Black Mirror: S4E2 Arkangel (Film Analsyis)

The Black Mirror episode Arkangel from season four mainly showed how a helicopter parent, Marie raised her daughter Sara and the consequences of this kind of parenting method. Helicopter parent is a term used to describe parents who pay extremely close attention to their children’s experiences and have a high level of interest in every aspect in their children’s life. The Arkangel story was portrayed in a dystopian and science fiction style showing how future technology might bring severe and irreversible effects to the people involved.

In the beginning of the story, Marie showed signs that she was a very paranoid person and cared about her child a lot. When she gave birth to her daughter in the operating room, she was worried and panicked about her child’ s condition because the doctors were blocking the baby and they did not inform her about the baby’s condition. This scene perfectly portrayed a regular human norm where we could not help with the feeling of unease sliding through us when we’re unsure about a situation. The scene where she admires her baby and the cloth blocked out the chaotic scene of the surgery as well as wounds also foreshadowed Marie would hide away all the brutal reality from her daughter.

After Sara got lost in the park, Marie brought her to implant an Arkangel chip in her head. The Arkangel chip came with a tablet and it allowed the parents to track their child’s location and their vitals. Besides the safety alert features, it also allowed parents to live stream what their child is seeing and save each memory in the history. One of the most powerful features of Arkangel is it gave parents the ability to censor whatever the child saw that made the child feel uncomfortable by tracking their heartbeat, blood pressure, temperature, hormones and so on. Just like every parent, Marie hoped she could protect her daughter so she brought Sara to get the Arkangel implant out of good intentions because she was afraid that she would lose her daughter again.

Although the intentions of Arkangel were good, they’re always repercussions of censoring reality. Sara could not identify how a fight scene and arguing scenes were like and she doesn’t know how to react to every small situation. For example, when her mother was crying beside her grandfather’s graveyard, her mother’s face was blurred out because it showed sadness and pain so it was censored by the Arkangel. It also caused negative effects by covering the truth, Sarah tried to hurt herself because she was curious how blood looked like and how pain felt like. As humans grow and learn through experience, Sarah became weird and different from her school mates because she never knew how the real world was like and a lot of stuff was censored from her causing her to have odd behaviors and mild reactions when her schoolmates talked to her.

Arkangel has four key characters that build the story line which include Marie, Sara, Rus and Trick. Marie is a single-mother and she has a daughter named Sara. Marie’s father, Rus is a reasonable and understanding person. He does not agree with the idea of implanting an Arkangel chip to Sara’s head because it restricted her from seeing and experiencing the reality. After Sara started to harm herself, Marie realized it was the time to let go of Arkangel and let Sara experience the real world herself.

Marie and Sara started to communicate and joke around with each other more often after Sara was stopped guarded by Marie through the Arkangel tablet. However, when Sara lied to her and did not come back home on time, she was tempted to use the Arkangel tablet to track her again which caused Sara’s relationship with Trick exposed to Marie. Marie was mad at Trick for letting her daughter take in drugs so she went to his workplace secretly and warned him to stay away from her daughter.

Yet, when we hold on too tightly on something, we will lose it even quicker because we are very anxious and keep on wanting to control the situation thinking that we could fix it if we put in more effort and pay more attention. Sara went mad when she found out her mother put emergency contraceptive pills in her smoothies and invaded her privacy by live streaming what she saw from the Arkangel tablet. When our bottom line is touched, we release our anger by saying things or do actions that will hurt and harm another person without thinking of the consequences. Sara hit her mother with the Arkangel tablet hard as a form of catharsis to release all of her anger and frustrations but she did not realize it until the censor was turned off.

Nonetheless, it was not entirely Sara’s fault that she became like that because it’s a normal phenomenon that we will rebel and seek truth that is hidden away from us. When we are restricted from doing certain things, we will secretly find alternatives to discover it and Sara was just like every teenager. Sara lied to her mother because she wanted to experience what hanging out with friends at the beach is like and in order to make her mom feel rest assured, she told her that she was going to her friend, Riley’s house to watch a movie.

In the end, the audience only saw Sara boarded a truck and it was cut to black, showing us Marie’s situation where she lost track of where Sara was going and how her actions made her lose her daughter forever. Although we have good intention, we should always respect others. Excessive intrusion to a children’s privacy would cause negative effects whereas positive and open communication should be implemented to result in a better family relationship.