Immortalité et post-humanisme dans San Junipero
2024, ), communication présentée lors du colloque international intitulé « Quand la science-fiction change le monde … » du 10 au 12 avril 2024 à Aix-Marseille Université, coorganisé par les Collectif Esprit Futur et l’association Stella Incognita
Abstract
The Black Mirror anthology offers many remarkable episodes dealing with the way digital technology has changed our social interactions and life purposes, but “San Junipero” may be the one where the questions raised probe deepest. Indeed, the topic of the episode is ontological since it concerns the possibility that digital after-life may erase immortality and constitute an ideal hereafter where the characters’ desires are fulfilled — in this case the homoerotic attraction that was repressed in her lifetime by Yorkie and that she can now live out truly with Kelly in the virtual, alternate world of San Junipero. This happens when the two women are dying in the real world and have to decide whether or not they want to be “uploaded to the clouds” (as Kelly says) after their death to live an unending romance that was not (socially) possible in their real lives. This episode is then one of the very few in the anthology that presents a positive way out of the dystopian surveillance nightmare made possible by digital technology — or is it? “San Junipero” was variously received both by critics and audiences as an instance of utopia or dystopia, as an idealistic solution to the pain of death or as a plunge in the illusion that virtual reality may allow us to experience human interactions better than unmediated relationships. I wish to examine this particular example of an ambiguous treatment of the utopian/dystopian divide by first focusing on the impact of the narrative structure of the episode, which is slowly revealed to correspond to the recurrence of weekly visits in the virtual universe allowed to Yorkie and Kelly in their nursing home or hospital. This recurrence is interspersed with the same intertitle (“One week later”) pointing to the artificiality of their relationships, which is made possible only through digital fiction-making, hence their wish-fulfilling fantasy is innately dependent on an embedded technological fragmentation of their experience, which creates doubts as to the perennial quality of this wish-fulfilment. Secondly, I will examine the distanced treatment of “retrofitting” in the episode, i.e. the way “San Junipero” revolves around the recreation of a visual, cultural and relational atmosphere supposedly peculiar to given periods (the 1980s, the late 1990s, 2002, etc.). This device tends to artificialize representation and threatens to tinge the rehearsed experience of the characters’ youth with eternal nostalgia. Finally, I will question the ultimate stand taken by the episode (in the final scenes) as to the characters’ choice of staying in the virtual universe, a choice which is at the same time made into an obvious happy ending, and balanced by crosscutting shots of the characters’ “subjectivities” being stored (and uploaded to San Junipero) in a hyper-technological, inhuman storage complex redolent of the fears related to transhumanity. This conclusion, to me, embodies the ambiguity of the episode which stages a critique it does not choose to uphold to the end.
References (15)
- Greg: We got a pastor coming tomorrow a.m., and she's scheduled to pass tomorrow afternoon. Kelly: 'Scheduled to pass.' Let's just call it dying. Greg: If you can call it dying. Kelly: Uploaded to the clouds. Sounds like heaven. [43'36] 12
- L'utopie technologique de l'immortalité deviendrait donc dystopie lorsqu'elle est prise pour le réel, lorsqu'elle abolit la place de ce réel. Mais est-il possible de maintenir un équilibre entre la simulation virtuelle de l'immortalité et la conscience persistance de notre propre mortalité ? 11 Cette remarque apparaît chez Daraiseh (Isra) et Booker (M. Keith): "Unreal City: Nostalgia, Authenticity, and Posthumanity in 'San Junipero,'" p. 153.
- -Un pasteur vient demain matin et son passage est programmé pour demain après-midi. spectateur. En proposant une construction narrative ouvertement équivoque, susceptible d'être appréhendée dans des directions opposées, « San Junipero » formule un discours métafictionnel sur la place des images et leur manipulation, sur le rapport entre le simulacre et la réalité diégétique, et sur la fascination que la reconstruction fantasmatique du passé exerce. En d'autres termes, le récit s'interroge sur le rôle de la fiction face au désir et sur la place laissée à cette fiction dans un monde envahi par le virtuel qui n'est pas équivalent à la fiction. Précisément, la fiction résiste parce qu'elle ne vise pas à combler (virtuellement) le désir du sujet mais à lui ouvrir la voie d'autres interprétations du réel. C'est par cette conception du rôle de la fiction que l'oeuvre étudiée ici affirme la contemporanéité de son discours sur l'humain confronté à la réalité virtuelle.
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