Analysis of Black Mirror and the Girl with the Hungry Eyes

Dark Satire –

Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes”

and Black Mirror’s Fifteen Million Merits

Fritz Leiber’s 1949 short story “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and Season One, Episode Two of the British television anthology Black Mirror, entitled “Fifteen Million Merits,” are both extensive satirical takes on institutions so ingrained in the forefront of the mind that the negative impacts these institutions have on society are often simply ignored.  Both deal heavily with female gender stereotypes, especially the overt sexualization of women in advertising and the media. In both plots, the media exists as the primary power structure of the world within the story, yet this power structure is represented very differently, primarily due to the large gap in time between the setting of the two. While “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” analyzes the American advertising and modeling industries, “Fifteen Million Merits”, released in 2011, satirizes many different realms of daily life, from the pervasive presence of technology and screens to television talent shows. The episode and the story place the idea of socially constructed conformity at the forefront of the plot but address it in different ways. While both “Fifteen Million Merits” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” attack major institutions head-on, they end without any change to the institutional flaws, leaving the observer or reader to compare the plots to the modern world, which, even in the case of “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” a nearly seventy-year-old story, is an incredibly accurate one.

        The most immediate and obvious parallel between “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and “Fifteen Million Merits” is the underlying theme of conformity. “Fifteen Million Merits” takes place in an imagined near-future world in which a society of people live in a completely enclosed, entirely autonomous space, with nearly every surface containing a video screen with customized entertainment and very frequent advertising. They earn their living by riding on stationary bikes to generate power for an assumed outside world, in exchange for "merits", a form of currency used to buy food, goods, items, such as a penguin companion, for their virtual character, and for entertainment. The society shuns overweight people, who are confined to menial, janitorial jobs and subjected to humiliation via a game show. Every rider wears a similar outfit, consisting of plain grey sweatpants and a grey t shirt or jacket. The janitors, however, wear bright orange garb, a stark contrast to the dark grey worn by the more in-shape riders. Additionally, there are several pornographic movies that rides have the option of viewing while they cycle. The dominant color in these films is purple. By physically dividing every group of individuals into a certain category, whomever is in charge of the “system” portrayed in the show is encouraging uniformity and conformity. While women are able to work and cycle alongside men, it is clear that they aren’t viewed in the same lens as men. The cycling is similar to an office job, in that workers perform repetitive, menial tasks, and a parallel between the monotony of everyday life in the real world can easily be drawn to that in the show. The physical similarities of the categories of people can be translated into the world of modeling and advertising as portrayed in “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes.” The world of modeling subdivides people based on physical appearance, whether intentionally or not. Up until extremely recently, it was incredibly rare for “plus-size” or African-American models to appear in a show or a campaign alongside the more “traditional” white model.  The Girl in the story is described as being someone “who sums it all up so completely,” standing in quite a stark contrast to the models of the time, especially to a photographer who has seen many. (Leiber, 223) It is obvious that she possesses something that other models do not. That would then become the goal of many other women, possessing a desire to appear “in” and on trend. Think heroin chic of the mid 90s, where nearly every model appeared dangerously thin and pale, or the current obsession with tattooed models. While “Fifteen Million Merits” is more of a take on the obsessive capitalistic market and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” satirizes the American advertising industry, both deliver hard takes on the issue of forced conformity within modern society.

        The overt sexualization of women and gender stereotypes are both addressed in “Fifteen Million Merits” and “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” but the nearly seventy-year difference in release date paints two very different pictures of sexual harassment. This harassment is much more direct and apparent in “Fifteen Million Merits,” and the harassment that occurs was clearly intentionally injected into the episode. One of the characters in the episode, a young woman named Abi, enters a talent show with credits that she earned from cycling. Once on stage, her song is interrupted by the judges, who then make several overtly sexual comments about her body before encouraging her to do porn instead. Abi is excessively pressured by both the crowd and judges, and in her altered state tearfully accepts, possibly due to the effects of a drink she is forced to consume before going on stage. She is shown several times in advertisements throughout the remainder of the episode, appearing barely conscious. The sexualization is much subtler in “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes,” and was most likely not intentional on the part of Fritz Leiber. In the beginning of the story, the unnamed narrator jokes about how he “hasn’t developed any long-haired indignation at the evils of advertising and the national glamour girl complex”, showing that, despite all the events that he is about to share with the reader, they haven’t changed his attempts to “capitalize on sex that way.” (Leiber, 223) After several sessions with the Girl, the narrator states that it “isn’t about sex this time,” implying that there have been previous times where the shoots have been about sex. (Leiber, 226) The narrator makes several sexual passes at the Girl throughout the story, still an all-too common occurrence in the modeling and advertising industry, and especially relevant today as it seems like new accusations of sexual assault are coming out against big-name celebrities every day. The way that Leiber casually describes sexual harassment in “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” tells a somber tale of the plight of women worldwide, and the fact that it is still present in “Fifteen Million Merits” shows how little society has changed.