Imagine all the interesting and horrifying uses of memory grain implant, a kind of infinite external hard drive that allowed you to record and rewatch memories at will. Detectives would be able to analyse interrogations LA Noire style, stalkers could rewatch chance glimpses of their victims and your memories could be hacked by strangers to be used for their own pleasure. And all of these uses, these perversions of our own private treasured memories, would be a far better way to open The Entire History of You than the dull, generic office 'appraisal' Jessie Armstrong decides to go with. It's a bog-standard personal development-style interview utterly devoid of emotion, intrigue or humour. Everything's worded so vaguely it's difficult to even tell what line of work the protagonist is in and never provides the context of his personal investment in the job to allow us to empathise with him. The scene only serves to establish the various everyday use of the memory grain and doesn't even have the decency to simply show this then pull back to reveal Liam watching it in the back of the cab. That sums it up really, it's a scene which wastes both our time.
The worst part is there's more of this clumsy style of story-telling to come, it shares 15 Million Merits's problem of fumbling in the first act. However last time it was merely a murky stain which left things more difficult to assess here it feels more like a shit streak across a large part of the episode. The dinner party is one of the most pivotal sequences in The Entire History of You and also the most excruciating. The sexual tension between Liam's wife Ffione and former oily lover Jonas is beaten about our heads with exaggerated laughing at unfunny jokes and clammy body language. It’s something Neil Marshall got across much better in the first five minutes of The Decent which leads me to wonder how between a quiet mediation on cyberstalking and a film about girls hacking cave monsters to death the latter is the more subtle.
As far as fleshing out the social and cultural impact of the memory grain Armstrong's writing is hit and miss. To its credit The Entire History of You does a lot with very little time, showing the variety of uses for this new technology from enjoying old memories to picking apart the quality of hotels to being reviewed at airport security. It’s even permeated the language, words like 'redo' and 'gauges' are as commonplace as 'Facebooking'. There's even a mild bit of controversy about going 'grainless' which brings me to the decidedly more miss issue of 'gouging' a weird combination of physical violation and phone hacking. We're never told exactly why someone would want to steal the memories of others but the dinner party guests act so casual and saccharin about the whole thing it's disturbing. Everyone seems to have been taking charm lessons from Piers Morgan and it reaches a cringe-worthy peak when the oily Jonas takes pleasure in stroking the gouge victims scars, the equivalent of rubbing a rape victims tearing’s, and everyone coos like it's a kitten with dwarfism.
Naming the protagonist Liam means an analysis of him will inevitably sound self-flagellating, which is a good word to describe him. The memory grain is primarily utilised to torture himself about past failures and fuel his paranoia. Insecure doesn't begin to cover it. Yet for all his vulnerabilities it takes still takes a while to warm to Liam as he continues to drive a wedge between himself and his wife. It becomes contrived when he makes the leap from impotent beta male to the violent jealous husband after never previously showing any undercurrent of hostility.
Despite this the peak of Liam's paranoia actually propels The Entire History of You straight out of shittytown and into a good show. Both the infidelity drama and the technological aspect go perfectly in sync rather than simply running parallel. As Liam physically forces Jonas to erase all memory of his wife his finds some more recent than others, specifically around the time their daughter was conceived. With more evidence thrown onto his suspicions he transforms into something we can generate sympathy for. The memory grain gives him moral justification but takes everything else, his wife, his child and all semblances of warmth and humanity from his life.
Not being entirely driven by its ideas about technology The Entire History of You finds itself the weaker of the three episodes. It could have benefitted from a better look at how this idea could impact the world rather than affect one family. Yes we can all relate to a domestic drama but there are meatier stories to be found in the memory grain. Perhaps future episodes can take a stab at it because, in spite of the criticisms, I want to see more tales from the Black Mirror and in a world where we're surrounded by screens, I think we need to.
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