Netflix's Spiderhead sees prisoners subjected to a series of emotional experiments. Here's how the film highlights real-life horrors.
Netflix's Spiderhead reflects on the private prison system, the callous, profit-driven machinations of the pharmaceutical industry, and how this nation's most powerful work to keep its citizenry sedated. The film proved to be as popular with Netflix audiences as it was relevant. It debuted at the number one spot on Netflix's top ten list, a coveted spot usually reserved for long-running series like the much-beloved Stranger Things or The Umbrella Academy.
The film is packed tightly with A-list stars and excellent actors, including, but not limited to Chris Hemsworth as Spiderhead's supervisor Steve Absenti, Miles Teller (Fantastic Four, Top Gun: Maverick) as Jeff, Jurnee Smollett (Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Lovecraft Country) as Lizzy, Tess Haubrich (The Wolverine, Alien: Covenant) as Heather, and Angie Millikan (My Brother Jack, The Shark Net) as Sarah. These actors are put to the test, as the Spiderhead script very literally calls for its actors to run the emotional gamut.
Here are some of the ways in which Spiderhead explores issues relevant to modern society.
The plot of Netflix's Spiderhead revolves around a batch of experimental chemicals, which are administered by the facility's staff. There is a history of mind-altering substances in fiction. Immediately, the drug soma, a widely consumed sedative consumed by the vast majority of the population in Aldous Huxley's 1982 novel Brave New World, comes to mind. However, the chemicals created for Spiderhead are not entirely euphoric in their effects but instead have the ability to augment the prisoner's emotional mindscape in any number of ways.
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Modern-day society is increasingly influenced by the effects of pharmaceuticals and other mind-altering chemicals. Whether this chemical influence comes in the form of a manufactured opioid epidemic or from the personal choices of a population forced into isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, sobriety is quickly falling out of favor as the standard mode of operation for the American public. In this way, Spiderhead proves prescient, as it's clear that clouding the minds of the average American would be beneficial to the corporate powers that be.
The previously mentioned pharmaceuticals, which have a wide variety of effects on the imprisoned individuals, are administered with the consent of Spiderhead's prisoners. Initially, it seemed like the experiments had a broader purpose. Later in the film, when Miles Teller's Jeff breaks into the staffing side of the Spiderhead facility, he discovers that the experiments he and fellow prisoners were subjected to were carried out for the sole purpose of testing a mind-control drug invented by the fictional Abnesti Pharmaceuticals.
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Unfortunately, there is a fair bit of real-world pain and suffering underlying the fictional pharmaceuticals in Spiderhead. Medical experiments, be they the intentional administration of drugs to unwitting participation, give questionable drugs to financially vulnerable guinea pigs who signed up for a medical trial to make a quick buck. Pharmaceutical corporations have knowingly given the okay to allow addictive chemicals to be prescribed with reckless abandon to sick citizens, which are well within the purview of global drug companies.
Whether the drugging of the American population comes about from uncaring corporate intentions or because citizens volunteer to have their free will, which comes with a whole host of hard decisions and precarity stripped from them, it is undoubtedly a reality of modern society. Spiderhead serves as a fascinating exploration of the average citizen's guinea pig status.
In Spiderhead, the prisoners of the state who populate the experimental incarceration facility are technically volunteers who signed up for the pharmaceutical program in the hopes of having their sentences reduced. However, it quickly becomes clear that the prison, while allowing a certain level of freedom for its inhabitants, is really made punitive by the criminal's own minds. The American prison system still employs all manner of archaic practices, from solitary confinement to corporal punishment. However, Spiderhead's prescience regarding the realities of prison comes when it ventures into the reality of mental imprisonment.
In a world increasingly fraught with frightening and seemingly fantastical horrors, Spiderhead provides a certain kind of wretched reassurance to Netflix audiences. Contemporary American society is plagued by certain sects of the powerful pharmaceutical industry. It has a prison system rife with issues seemingly remnants of a much more barbaric time. Perhaps most pressing, it seems as if there is no escape from the problems of daily life.
Spiderhead, and other similar films, are able to turn relatable horrors into brief, entertaining breaks from reality. As such, the persistence of Spiderhead, though undoubtedly shocking to viewers around the world, provides a certain perverse comfort, and much like the character's in the film itself, audiences are subject to a strange bit of emotional manipulation while watching it.
Nicholas Johnson is full time cool guy and part time freelance article writer. He has four rescue animals, two dogs, two cats, and no, he doesn't think that makes him better than you.