‘Striking Vipers’ Is About the Kind of Queer Bodies Society Still Fears
The queer potential of “Striking Vipers” is undermined by its own discomfort with the kind of queerness it has put on display.
With a cynical eye toward the future, Black Mirror has been somewhat insulated from present day conversations about diversity and representation in character-driven TV shows. But the all-black cast in the newly released season 5 opener “Striking Vipers” makes it clear that black people are indeed part of Black Mirror’s tech dystopia.
The episode, written by Charlie Brooker and directed by Owen Harris, involves two best friends, Danny (Anthony Mackie) and Karl (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who reconnect at a birthday party for Danny years after Danny has gotten married and started a family with Theo (Nicole Beharie). For his birthday, Karl gifts Danny a video game, Striking Vipers, with a device that allows the men to experience advanced virtual reality while their avatars, Roxette (Pom Klementieff) and Lance (Ludi Lin), battle each other across exotic landscapes.
But the old friends quickly turn to having sex with each other in the video game, and the VR feature allows the men to experience the same physical sensations their male and female avatars do. Eventually, the virtual affair causes Danny to become sexually withdrawn from Theo, who takes notice, and the rest of the episode chronicles their struggle to confront their unhappiness and to save their marriage.
It is unknown if Brooker had always intended for Danny and Karl to be played by black actors, or if he even realized their blackness could dictate how the episode confronted queer desire. According to an interview with Abdul-Mateen II, who plays Karl, Brooker had originally written the show’s other episode featuring a queer story line, “San Junipero”, about a heterosexual couple. So it is possible that the characters in “Striking Vipers” were developed irrespective of the racial identities of the actors that would eventually play them.
I remain skeptical of that. I watched “Striking Vipers” with the understanding that blackness was crucial to its presentation of queerness, especially given the episode’s deployment of the down low trope. This trope claims that a number of secretly gay black men are getting married to women while also having sex with other men, potentially exposing the women to HIV.
Even as “Striking Vipers” appears to seek compromise with Danny and Karl’s queerness at the end, its original sin in failing to imagine black men’s queerness outside of homophobic tropes cannot be forgotten. The reluctance of Brooker and Harris to show sexual intimacy between two masculine black men suggests queer acceptance remains limited, even for liberal TV audiences, to representations that do not threaten culturally rigid distinctions between gay and straight, masculine and feminine, or white and black.
In his review of the episode, author Noah Berlatsky argues that “Striking Vipers” has all the characteristics of exploitation films, which “capitalize on the moral panic surrounding trendy, sexy, and controversial topics while exploring their underlying social issues.” He believes that the virtual reality feature in the game, which allows Danny and Karl to experience the sensations of their avatars’ sexual intercourse, intends to exploit fears around sex in online space and the “feminizing threat” online space poses to isolated young men.
Given the amount of time they spend alone playing Striking Vipers, Danny and Karl are shown to exhibit the characteristics of the emasculated male. Neither is able to sustain meaningful romantic relationships with the women in their lives. Danny’s wife, Theo, is the one who initiates conversations, remembers anniversaries, does the housework, and tends to their child while Danny sinks deeper and deeper inside himself. Karl, on the other hand, has devolved into a man-child who seeks little else in life than to relieve his sexual impulses.
Notably, Danny’s descent is juxtaposed with his and Theo’s effort to grow their family. Whether it is the communal dynamic of Danny’s birthday cookout or the marriage ideals put forward in Theo’s monologue during their anniversary dinner, the black family emerges as a stabilizing fortress against the volatile tides of queerness — and the danger they pose to black women like Theo.
As HuffPost’s Zeba Blay explained in her analysis of “Striking Vipers”
There are few queer stories about black men in pop culture, and a trope that we do get often is that of the ‘downlow brother’ who marries black women while continuing to pursue gay sexual relationships outside the marriage. The trope doesn’t leave much room for compassion or nuance, vilifying these men rather than scrutinizing the real factors that force them to stay in the closet or question their sexual identity in painful silence.
By limiting black men’s queerness to the down low narrative, “Striking Vipers” ultimately limits itself as a bold or positive representation of queerness. And perhaps it was never intended to be. After all, viewers never see Danny and Karl engage in sex with each other or with other men. Towards the end of the episode, the men share a single kiss to see if their sexual attraction to each other goes beyond the video game, but after the kiss both men claim not to feel any sparks.
I could be convinced that the decision not to include sex scenes of any kind between Danny and Karl directly, or between Karl and other men, helped convey the ambiguity of their desire if Black Mirror had not taken a different approach with the black female lead in “Hang the DJ”. Amy (Georgina Campbell) is shown having a string of unfulfilling sexual encounters with men and women in order to convey her anxieties about a dating program that promises to find her “perfect match” after a certain number of dates. Avoiding sex until she re-matched with the man she believed to be her soulmate would have conveyed her anxieties just as much, if not more.
Once Danny and Karl realize their sexual chemistry is limited to the video game, Danny confesses his “affair” to Theo. In an effort to save their marriage, she allows Danny to play “Striking Vipers” with Karl once a year, while she goes on dates with other men. How the couple reconcile Danny’s sexual behavior with his identity, and whether or not they are better off with Danny’s yearly affair with Karl is unclear — and probably not important. Saving the black family trumps all of it.
Ultimately, the queer potential of “Striking Vipers” is undermined by its own discomfort with the kinds of queer bodies it has put on display: men who are not feminine, not attracted to men exclusively, and not white.
In other words, men who reveal prejudices that a post-Obergefell society would rather pretend it does not still have.
