Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Bandersnatch! Bandersnatch! Is whatever a Bandersnatch is! Look out! Here comes a fourth wall smashing lampshade hanging death defying tropifying choose your own full motion video game slice of interactive fiction that’s in the main not really a film, and so is of questionable value discussing in this format.
If you have Netflix, it’s worth spending a couple of hours fiddling with Bandersnatch, and I say that as someone who thinks Black Mirror is, in general, the most perplexingly well received slab of media over the past decade. In terms of overarching narrative, it’s about a young programmer with some mental health issues that’s trying to finish a video game on a tight deadline, adapting a cult classic choose your own adventure novel, the creation of which drove the author insane, and I’m sure you can see where this is heading.
The gimmick here is that you can, at various points and with various consequences, make choices in the life of Fionn Whitehead’s Stefan Butler, and how he interacts with his father (Craig Parkinson), rockstar programmer Colin Ritman (Will Poulter) and therapist, Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe).
For a piece of achingly meta interactive fiction like this, it’s perhaps fitting that the most fun I’ve had with this is reading film critics flailing around trying to describe this when, to anyone who’s been around video games for the past decade or so we can simply say “it’s a Telltale game” and describe it in its entirety, or if like us greybeards they’ve been around since the ZX Spectrum home computing heyday in which Bandersnatch is set, “it’s The 7th Guest without the irritating puzzles”.
Just as that did not turn out to be the future of games, this is not the future of film, but it’s a fun gimmick worth some of your time to play with, but nothing like enough to go through multiple times to find the “different” endings, especially as it seems many of them are different in the “Mass Effect 3” sense.
Strangely, though, the main thing that’s stayed with me from Bandersnatch is a similar, but much less virulent form of the annoyance of the meta narrative from Spec Ops: The Line. If you’ll permit the tangent, in that game, in a nutshell, everything you as a protagonist did to help the people you proport to be helping makes it much, much worse, to the point that at the end you are presented with your actions by essentially an author avatar saying you could have simply stopped playing instead of doing these horrible, white phosphor based things. Which is the sort of comment that’s clever for ten seconds, before it falls apart on analysis. There’s no way to progress the narrative or the game in Spec Ops without performing these actions, and while I see the artistic intent of saying you could stop, the form is tied to the function here, and games are expensive and bought to be played, so simply not playing is a daft waste of money, and a silly thing for a game developer to say.
I get a similar, but far less explicit sense of finger-wagging from Bandersnatch, undercut entirely by the way that any option chosen to stop our protagonist suffering leads to an immediate non-standard game over and prompt to go back and screw him up a little more. Turn that black mirror back upon yourself, Charlie Brooker. Kudos for coming up with a film that’s difficult to pirate, though, so I’m sure Netflix were happy with that.