Interactive television fiction and Brecht’s V-Effekt

Abstract

Interactive television fiction and Brecht’s V-Effekt - This paper aims to draw a parallel between interactive television fiction and V-Effect, also known as the distancing effect, proposed by playwright Bertolt Brecht. The corpus of the research consists in two interactive episodes from two fiction shows from profoundly different times and geographies: the “Meu Pai” episode from television series “Você Decide” (Globo, 1997) and, mainly, the “Bandersnatch” episode from on-demand series “Black Mirror” (Netflix, 2018). Our goal is to do a preliminary analysis of the technological competence in generating the distancing effect when allied to television fiction.

Keywords
interactive television fiction; V-Effekt; Brecht; Black Mirror; artificial intelligence