San Junipero: Skeumorphs & Flickering Signifiers

In How We Became Posthuman, Hayles is quick to acknowledge the multiple ironies of her title.¹ One of these, she notes, is in her use of the past tense “became.” Hayles explains that this was intended to surprise the reader, but it’s also a wink at technophobes who fear a postbiological future. Yet, it also echoes Donna Haraway’s notion that we are already cyborgs. Although Hayles refers to “human” and “posthuman” as terms with “shifting configurations that vary with historically specific contexts”—in some ways foreshadowing the flickering signifiers referred to later in the text—she also provides a list of ways in which virtual reality has visibly altered our current and actual lived experiences.

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To examine these elements, I’m designating this post as an analysis of “San Junipero”—an episode from the third season of the sci-fi Netflix series Black Mirror. As with every installment to the series, “San Junipero” takes an element that concerns technology within contemporary society and projects it into a heightened future. Here, the story revolves around attempts to prolong life. The episode begins with an initial meet cute between Yorkie and Kelly. Soon after, a romance develops between the two twenty-somethings that is quickly complicated by a number of factors. One, Yorkie is hesitant about beginning a romance with another woman. Two, the women are only able to see each other once a week. Three, San Junipero—the town in which they meet—is actually an online platform that both women access from distant locations. Four, in the real world, Yorkie is in a coma and has been, residing in a hospital, for the last 40 years. Five, Kelly—who lives in a nursing home—is dying of cancer and has been told she has three months left to live. I’ll stop numbering the complications now, but as the story develops, a number of parallels between the narrative and Hayles’s writing emerge.

In discussing virtuality and skeumorphs, Hayles warns that we ought to be skeptical about metanarratives that follow “the transformation of the human into a disembodied posthuman” (Hayles 22). Yorkie and Kelly give visual representation to Hayles’s claim that the body and the message are inherently linked.

Skeumorphy glasses

After their initial meeting, Kelly makes an early reference to this idea by questioning why Yorkie is wearing glasses. Admitting that the lenses don’t do anything, Yorkie explains, “I wore glasses back in school, but I guess now they’re kind of a comfort thing. […] To be honest, I think I wear them for something to hide behind.” In San Junipero, users are able to change their appearances at will, changing outfits and hairstyles instantly. And while it seems that users are only limited by their own imaginations, they continue to embody what appear to be younger forms of themselves. Kelly responds to Yorkie by saying that the glasses are “authentically you,” highlighting a reason, perhaps, that users continue to hold onto these aspects of their former selves. While attention is brought to this particular skeumorph (“a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time”), other corporeal examples appear throughout the episode (Hayles 17). Of these, race and gender are perhaps the most obvious. Despite a much more liberal view of sexuality, gender nevertheless continues to be represented through a binary pattern. Additionally, Kelly is presented as a woman of color in both worlds while Yorkie appears as white in both.

Yorkie & Kelly outside of San Junipero

Yorkie & Kelly inside of San Junipero

These skeumorphs represent an apparent complexity regarding virtual reality. They are fixed in a (virtual) world that is otherwise full of flickering signifiers.

Hayles coins the term “flickering signifier” in contrast to Lacan’s definition of a floating signifier. While Lacan noted the arbitrary nature that anchors a signifier to its signified (a relationship that could be severed easily enough and that would allow the signifier to float into a new relationship with a different signified), Hayles shows that, through computer coding, radical changes might be made between signifiers and signifieds (Hayles 31-32). A small tweak in code, for example, could change the meaning and/or appearance of a great body of text.

In contrast to the skeumorphs that tie San Junipero users back to their previous real-world realities, flickering signifiers allow for the instant changes in clothing and appearance that I’ve already noted. In addition, users are able to skip to different time periods within the system. Midway through the episode, Yorkie leaves the interface she’s been using—an environment set to replicate culture, style and technology from 1987—in order to search for Kelly in the years 1980, 1996, and 2002. In each instance, time is presented as flickering—something that can alter immediately, drastically.

Yorkie at the arcade in 1996

Kelly & Yorke at the arcade in 2002

Lastly, Yorkie’s use of the San Junipero system is a fictionalized parallel to the collective behind the online avatar introduced in Wagner James Au’s article (blog post?) “The Nine Souls of Wilde Cunningham.” Yorkie, who has been paralyzed and bedridden for 40 years, tells Kelly that, had they met in the real world, “You would not have got me at all.” San Junipero offers Yorkie a chance to engage in physical acts that she’s been unable to perform for more than half of her life.

In addition to allowing her a new bodily autonomy, San Junipero also allows Yorkie (and all other users) a sexual freedom. When Kelly visits Yorkie in the real world, she’s informed that the accident that put Yorkie in her current state occurred when she was 21, on the same night that she came out to her parents as a lesbian. Her parents did not respond well, and Yorkie—attempting to run away—drove her car off the road. Her parents are said to have viewed her sexuality as “not natural”—and although recent work in queer ecologies continues to diminish any kind of credibility still attributed to these kinds of claims, San Junipero is representative of a virtual reality where one can imagine new spaces for non-normative sexualities, as well as new opportunities for people with various disabilities.

This last point is something that I hope to explore further. Hayles refers to online romantic or sexual relationships as an example of how virtual reality has already altered our actual lived experiences (28). But this post is getting long, so I’ll take up this line of thinking in a later post.