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Men Against Fire (Black Mirror, TV)

Unconscious War Machine:

Men Against Fire and Solidarity

by İbrahim Eren Adalı 


“Men Against Fire”, the fourth episode of the third season of the British science-fiction series Black Mirror, takes a deep dive into the issues around the catastrophe of fascism and reveals the shocking results of the dehumanization in society. The episode revolves around a new soldier, Stripe, who goes on his first mission to detect a roach threat in the forest. These hideous mutated creatures are called roaches which the military kills ruthlessly. However, it later appears that it is nothing but the propaganda of the military and a made-up threat. After Stripe’s mass software glitches out, it turns out that roaches are nothing more than regular human beings. This brain implant, “Mass”, was programmed to deceive the soldiers into believing that these roaches are dreadful zombies. Since roaches are believed to be genetically inferior, the military aims to improve the quality of the human species. The episode explores how the de-humanization of the system violates the solidarity in society.

As its name indicates, the mass system primarily raises the issue of mass murder and offers a scathing critique of dehumanization. It is crucial to point out that there are parallels between the episode and xenophobic hate speech of much political discourse. One might even argue that a mass system can be viewed almost like a computer war game. Soldiers, who are programmed to murder the roaches unquestionably, decay into mechanized soulless video game characters at a metaphorical level. The unscrupulous tactics of the system transform people into almost re-engineered android war machines. Interestingly enough, the system disables soldiers’ senses of taste, smell, and touch, preventing them from smelling human blood during combat. Therefore, the arbitrary system dehumanizes not only the roaches but also the soldiers as well. Also, it is important to remember that uneducated young people are more susceptible to propaganda. The mass works in such a way that soldiers, being young fighters of the system, quickly fall victim to the manipulation trap. At this point, the episode can be recognized as the allegory of the vicious politics that aim to turn young people into unfeeling machines and weaken the social solidarity between refugees and host communities that way.

Once Stripe realizes that he has been deceived and the roaches are not zombie-looking sub-humans, he can smell, touch and, see again. It is an indisputable fact that the sense of smell, touch, and taste are the very symbols of humanness. Empathy is another crucial concept in the episode as well. To weaken the social solidarity between refugees and host communities, one must dull the empathy and conscience in society. In other words, empathy, an essence of humanness, must be destroyed by the system. “Men Against Fire” problematizes racial bias and helps us to understand how authorities build an army of mechanical war machines with no soul or empathy to exclude the “solidarity” between ethnic groups in the episode; as such it points to the importance of solidarity in our civil society.

Black Mirror

Verbruggen, Jacob. Black Mirror. Just Entertainment, 2016.