Between dystopia and science fiction: the identity construction of Lacie Pound on Black Mirror's series Nosedive episode
Black Mirror. Nosedive. Discourse genres. Language. Identity.
This thesis has the objective to establish, from The Bakhtin Circle’s theoretical and methodological assumptions, a discursive analysis of the identity construction process as regards the characters of the episode Nosedive, from the British series Black Mirror, mainly about the protagonist’s identity, Lacie Pound, and from which ways the identity constructions reflect and refract the identities of contemporary persons, marked by a unfinished identity (HALL, 2006). In addition, it aims to analyze how Black Mirror series, through literary language, represents the current reality, defined as liquid (BAUMAN, 2001), digital (HAN, 2019a), transparent (HAN, 2020), hypermodern (LIPOVETSKY, 2020a) and nimble (LIPOVETSKY, 2020b). To achieve these pretensions the audiovisual work (CANTORE and PAIVA, 2020) Nosedive, co-written by Michael Schur and Rashida Jones, will be used as a way to emphasize the identity questions as of interactions between Lacie Pound and other characters, since Lacie’s identity construction occurs through the relationships built along the plot, evincing social questions in an extremely excluding universe, regards to the acceptability of people who escaped from socially imposed standards and reverberate characteristics of the grotesque (BAKHTIN, 1989). In this social extremism sphere, it intends to analyze how the dystopian discourse genre, along with the Science Fiction discourse genre build a new genre, which results in the series concerned. Moreover, it is intended to study how the grotesque bodies are constituted throughout the Nosedive plot, in particular the main character’s body – since the grotesque is remarkable in its corporeal image – and in what ways they are linked to the ideal body archetype widespread in hypermodernity (LIPOVETSKY, 2020a) and in the society of beauty (HAN, 2019b). At length, seeks to evince the aversion that Nosedive’s society has to the different, metamorphosed into the monstrous figure, becoming liable to punishment and social exclusion, which ends up reflecting the world in contemporary life in art.