Let's break down that mind-blowing Black Mirror season 6 premiere
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for Black Mirror, season 6, episode 1, "Joan Is Awful."
Black Mirror is back! A lot has happened in the four years since the last season of Charlie Brooker's eerily prescient sci-fi series, and yet the season 6 premiere, titled "Joan Is Awful," manages to sync up with hot topics from recent weeks, including the rise of content generated by artificial intelligence. It's also one of the most "meta" episodes of Black Mirror ever.
So let's break it down!
Netflix Ben Barnes and Salma Hayek in 'Black Mirror.'
"Joan Is Awful" operates on multiple levels of fictional reality. At first, viewers are introduced to a businesswoman named Joan (Annie Murphy), who doesn't exactly generate sympathy by firing one of her subordinates. But when Joan gets home that night and turns on the TV — tuned to a thinly-veiled Netflix stand-in called Streamberry — she is surprised to find a new show called Joan Is Awful. Her surprise turns to horror and confusion when it becomes clear that Joan Is Awful episodes simply reenact the events of Joan's real life, with Salma Hayek playing her.
It's then revealed that the show-within-the-show doesn't even feature Hayek herself, but rather an AI-generated likeness of her. This doesn't sit well with the real Hayek, who is also a character in the episode. Unfortunately, neither she nor Joan can do anything about Streamberry's terms and conditions agreements that give them unilateral power to deploy their users' likenesses for content.
"I had previously identified Black Mirror with horror," Hayek tells EW. "So when I got a very excited call from my agent saying that I had been offered a job where I play myself, and it was for Black Mirror… it's kind of weird when you are offered to play yourself in horror. It's like, 'oh my God, how do they see me?' So that phone call was already like a Black Mirror episode in itself. But then I read it and I was laughing so much. I was so excited to have an opportunity to make fun of myself and to work with Annie."
Hayek isn't the only one playing herself in the episode. We learn that Murphy's Joan is not even the real Joan, but is another fictional version of Joan being played by the actress Annie Murphy — who is herself being played by Hayek, who is herself being played by Cate Blanchett.
Confused yet? So was Murphy, upon having to play a version of herself on screen for the first time.
"I started really overthinking it," Murphy tells EW. "I was really observing my own manner, like what my fingers do, and my intonation. I started just driving myself bonkers. So I just kind of had to relinquish that overthinking."
Hayek adds, "this honey was so into her character, she was doing such a good job and she was so comfortable, but then when she had to play herself she walked on set like, 'wait a minute, what's happening again?'"
"It was a lot to wrap the ol' brain around," Murphy continues. "I think both of us kept having moments of being like, 'wait, sorry… what?' And asking Charlie questions. But it got to a point where we asked one particular question and Charlie was like, 'let's just not talk about it.'"
One person who did get what was going on? Hayek and Murphy agree that their co-star Michael Cera, who comes in towards the end of the episode to explain the story's various levels of quantum reality to both their characters and the audience, seemed to have a grasp on the complicated material.
"Michael got the episode more than anyone else, maybe including Charlie," Murphy says. "He was so on his game, and thank God we have that scene because it really paints a picture and answers a lot of questions."
Nick Wall/Netflix Annie Murphy in 'Black Mirror' season 6.
In a recent interview with Wired, Brooker cited his pandemic-era viewing of The Dropout, where Amanda Seyfried played Elizabeth Holmes in fictionalized versions of very recent events, as a major inspiration for the episode.
"You had all these celebrities playing people who must be sitting at home watching this," Brooker said.
A few years later and the episode arrives at a time when actors' fears of their likenesses being used against their will is becoming a major factor in ongoing SAG-AFTRA labor contract negotiations. Hayek has experience with seeing her likeness manipulated by the likes of Photoshop, but now the technology seems to be escalating at a rapid pace.
"My likeness has already been used on the internet in so many disrespectful ways," Hayek says. "It's not even you, and they do horrible things with it. I've lived through some of those things, but just a few months ago when we were talking about it, it seemed like something that was going to get worse in the near future. But now it feels like we're here!"
Eagle-eyed viewers should be able to notice that, in addition to its contemporary relevance, "Joan Is Awful" also abounds with Easter egg references to past Black Mirror episodes. Some of the other titles seen on the Streamberry streaming menu include Finding Ritman (a reference to the 2018 special episode Bandersnatch) and Junipero Dreaming. Can you spot them all?
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