Playtest and The Raven

a disturbing dive into the black mirror of one's self

Abstract

Abstract: Since the 18th century, the power and longevity of the gothic has been justified to the extent that gothic works enable us to deal with our desires, fears and anxieties, from the most subjective to the most social and cultural ones. Within this context, the objective of this paper is to analyze the episode Playtest from the series Black Mirror, arguing that it constitutes a “symbolic realm” (HOGLE, 2002, p. 02) to express the anxieties and fears of our society in relation to technological advances. Taking into account the narrative elements as well as those related to its visual style that associates this episode with the gothic tradition, we further argue that this audiovisual production establishes a deep intertextual relationship with Edgar Allan Poe’s the poem The Raven, especially in the construction of a self haunted by his fears and repressed past. We revise the elements that make up the sound layer of audiovisual productions based on Bordwell and Thompson (2008) and observe that the sound is a key element in the construction of a gothic space in this series episode, whereby we witness a blurring of the dichotomies from the cinema theory related to sound, such as diegetic versus non-diegetic. The results suggest that Playtest dialogues with The Raven and that its delving into the gothic universe enables it to deepen one of its central themes, i.e. the relationship between the main character and the virtual reality game may be a cultural symptom of the increasingly complicated and controversial role played by technology in our daily lives.

Keywords: Black Mirror; Gothic; The Raven; Edgar Allan Poe.