My husband and I just started watching Black Mirror on Netflix. It’s addictive and thought-provoking. The show has seven seasons, and each episode is a standalone story, so you don’t have to watch them in order.
The episode we watched this weekend, “Arkangel,” is the second episode in Season 4. The main characters are a woman named Marie, who resembles a stereotypical helicopter mom, and her daughter, Sara. (For an interesting and critical review of the episode, check out this post by writer and historian Laura Tisdall.)
“Arkangel” rattled me. I thought about the episode long after we turned it off, and I’m pretty sure parts of it spilled into my dreams that evening.
The episode begins by showing us the traumatic nature of Sara’s birth: Cold, brusque doctors perform a Caesarian section, after which Marie is distressed because the baby needs help to start breathing. A few years later, when Sara wanders away from the playground and gets lost, Marie panics. Even though Sara is found quickly and unharmed, the incident prompts Marie to have a space-age tracking device installed in her daughter’s body. The entire system, called Arkangel, consists of an implant injected into Sara’s temple and a tablet from which Marie has access to a plethora of 24/7 parental controls. With just a few clicks, she can see Sara’s location, track her heart rate and cortisol levels, and even activate a filter to blur any upsetting images and sound.
While skeptical of the technology at first, Marie winds up using the filter to shield Sara from a number of things, from a neighborhood barking dog to violent online videos. Another feature, which I found the most disturbing, is the ability for Marie to view whatever Sara is seeing, as if through Sara’s own eyes.
As the episode unfolded, even though I disagreed with a lot of her decisions, I felt compassion for Marie. I know the angst that’s rooted in the uncertainty of sending your child out into the world, and the relief when your babies are tucked in safely back at home. And watching Marie track her daughter’s location, which shows up as a blinking red circle on the screen, felt familiar. Since my oldest daughter got her driver’s license, I’ve clicked on her location using the Find My app more times than I can count. I’ve watched that little dot traverse familiar streets and some that I don’t know as well, my breath slowing whenever I can see she’s close to home.
At one point, Marie realizes that her attempts to shelter her daughter have backfired, and she decides to stop using Arkangel. Untethered from the tracking system and free from the filters that distorted her reality, Sara begins to adjust. We watch her progress from elementary school into her teenage years, coping with the ups and downs of school, friendships, and family life. She befriends the aggressive dog that once frightened her. She seems to have a nice relationship with Marie, too, joking with her mom about the probiotics she adds to smoothies and regularly telling her, “I love you.”
This would have been the ideal point to end the episode if the story was meant to be a hopeful one. But “Arkangel” continues, for it’s a cautionary tale about what can happen when parents cling too tightly to the illusion of control.
One night, Sara is out with friends and is unresponsive to Marie’s texts. Feeling the familiar, insidious stirrings of anxiety, Marie digs out the old tablet and turns it back on. What she sees horrifies her, and in a flash she tumbles back into the precarious business of micromanaging her daughter’s safety. Sara, predictably, is incensed when she learns what her mother has done. Without giving any spoilers, I can say that the episode ends with disastrous results that are the exact opposite of what Marie was hoping to achieve.
“Arkangel” raises troubling questions. For instance, by trying too hard to protect our kids, are we causing the opposite result? As the saying goes, “Strict parents raise sneaky kids.”
I think about how many parents use technology to keep tabs on our teen drivers. My husband and I have told our daughter that sharing her location with us is a safety measure. To be fair and transparent, we share ours with her, too. Though the technology isn’t as extreme as the system portrayed in “Arkangel,” our daughter isn’t thrilled with the arrangement. I don’t blame her. Like Sara, she sees it as an invasion of privacy, and she bristles at the implication that we don’t trust her.
“But we do,” I say. “It’s just the rest of the world I don’t trust.”
I wonder how my parents felt when I first started driving. There were no fancy apps back in the 1990s, no slick technology that could tell you where your kid was at any given moment. If our parents needed to get in touch with us, they’d call around to friends’ houses and hope someone picked up the phone. Somehow, we all figured it out. Parenting seemed less stressful back then, but perhaps I’m looking at it with rose-colored glasses (after all, I wasn’t the one doing the parenting).
I’m not sure if tracking my daughter’s location is making her safer, or if the whole arrangement is merely a balm for my fretful soul. It certainly feels more secure to have this digitally-enabled, invisible umbilical cord connecting me to my kids. And I’m not ready to let go of that. So for now, the Find My app is alive and well on all of our family’s devices.
But if the app starts to morph into anything resembling the Arkangel system, I’m running for the hills.
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