Governments in the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire and the 2000 Japanese film Battle Royale use violent technology to subvert populations into obedience, thereby maintaining their power. Such premise sounds dystopian, but has and continues to be used in reality, encouraging questioning of where the viewers’ own ideologies came from. The pattern of media horrors representing those of reality’s frameworks has a long precedent, and it emerges clearly in Black Mirror episodes like this one especially and Battle Royale, as systemic
At no point in Men Against Fire, unlike most other horror-tech narratives, do most characters perceive any defect to their technology. In fact, the MASS implants shared across the mostly-military characters do enable good: soldiers can communicate with efficiency, scout out dangers without having to physically approach them, and even program fulfillments for one another like “a good night’s sleep”. However, rookie protagonist Stripe discovers that MASS literally changes perception and that use of this innovation enables manipulation on a, well, massive scale. This case highlights Nazi-like ideology as MASS and implied other propaganda condition people to perceive those deemed undesirable (the disabled, foreigners, homosexuals, and so on) as monstrous creatures worthy of naught but death, rather than as fellow humans. The tactic has a storied past. The American World War Two effort, in addition to its enemies, boosted commitment through production painting its enemies as a savage, less-than-human mob:
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky asserted in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Economy that media “mobilize(s) support for the special interests that dominate state and private activity” through “’cleansing’ information from the real world to leave only the ‘residue’ which is acceptable to established power systems,” (Pedro-Carañana). Creating a division between one group, especially a minority, and others diverts support to majority, authority-approved sources. A woman victimized by MASS describes in Men Against Fire how she and her son (allusions exist throughout the show about up-keeping a “pure bloodline”) were progressively dehumanized. Again, the process of these happenings mirrors reality: subtle negativity leads to registration which leads to persecution. Saul Friedlander chronicled in his book Nazi Germany and the Jews a timeline of Europe’s turning against Jews in the 20th century, beginning with increasingly broader propaganda and definitions of wrongness before proceeding to registration and, ultimately, to violence, (Friedlander). This timeline matches almost exactly to that revealed to Stripe. More recently, news and other sources of information or entertainment have been used to spread so-called “fake news” for agendas in North Korea, Russia, and even, debatably, the United States. The rise of social media increased that practice, with politicians themselves blogging and posting (Bjola). Drastic change of any kind incites hostility or fear, especially that which impacts the lives themselves of individuals. Yet, gradual change can afford space to extinguish resistance. It is worth noting that military/government motivations do not always involve such insidious ends as in Men Against Fire, but some do. Technology like MASS, or, in our reality, similar social and connective medias have enabled hate, violence, and death, not to mention the mechanical tools invented for fulfilling these goals.
Battle Royale revolves around a differentiation between young and old, a less permanent boundary one would not expect to erupt into violence due to its fluidity. In fact, at least one sympathetic adult character appears. However, the grown-ups of Battle Royale’s dystopian Japan fear the autonomy of their juniors and so employ psychological and technological means to institute their titular control mechanism. Each year, a supposedly randomly-selected school class of children undergoes drugged transport to a fortified island, then must battle to the death with resources ranging from paper fans to machine guns, until the government permits a single winner/survivor to leave. This obviously results in the deaths and traumatization of children, but more generally functions as a deterrent for youth questioning and misbehaving. That is, a troublemaker would fear their and their companions’ inclusion in the Battle or perhaps some other, awful alternative. Tasha Robinson wrote in her article read in class, “Modern Horror Films are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries” that the postmodern world presents greater challenges to create isolation in horror, a needed feature because access to the larger world increases the potential to defeat or escape aggressors immensely (Robinson). The government in this movie accomplish separation by holding the Battle on an island accessible only by air or by high-grade boat. The children, of course, possess none of this transportation. In order to obtain one, and next to use it in escaping, the characters determine they must hack the military’s technology, isolating their captors while connecting themselves to navigation, etc. That plan showcases the neutrality of tech: only the manner of its usage deems it positive or negative. Battle Royale’s antagonists, for instance, use innovation to very gorily punish those who defy them, contain threats, and track those under their power (and to literally explode the heads of those who attempt to remove their trackers), while the children harness it to fight back. The horrors they face may seem themselves isolated to the island—one can survive them by winning aka killing everyone else, according to the promoted narrative–, but the first and final scene of the movie exhibit the falsehood of that distinction. This film opens with the announcement of the winner/survivor of the Battle directly before the one chronicled afterwards, in which an elaborate motorcade travels through throngs of rabid media, who represent these happenings to the public through live filming. Such context mires the Battle, especially as a manifestation for the brutality of the government, which otherwise receives little direct exposition, in a false righteousness and, perhaps even, desirability. Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Be Soft Rains” showcases how deviation from normalcy creates horror in itself; Battle Royale explains the fluidity of normalcy, that culture creates routine but does not instinctively adhere to any besides the basic needs of eating and drinking, sleeping, socialization, etc. as needed (Bradbury). Just as the Smart Home of Bradbury’s postwar landscape comes to demise through insistence of maintaining outdated norms (though, as a potentially inanimate being, it may have little agency to deviate), only through changing an imposed status-quo can any of the children survive their experiences without having become traumatized government tools. Conversely, the movie’s final scene features the two survivors/escapees, Noriko and Shuya, attempting to next smuggle themselves out of the country they are now fugitives of as Shuya instructs viewers via voiceover to “run for all you are worth!” before credits slowly appear onto a photograph of most of the people who died onscreen previously:
The end indicates that neither Noriko and Shuya, nor any other living in the movie’s world, nor, in fact, the audience in the real world have not truly escaped their oppression. The horror does not self-contain on an island, to a specific government or country, or even to a finite movie. It pervades throughout, a consistent motivator to remember the atrocities all around us (the sequel movie finishes with a similarly tiny group of traumatized survivors with an unstable future). Finally, the Japan shown in this last scene of the film, as well as in some flashbacks, clearly earns the title dystopia for the overt manipulation, violence, and cruelty of and to its inhabitants. Yet, it looks remarkably like that and like civilization in general today: urban and rural areas, grade schools, grocery stores, traffic lights…the relative indistinguishability from our own setting cements the dissolution of isolationist confines. Altogether, this movie urges its audience to become aware of their own horrors through depiction of those same or like horrors brought to an awful extreme.
This episode and movie differ by 16 years, country and continent, background and plot, and techniques of production. While Men Against Fire uses a genocide storyline ripped from history to illustrate the effects of propaganda n instituting pain, oppression, and brainwashing in a postmodern situation; Battle Royale cautions against the harnessing of power and corruption via postmodern invention. They share, however, the motif that propaganda influences it audience unduly and has but gained ubiquity as technology advances. No impossible monster appears in either, only extensions of the world as is. Only the dark side of human nature, or ambition, magnifies through digital resources. These watchings implore greater attention to how humans use what they create.
Works Cited
Bjola, Corneliu. “The Ethics of Countering Digital Propaganda.” Roundtable: Alternatives to War, 1998.
Bradbury, Ray. There Will Come Soft Rains. 1950, www.btboces.org/Downloads/7_There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury.pdf.
Chomsky, Noam, and Edward Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Economy . 1988.
Friedländer Saul. Nazi Germany and the Jews. Phoenix, 2014.
Fukasaku, Kinji, director. Battle Royale. Toei Company, 2001.
Robinson, Tasha. “Modern Horror Films Are Finding Their Scares in Dead Phone Batteries.” The Verge, 2018.
Verbruggen, Jakob, director. Black Mirror: Men Against Fire. Black Mirror, 2016.
Yam, Kimberly. “These Anti-Japanese Signs From World War II Are A Warning Against Bigotry Today.” The Huffington Post, 2017.