Hello and welcome to my easy to understand guide to Black Mirror and the episode San Junipero in relation to media language. This video is going to be particularly relevant for you if you are studying EDUCAST's A-level media studies as it's currently a set text on that specification. Media language in particular, Ms Onsen, is used really carefully in this episode to set the scene and to help to indicate to audiences who people are, what's going on and when the episode is taking place. We're seeing the sort of scenes of the ocean and we're seeing sort of a pinks and purples colour palette. It makes it feel very kind of Americanised and quite exotic and escapist and we're getting lots of use of music.
There's a huge use of music. in here to set the time period so we're getting things like heaven is a place on earth which is a song by belinda carlisle and the choice of the cars on the streets as well as the lost boys film poster it's immediately telling the audience that this is going to be set in the sort of 1980s to 1990s time period. These intertextual references continue, for example, the choice of the arcade games and things like that, again, help to cement what time period we're in for the audience.
And this continues throughout the episode. For example, we have the Don't You Forget About Me song while she's trying on outfits, and that's a reference to the film The Breakfast Club from the 1980s. We hear the song Totally Addicted to Love from Robert Palmer, which is trying on sort of black outfits and later on we see a screen poster that's 1996 and we see Alanis Morissette and the Bourne Identity in 2002 so in throughout the different time periods which they're kind of traveling to within this virtual reality the use of the mise-en-scene like posters music costumes is clearly there to help audiences signpost exactly where they are within time you Clever audiences might recognise the titles of the tracks being used and understand that they are hinting at or foreshadowing different parts of the narrative. Well there are tracks like Can't Get You Out of My Head, Girlfriend in a Coma, Living in a Box and Fake.
Costumes were also used to help us clearly identify the characters and the roles they play within the narrative. So, you know, the kind of intense makeup and the jewellery and the kind of revealing costumes for Kelly help us to see that she's the sort of more popular, outgoing, confident person. and the choice of the glasses and the plain outfit for Yorkie help us to see her as the kind of archetypal geek who's a lot shyer and less confident.
The use of the camera throughout the episode helps us to indicate certain connotations so there's lots of kind of close-up shots of the two women getting closer together, their faces getting nearer. It shows their kind of growing levels of intimacy and connection. Later on in the episode there's a much higher key light which perhaps you know makes everything seem quite bright and overexposed and that makes it feel much more futuristic to us. Also might suggest a sort of heavenly feel as well so adding certain connotations of sort of life after death. One of the final shots in the episode is the kind of track back where they go through through the server rooms showing the vastness of the number of people who are in the kind of cloud and that just emphasises the great number of people who are in these virtual worlds and it makes it feel more impactful to the audience.
Editing techniques are also used carefully as well, lots of shot reverse shots to contrast the two female characters and help to emphasise the differences between them and their personalities. At one point they cut from a scene of them taking their clothes off to some scene of crashing waves on a beach and clearly that transition and the juxtaposition of those two images is supposed to kind of emphasise the sexual nature and perhaps suggest the idea of passion and sex and orgasms within the scene without actually having to show it. The fast-paced editing in the quagmire club helps to make it feel quite kind of thrilling and intense and quite scary and chaotic. The sound seems to disappear constantly as though Yorkie is kind of zoning out from the conversations and perhaps that she's not really focused on what she's you know supposed to be focusing she's focusing more on Kelly.
The genre is quite mixed. There's obviously generic conventions of kind of drama and romance. You know, you've got narratives about love, there's scenes of them kissing, they're talking about relationships, they're having quite a lot of emotional conversations, there's scenes of arguments and crying. So this very clear signifies that this is a kind of drama, a relationship, love, romantic drama. But there's also obvious signifiers of other genres as well.
So for example, like sci-fi, we've got the time changes and the service. us and the technology and the futuristic things and that helps to tell us that this is a bit of a hybrid genre where we're looking at a slightly odd combination of sci-fi and romance. The overall messages of the episode I guess are about our attitudes towards love and romance and sexuality but also you know the benefits of technology and the issues as we get older and age and how technology might be used to help.
people in that situation. There's lots of enigma codes within the episode to help draw audiences in. So, for example, you know, why is Yorkie so out of place in this club?
Why is she so different to everyone else? What's she doing there? Why is there this focus on time period and, you know, only three hours? There's only, we've only got till midnight and it's not explained why they've only got three hours or why they've only got till midnight. So that helps to keep us engaged in the story and make us keep on watching.
Suddenly we flash to the 90s and we don't really understand how it got there and then we see the mirror and that's not smashed anymore and we don't really understand why. They talk about if we really met and at that point we have no idea that they haven't really met so that again adds in an element of mystery for an audience. You should also be considering post-modernism for this episode as well.
So the episode features a lot of themes of what if, which is quite common in post-modernism products. So what if we had the technology to put people into kind of virtual comas? What if we had the technology to...
allow people to experience being young again. So lots of themes of futuristic technology and access to that technology. There's also lots of intertextual references to music, fashion, films and that's very common in post-modern products too. The mixture of genres and the hybridity is very common in postmodernism, as is the fact that the whole episode tackles the idea of reality and hyperreality and simulacra, which links to Baudrillard's theory, which I have a video on if you need to watch.
So the whole episode really tackles this idea of reality and the blurring of lines between what's real and what's artificial. And Black Mirror as an anthology series is known for being very postmodernism and tackling these issues in almost every way. episode so it's what an audience would come to expect. So that was my easy to understand guide to Black Mirror and media language. Don't forget to check out my channel for other videos that might be relevant for you and if you've got any videos you would like that I don't already have leave a little comment below and I'll see what I can do.