New forms of seriality, new formulas of enunciation: Bandersnatch, a case study

Abstract

New forms of media production and consumption point out and implement new forms of enunciation of the audiovisual image. Despite its peculiar model of development, “Bandersnatch” (Netflix 2018), the interactive episode of the Black Mirror series, exemplifies and radicalizes some of the typical features of contemporary seriality. Behind the apparent logical and space-time eccentricity of the narrative world, we can highlight a homologues development between the structure of the text and the forms of its production and consumption. In the episode, this homology is highly marked and materialized through its interactive mechanism. Nevertheless, the collapse between the plane of the enunciation and the plane of text results in an autonomous reproductive model of the medium, rather than in a constructive cooperation of the spectator-user. In particular, the marks of the enunciation inscribed in the text are no longer traces through which it is possible to abstractly infer the simulacrum of the instance of enunciation itself, but they become factors for the material reproduction of the media dispositive.