The short film Be Right Back from
the series “Black Mirror” introduces us to Martha and Ash, and their story
after death. In the beginning of the film Ash 1 dies in which we assume to be a
car crash, caused by his addiction to his phone. In the beginning, Ash 1 one is
so focused on his phone that he does not hear when Martha is speaking to him
from outside the van or when she is asking him about their meal. This addiction
you could say is passed on to Martha after Ash 1’s death. Martha is offered by
a friend an online service that allows her to connect with Ash. This service
takes in all the online activity Ash had and forms an online version of him. As
Martha grieves, she is pulled to the new technology that can bring Ash back to “life”
through his social media post. She becomes obsessed with virtual Ash to the
point where she freaks out after dropping her phone. Her words are “I dropped
you” to which Ash responds “I’m not in that thing, I’m in the cloud”. She is
unable to separate fiction from her reality. She becomes increasingly isolated
to the point where she can be seen walking around alone talking to virtual Ash
through her ear piece. However, at some point Ash’s online self is no longer
enough for Martha so when she is offered to take their grieving service to the
next level she jumps to the opportunity despite it being still on trial and
expensive. When Ash 2 arrived to her house she becomes almost obsessive over
him to the point where she is intimate with him, fulling know he is not human.
Her interactions with other people, such as her sister, are minimal as she prefers
being around Ash 2. After a while Martha becomes frustrated that despite
looking and sounding exactly like Ash 1, Ash 2 lacks the essence that made Ash
the person Martha loved and Ash 2 cannot simply achieve the emotional
connection they had. The aspects of his personality that made him who he was
are gone. Martha rejects Ash 2 and she wants him gone, but in the end, she
places him in the attic. She discards him just like the photographs of Ash’s
dead bother, making him a memory that you recall upon ever so often. Which
makes you question, how far would you go to speak to someone at least one last
time? Would you be able to accept someone not fully human in order to do so?
2 comments:
I'd disagree with the idea that Ash's obsession for technology and social media is not what Martha adheres most to after his death. I think she longs for having Ash back and her only way of doing that is to embrace the AI version of him created by the online service
JP, I agree with Maria. Although the obsessive behavior is not the same because Martha indeed had a motivation for this behavior, who does not? It is clear that Martha uses the phone maybe twice as long as Ash 1 but that may be because he had Martha to settle him down. She makes him put down the electronics away before driving. She did not have anyone and that let her to this obsession. I do not think maria refers that because ash was on his phone so does Martha but rather that the obsessive behavior with the phone continued after ash dead,just like ash she turn to electronics therefore having that link. This idea is interesting.
Post a Comment