What Lies Behind Black Mirror's Black Museum?
By Mariah Muhammad
Throughout America’s history, there have been hundreds of cases gone wrong - innocent men and women who died or spent their entire lives in prison only to have DNA evidence clear their records.
Even organizations like the Innocence Project, a non-profit dedicated to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, have tried to reform the criminal justice system with little widespread success.
But what does that say about how the same facets of the criminal justice system are represented in media?
In season 4 of Netflix’s Black Mirror, the episode Black Museum tells the story of a man named Clayton Leigh, who was accused of murdering a journalist.
Although Leigh is later sentenced to death, he agrees to sign over a digital imprint of his brain to Rolo Haynes, a white man in the business of collecting the strange and inhumane, in order to support his family after his death.
It does support them, but as unsettling as it is for the audience, the price is more than anyone expected.
Throughout the episode, Haynes leads one woman, Nish through his strange inventory, weaving insane stories into the audience’s, and the woman’s growing disenchantment. His claim to fame, however, was his digital copy of Leigh, who with high-end technology, is trapped to live in perpetual electrocution.
In a makeshift eternal prison, Haynes’ customers were allowed to electrocute Leigh for up to 10 seconds, and Clayton would still feel it. In America, the cruel and unusual take many different forms.
Nish, who is revealed as Clayton's daughter in the second half of the episode, sought revenge on Rolo, poisoning him in the process. Once he realized what she had done, it was already too late; she locked him in Clayton’s mind and electrocuted him to death, capturing the moment in a digital cookie.
What does justice really look like, and why do we find ourselves rooting for those unwilling to bend in the face of discrimination?
As Sylvia Law, a leading research professor in constitutional law says, “transforming our law to recognize discriminatory effects as a form of discrimination would require either a constitutional amendment or overruling of decades of precedent.”
Once we realize the problem is systemic, hopefully, one day the face of law enforcement will bend toward justice. If the episode wanted to show the parallels of an unjust America, then it succeeded. Black Mirror’s focus on those two characters’ provoked emotions that every side could experience.
Although several movies and television shows this decade have taken a dive into ripping apart this level of discrimination and racism, Black Mirror has undoubtedly done it best.