Crowdsourcing a Review of Black Mirror:
Bandersnatch

This year, I feel like crowdsourcing opinions on Black Mirror: Bandersnatch could be the only way to create a meaningful review of it.

By bringing together as many experiences as possible, we can look at what Bandersnatch made people feel – each one of them seeing it from their own unique angle.

We searched for mentions of Bandersnatch across social media between 27 December 2018 and 1 January 2019. We found more than 400k posts from 300k unique authors.

An emotional mess

To demonstrate how different viewing experiences might alter emotional response, here’s an example of two ending-related words from Bandersnatch and the emotions we identified in the social media posts they are mentioned in.

All these mentions were related to Bandersnatch (we’re not just looking at general mentions of “chop” or “balcony”).

Looking at the broad picture when it comes to Bandersnatch mentions allows us to examine the dominant emotions people expressed online around the movie. This is the closest we’re likely to get to reviewing the movie in an inclusive way from an emotional standpoint.

As you’ll see, it’s a total mix. Anger, sadness and joy were the most prominent emotions we searched for.

Anger and sadness aren’t always ideal emotions for people to express when it comes to something you’ve created, but I think it’s a mark of success here. Choose-your-own-adventure games are meant to be frustrating. They put you on the spot, make you make choices that are difficult. A signature of Black Mirror is to leave you feeling strongly, and that certainly seems to be the case here.

For me, the overwhelming emotion throughout was frustration. I wasn’t a fan of the short time frames you had to choose, and not knowing how much of an impact my decision might have. In the beginning the viewer can choose what to have for breakfast and what tape to listen to on the bus, and even at this early stage I was already torn. It seems others felt the same way – here’s one of the most popular tweets in the conversation.

Meanwhile, there’s a weird experience where you’re not sure how much power you actually have.

Near the beginning, Stefan must choose whether to work for Tuckersoft or not. I, like this person’s mom, decided to keep opting for him to work at Tuckersoft believing that if I opted for that enough times there would be a different outcome. Sadly not.

Later, at least in my storyline, Stefan begins to believe that someone else is controlling him, and resists adhering to some of my decisions.

At first I thought I had all the power, then I found my choices weren’t always fulfilled, and finally, when faced with a decision between destroying a computer and simply throwing tea at it I realized I wasn’t in control at all. Netflix wasn’t controlling Stefan, it was controlling me.

I can totally understand how anger and sadness were dominant emotions here. And I can totally understand why people love the movie, too.

A look at the top-used emojis demonstrates better than any of the above charts just how mixed the responses are, and how hard a watch this is compared to a usual binge session of our favorite shows.