Last week, for a group project in our Feminist Political Theory class, we hosted “Beyond the Screen,” an event where we invited students to watch an episode of “Black Mirror” and discuss how it made them feel or think about current feminist issues.
The episode, “Nosedive,” follows Lacie in a world where people rate one another after every interaction, and the lower your average rating, the less you are accepted by society and have the ability to do anything with your time. This leads characters, such as Lacie, to fake their personality, appearance and dreams in order to be accepted within this society. But when things start to go wrong and her rating plummets, she’s forced to confront what this system really means and how it feels to be in a lower class. It causes her to have a breakdown, shouting and crying to some of the higher-ranked members until she gets arrested. Only when she is in jail does she finally break apart her facade and find some sense of freedom.
After the screening, the first thing some of the audience members noted was the stress and frustration they felt both toward and for Lacie. They were frustrated with her for being so shallow and fake, but also angry with her for how the system was set up to fail her and confine her in these ways.
Despite how futuristic this story was, its main ideas ring very true in our present day. One viewer noted how this reflects the “depressing reality that women always have to have a face on.” Both in person and online—which become merged in this future world—women are ridiculed for how they speak, dress and act. One feminist theorist, Simone de Beauvoir, notes that women will change every aspect of themselves for a man, to be loved and fit into their “role” in society as a wife or mother. This idea has expanded beyond just changing for men, but toward changing for society as a whole, because social media—or the ranking system in this episode—has emphasized the highs and lows of everyone’s life. Beauvoir says that women desire love and feeling appreciated, so they often feel the need to mold themselves into society’s perfect model. It forces them, (women), to put on a facade, staying strong, yet still conformed within a box, even when they feel so differently. Like Lacie, women feel the need to fake their laugh, their smile and their attitude, in order to fit in. This episode also captures the high anxiety caused by the ever-changing algorithm, damaging people’s mental and physical health. It resonated with everyone in our audience as it called out the high-pressure society we as women feel the need to conform to.
We also discussed how interesting it was to have her find freedom inside of a prison, a location associated with confinement and punishment. We think they chose this for Lacie because it was only by being pulled away from this society, forced to no longer see things through rankings and social media standards, that she could begin to view herself as a real person again. The pressure was gone. By tearing herself out of the system, she had freed herself. She is free within the prison because the ranking society outside is far more akin to a jail cell than the physical one she is in.
Just within this episode were so many comments on sexism, classism and the pressures of societal standards and social media. To be able to connect these ideas with our own lives, finding a way through the media to articulate ourselves, was great. We were able to connect deeper with our own internal frustrations. Through our discussions, I felt we created solidarity among this group of women. It strengthened our desire to back away from the restrictive system that we all feel trapped within, tearing us to pieces as Lacie was, even if our version of rankings aren’t physically hanging over our heads to haunt us.