone by at all and that the environment was fatally compromised from the outset, helps elucidate the "Cueva de Montesinos" episode in Don Quixote, in which the Don returns from an hour-long descent into the cave, telling of a fantastical three day adventure; "Nosedive," in which people's socioeconomic standing depends on their social media ratings, is paired with the interlude El retablo de las maravillas, in which townspeople allow themselves to be fleeced by conmen in order to demonstrate their racial, religious, and sexual purity; and finally, "The National Anthem," in which a Prime Minister is forced to have sex with a pig on live television when pressured by public reaction on social media to a kidnapper's threats on the life of a princess, is juxtaposed with the famous plot turn in Don Quixote where the Don and the Duke and Duchess pressure Sancho to administer corporeal punishment to himself to disenchant the imaginary Dulcinea. What the three cases studies ultimately show is how Cervantes used fiction to critically interrogate the logical underpinnings of his media environment in ways that closely parallel those of a contemporary critical "science fiction" television show and, likewise, how much the appealing and thought-provoking narrative strategies of Black Mirror in turn owe to the cripple of Lepanto and his acid pen. Attracted by an ad posted by a cutting-edge gaming company looking for test subjects for their latest products, Cooper finds himself in a castle converted into high-tech headquarters for a company run by a young, mysterious Japanese inventor called Shou-but only after Sonja advises him to try to take some pics while he's there, as they will likely be much more valuable than any salary he is paid.