Black Mirror, S7, Eulogy (Netflix)
An immensely moving, visually innovative tale of finding solace through memory, music and photography, Eulogy is the highlight of Black Mirror Season 7. This story centres on Phillip (played by Paul Giamatti) who discovers the news of the death of a woman he loved many many years ago. He is sent a package from a company named Eulogy that extracts memories from users so that an interactive funeral service can be built in which attendees collectively experience these uploaded memories of the deceased. To find the right memory, Phillip is guided by a digital assistant (played by Patsy Ferran) through various photos he has from his time with Carol, whom he shared a deep love with in the early 90s. The central conceit of the story is how Eulogy’s technology allows Phillip to literally step into the photos from his past, conjuring a very emotional response in how the past, once real but since made immortal and ephemeral in photography, suddenly becomes physical again. The more photos he journeys through, the more we discover the doomed journey of the relationship. Not only is the visualisation of the once two-dimensional photos as blurred 3D spaces fascinating, but it raises quite extraordinary questions about memory and technology’s capacity to reanimate the past in ways that transcend the physical trappings of our bodies.
The distance created by time means the details of the photos are often blurry, and reliant on Phillip’s remembering of details to find the right complete memory. His guide frequently asks about whether he knows any sonic cues that can fill in these blanks, raising a truly astute observation about the necessity of music in capturing the soul and emotion of a moment, and how music can transport us back through time to a singular moment. This idea is given its truest expression with a stunning diegetic piece of music that makes the ending land with the most consolingly bittersweet feeling, one reminiscent of many of the emotions of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Giamatti is an excellent guide through Phillip’s painful memories, portraying so much regret and flawed humanity that wordlessly expresses the reason why this relationship didn’t end happily ever after. A later narrative reveal conjures a new level of emotion in how Phillip is suddenly made to interact with the present day consequences of his past actions.
The whole story feels a rather ingenious way to use the show’s signature focus on technology to tell a story that is resolutely human, and far more hopeful than the show’s bleaker reputation. In making the often hazy world of memory physical and present tense again through exploring photography’s transcending of time, Eulogy reaches a truly moving conclusion that made me overwhelmed in the best way. A paean to lost time and lost love, this is ultimately about how human memory is one of the most powerful things in the world. It is in the remembering that we are summoned back to the past, and in the memory we escape time to make any moment our emotionally felt present. Technology may advance, but it will never connect us to each other in the way memory always has.
