Valley of the Dolls and Airport: Explaining the Books in Black Mirror Beyond the Sea
The most directly and obviously relevant story to Beyond the Sea in the collection is “Marionettes, Inc, in which a man in an unhappy marriage buys a robot replica of himself so that the robot can interact with his wife and he does not have to. We also see plot similarities in “The Rocket Man,” about a boy who misses his astronaut father, whom he hardly ever sees, as the replicas Cliff and David use in Beyond the Sea are, of course, a solution to this problem as well as a way to keep the two men sane while they are in space.
The connection goes far beyond these plot similarities, though. “The Veldt” features a family torn apart by violence after some family members become too obsessed with a fantasy; “Kalaeidoscope” explores the loneliness and the danger of working in space; ‘The Long Rain’ follows characters driven to madness and death; “No Particular Night or Morning” is about two friends on a spaceship discussing the nature of reality, and “The Visitor” follows a fight over a person who offers exiles a means of psychological escape from their grim reality which is taken away all together when the person is killed in the process, just as Lana is killed when Cliff and David start fighting over her and the escape from the space station that spending time with her represents. And, of course, the framing device that holds together the stories in The Illustrated Man is a tattooed man whose tattoos tell stories, which reflects the importance of art and drawing to the story, as it is not only David’s therapeutic release, but also the plot device that he uses to persuade Cliff to lend him his replica on a regular basis.
But really, The Illustrated Man is significant to Black Mirror as a whole, not just Beyond the Sea. The short stories in the collection are about the dangers of technology and the impact of technology – especially space travel and virtual reality – on human psychology. It is “what if spaceships and television, but too much?” And if that is not a perfect description of a 1950s form of Black Mirror, we do not know what is.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein (1966)
This is the book David recommends to Lana, so it gives us some insight into his character and motivations at that point in the story. Author Robert A. Heinlein is also known for the original novel Starship Troopers (1959), which was the basis of the 1997 film, and his short story “Waldo,” about a disabled man using mechanical arms, has already been referenced back in Black Mirror season 2’s “The Waldo Moment.”
Heinlein’s politics and views shifted several times over his lifetime, but he was generally fairly militaristic, occasionally libertarian, while also being very sex-positive and interested in exploring unconventional relationships. In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Moon is being used as a penal colony and men outnumber women two to one, resulting in a society open to polyandry. So David may have a quite straightforward motive for encouraging Lana to read it, since a relationship threesome involving two men and one woman is basically exactly what he wants all three of them to enter into. He has obviously already read the book; its libertarian outlook is perhaps something that appealed to him.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is also another good reflection of the themes of this episode, and of Black Mirror as a whole. Two of the main characters are “Mannie” (a nickname for Manuel), a human, and “Mike” (short for Mycroft, named after Sherlock Holmes’ brother), his friend, an artificial intelligence. At the end, Mannie wants to ask God whether a computer might also be “one of Your creatures”, reflecting the questions around what it is to be human that underlie the episode and indeed the show, and that were the motivation for the brutal murder of David’s family by Manson-family-esque killers in the first place.
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