Film Analysis Of Nosedive, Directed By Joe Wright

Nosedive is an episode of Black Mirror directed by British filmmaker, Joe Wright. It features protagonist Lacie, who lives in a world where you can rank and be ranked by random strangers on a phone app with augmented-reality retinal implants, based on every interaction you have with them. The episode starts off with Lacie being aggressively cheerful and nice to everybody she meets because she wants a higher rating on the app, because people who have high ratings are on the top of the social food chain. It then progresses with Lacie slowly losing her wits as her rating constantly decreases with every little mishap that happens to her. It ends with Lacie robbed of her phone and in prison, arrested for having a bad rating, but being happily mock angry and with the first genuine smile on her face for the first time in the whole episode.

Nosedive acts as form of social satire, whereby it reflects on society’s social media habits, and offers a look into our future with chilling dystopian possibilities. Director

A simulacrum often results in the superimposition of reality: Hyperreality; it engages with simulated reality to represent the underlying reality (Poster, 1988). In Nosedive, Lacie lives in a world where people do not even interact with one another without going through their social media feed first to find out what they have been doing lately, instead of asking them themselves, all the whilst being in each other’s company. The characters’ obsession to this ranking app has resulted in their inability to differentiate between reality and a simulation of reality. This jarring sense of hyperreality exposes the nature of our thirst for other people’s validation, and our desire to watch other people’s lives