Why Bandersnatch isn't a movie

When I published my year-end movie list, I got a couple people asking me why I hadn’t included Black Mirror: Bandersnatch on it. 

The most pertinent answer was that I hadn’t seen it yet.

Now that I have seen it, the answer I would have/could have given was “It’s not a movie.”

What makes a movie a movie is a semantic argument that could twist someone into knots, and Bandersnatch could be Exhibit A of that particular debate. But the more of it I watched, the more certain I was that it doesn’t belong in any list that is purely recognizing feature films.

In case you don’t know anything about Bandersnatch, it’s an “episode” of Black Mirror airing exclusively on Netflix that involves a video game programmer trying to program an adventure game based on a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novel. This “episode” is also a choose-your-own-adventure for the viewer, as there are choices that pop up on the screen throughout, and you must use your remote control (or mouse if you watch on a computer) to select a particular option, which guides where the narrative goes next.

I put “episode” in quotes because calling it that commits it to being a regular hour-long installment of the show. In truth, there’s probably no “regular” installment of Black Mirror. While most of the shows have been in that typical 45-60 minute range, some have been shorter and some have been longer. Installments have been released in free-standing form as well, not directly tied in to the release of the rest of the season. In a way, Black Mirror is the prototype for the way streaming TV has relaxed our strict parameters on the old-school definition of a TV show.

But because it does have that name, Black Mirror, attached to it, categorizing Bandersnatch as something within the realm of TV is probably the easiest way to go.

The most direct point of comparison might be the December 2017 episode of Black Mirror, U.S.S. Callister. It’s one of the longer ones at 76 minutes, and though it was released alongside the rest of the fourth season, it generated plenty of discussion independent of those other episodes. However, it was not branded as anything other than an episode of the show, and I never once considered adding it to my various movie lists.

Self-classification seems to be the biggest difference with Bandersnatch, and of course the choose-your-own-path gimmick. Bandersnatch is described as an “interactive film” rather than an episode of the show. Its possible running time is variable. Depending on the path you choose, it could be full feature length, 90 minutes or longer. However, the quickest path gets you through the story in only 40 minutes, or so I have read. If you watched that version of Bandersnatch, I hardly think you’d feel compelled to compare it on an equal playing field with other 90-minute features. (Though I should note that even Netflix is not really sure how to categorize it, as the poster above describes it as an "event.")

But let’s set aside how Netflix wants us to think of it, because in truth, Netflix probably doesn’t care what you call it as long as you watch it. It’s like my wife that way. When I tried to get into a discussion of its categorization, she wasn’t interested in that. I can’t blame her, as she’s not agonizing over these things like I do.

The reason I don’t think Bandersnatch is a movie is because you can’t discuss it with someone else with any certainty that you’ve both had the same experience. In fact, there would be almost no way to have the same exact experience as someone else, unless you watched it with them, given that you must make around 30 different decisions at some point or other over the course of the narrative.

Now, you can say that viewers always have a different “experience” of a film. Personal, real-world factors – such as life experience, preference for a particular genre, mood on a given day – always factor in to how we “see” a movie. “You didn’t see the same movie I did,” you might say to a person with whom you disagreed about a particular film.

But that’s never meant literally. Usually you saw the same film, you just didn’t “see it the same way.” Unless you saw a different cut of a particular film – and I’ve got my problems as well with multiple edits of the same film – you literally saw the same images and heard the same dialogue. You just interpreted them differently based on your own biases.

The Bandersnatch text is not the same for every viewer. In fact, there are whole parts of the film (ha, I just noticed I called it a “film”) that may have been key to one person’s enjoyment or dislike of the film, that another person may not have seen at all. I read that there are 150 minutes of distinct, unique footage, only about 90 of which I saw. How could I miss an hour of footage and properly know whether I liked it or not? I liked what I saw, but what if there were grave missteps made in those other 60 minutes that would seriously undermine the movie for me if I saw them? (Yep, just called it a “movie.”)

Let’s take the whole section where Stefan (Fionn Whitehead) and Colin (Will Poulter) trip on LSD. It was one of Bandersnatch’s most interesting sequences for me, and yet I have to think many viewers wouldn’t have even seen it. You have to make one decision correctly just to get Stefan back to Colin’s apartment, where he offers him the drug. Then you have to choose to have him take the drug. We did both of those things so we saw the part where Colin tells Stefan that one of the two of them must jump off the balcony, at least 15 stories to the ground. While it seemed that a lot of our subsequent story stemmed from having taken this path, I guess I ultimately don’t think this can be considered a central structural element to the story, since some viewers would never even get there. Does it even have a central structural element?

I don’t even know how you properly talk about Bandersnatch with another person. You’d have to say “Did you get to the part where …?” If they did, they can talk about it with you. If they didn’t, maybe you’re spoiling something for a subsequent viewing of Bandersnatch that they plan to undertake.

If you want to get really cynical, Bandersnatch almost seems like a ploy by Netflix to force repeat viewings, and thereby goose its viewing numbers even further. Of course, since Netflix chooses to report its viewing numbers to us and there’s no way for us to verify them, it hardly seems necessary to artificially inflate those numbers. I do think they’re probably interested in seeing how many repeat viewings they get of Bandersnatch on the same account, to determine if people really will go down all the rabbit holes and watch the thing like seven or eight times. Which will probably help them decide whether to make more Bandersnatches.

To its credit, Bandersnatch does give you a window into decisions you didn’t make by taking you back to the most recent decision you made to see if you want to do it over. But usually you only go one step back, and usually only if the step you chose brings the narrative to a close. There are branches you can’t get back to because they are far too early, like the opening choice of cereals, or the choice of which music to listen to on Stefan’s walkman. You have to start all over again if you want to do those differently.

Ultimately, I think this is an incredibly exciting project that demonstrates a real ambition in storytelling and programming. But I can’t say I didn’t find it stressful to watch. With each choice we made, I felt myself walking away from parts of this “film” that I couldn’t see – that I would only be able to see if I watched it again, and again, and again. And despite the way it plays with notions of time, reality and free will in provocative ways, Bandersnatch is not an experience I want to keep having in order to unlock all its Easter eggs.

If I need a final crowning reason for not considering this a film, let’s go back to my year-end list of film rankings, which I mentioned to start out this piece. Movie lists are not only about comparing all the films you saw in a given year with each other, but they’re about comparing those viewings to the viewings undertaken by other cinephiles. I’m not only considering BlacKkKlansman in comparison to all the other films I saw in 2018, but in comparison to where you placed BlacKkKlansman on your list. To do that second one with any degree of usefulness, I have to be sure that you and I both saw the same BlacKkKlansman. You and I definitely did not see the same Bandersnatch, so we cannot make that comparison.

And yet I should acknowledge that throughout this piece, I have been repeatedly inclined to refer to it as a "film" or a "movie." Sometimes, I've left those references in, just to give you an indication of how real this debate is. I’m landing clearly on one side of the debate, in the end, but getting there was only the result of choosing between different paths of logic in my own mind and following them to their natural conclusion. And if Bandersnatch does indeed become some kind of bellweather for the future of movies, it’s a debate I’ll certainly have to revisit in the future.

Netflix is already disrupting every aspect of the movie industry, but I’m going to hold off a while longer before I allow it to disrupt my personal notion of what constitutes a film.