What spoilers I do provide will not
detract from the immediacy of the program, and I have omitted what I
believe to be the most tragic aspect, as that scene is possible to
ruin. You may feel safe in reading this if you have not seen Black
Mirror yet.
I'm not a TV reviewer, or even a
blogger (where forms requiring more than 140 characters of attention
[cont...]), but I feel compelled to write on two aspects of the first
story in the Black Mirror trilogy which have been overlooked in the
traditional media reviews, the reaction of viewers who have taken to
Twitter, and the questions about human nature this stark picture
raises.
I've read all the major British papers'
reviews of “The National Anthem.” Initially, this was to see how
advance viewing held up to my high expectations of Brooker. After I
had seen the program, this curiosity turned to disbelief: how could
none of the papers have mentioned, amid favorable comparisons to The
Twilight Zone, just how traumatic Black Mirror is? It falls into
the same category as the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men
and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers:
that is, it is excellent, but the world it depicts is so psychopathic
– yet so familiar and plausible – that one is left feeling so
nauseated and disturbed that no degree of excellence could compel a
second viewing. I didn't sleep well as a result of seeing it, and I
still feel slightly physically ill. Once the initial traumatic phase
wears off enough to allow for reflection, one is left with an even
more troubling question:
What
does it say about us as a species and as a culture that the most
intellectually-stimulating television drama of 2011 has as its
driving force a global movement compelling the British Prime Minister
to fuck a pig?
In
addition to convincing nearly 4 million people (according to BARB) to
watch simulated man-on-pig sex, which is an achievement in itself,
Charlie Brooker has managed to disgust me out of my entire repertoire
of Welsh jokes, and make an even more acidic statement on
contemporary art than the 1994 K Foundation award. It goes without
saying that, in spite of this, I wouldn't have "seen it through
to the end" if it weren't for compelling characters and plot.
The urgency of the horror is derived from real life scenarios such as
Gordon Brown's being forced by social media to issue an apology.
How
much have we changed in the first century of our transformation to
electric media if only thirty years ago Mary Whitehouse, CBE (yeah,
fucking CBE) was banging on about pim-holes,
pempsliders, and Daleks being too scary? A great deal, surely,
but in America our regulatory stipulations lag further behind.
In
America, it is all too easy to find stories of the goriest murders,
with seven second jump cut action thrill scenes of gleeful artisan
flamethrowing interspersed with long shots of witty banter over the
charred human remains. It is all too easy to find the same glibness
applied to such violent and deplorable acts as rape. All this and a
healthy sample of verbal abuse for the kiddies to mimic and willful
ignorance to boost your self-esteem thrown in, all on the terrestrial
stations, straight to your home to stoke your hard-on for military
excess. Meanwhile, nipples are digitally removed from lingerie
catalogs; may God have mercy on us if one appears on a glowing
screen.
But I
digress... Suffice it to say, this won't be on our airwaves any time
soon, even though it is the first meaningful look into the dark soul
of our new age in the cult of glowing rectangles. The vomit-worthy
physicality of Black Mirror is a necessary expression of our
emotional disconnection from our disturbed internet personas.
The
10,00 tweets per minute egging PM Michael Callow on and the death
threats against his family, which ultimately break his resolve, are
not solely the domain of dystopian fiction. In our own world, behind
the platitudes and conspiracy theorists available online, one finds
an undercurrent mix of anonymous pointless venting and genuine hatred
for others, both of which can be traced to a constellation of factors
including the alienation and isolation of global communications and
our culture-wide confusion about how we, as individuals, are to
interface with a society so scarred by the integrated circuit that
the institutions and careers our parents hold dearest have been
replaced by automated racks of servers and a psychic vacuum.
If I
can't see the person at the other end of of my vitriol, surely it is
no harm to wish AIDS or cancer on them, or to hurl racist slurs on
them, or even simply to describe their dearest work of art a
pointless piece of shit. In the last decade,
rightly-if-too-infrequently called the Uh-Oh's, joking about AIDS
took on the status of a meme, right along with more innocent fair
like rickrolling. This despite the fact that persons active in the LGBT community from a short 15 or 20 years prior had undergone an
experience as harrowing as a war and thus deserved a measure of
respect usually reserved for veterans. This despite the fact that if
you live in the developed world, someone you know has died of cancer
or has been cut and poisoned and burned to death first. At the heart
of the population of Black Mirror's quasi-fictional public is a lack
of empathy.
Ordinarily,
one has a vague sense that bestiality is wrong or unnatural. The lack
of visceral revulsion is more accurately described as a lack of
imagination than as a moral failure. As Mr Brooker has put it in his
other projects, our beloved box has so distorted our relationship to
reality, that we mistakenly believe that we are the only losers in a
world where everyone else is married to The One and living in the
sort of homes you see on MTV. In the mix of alienation and dampened
epathic imagination, we add the information addiction and overload
that has compelled me to check on my social media profiles a dozen
times in the last hour. I don't remember what you said two hours ago.
How
short our collective memory has grown! From forgetting about our
ongoing epidemics as they were a decade or two prior, we have moved
into a period that would drive Kierkegaard, who described his own
contemporaries as spectators and his own time as transitory and
trivial in its concerns, to gnaw off his own limbs in a fit of
madness. Earlier this year, for one day, the entire world gathered
around their glowing rectangles in solidarity with Troy Davis. You
had to Google that name just now. By the next day, the
Twitterspheroid had returned to its regular programming of [replace
movie name with bacon]. Indeed, the fictional Mr Callow's reputation
as prime minister has improved a year after his demoralizing ordeal.
Presumably this has nothing to do with the release of the princess
and the incident has mainly been forgotten.
The
relationship between imagination and empathy is most apparent in the
fictional TV audience's status as audience surrogate. For the first
20 minutes of Black Mirror, we laugh along with them. By 30 minutes
in, we are slightly on edge. In the climax (haw haw), we begin to
feel a visceral disgust. Even the perpetrator of the kidnapping and
initiator of the mob has by this point realized that he has
underestimated the aspects of human nature which he relied on to
carry out [his project]. Only he and Mr Callow's chief of staff are
able to share in the knowledge of the day's true tragedy, brought on
by our inability to look away from the media long enough to see
what's going on in the world. The marks of great tragedy, horror and
pity, are to be found in abundance in the final part of the drama,
but there is no catharsis. The electric age society has not been
purged of its evil and is free to commit it again. The most pitiful
sight in drama in 2011 is either Mr Callow's profuse vomiting or the
state of his relationship with Mrs Callow.
Initially,
one might be excused for not understanding the merit of the
comparisons to The Twilight Zone.
Rod Serling dealt with such pressing issues as nuclear annihilation
and racial discrimination. What possible parallels are there between
that and the prime minister fucking a pig on live TV? In a world
under constant threat of nuclear annihilation, a world of severe
economic injustice, of racial inequality, of a lack of empathic
imagination, one can scarcely imagine the effects a direct democracy
carried out via social media without imagining a glib forum moderator
going over his site's rules about being more creative than picking
directly from the World Targets in Megadeaths
manual.
What
is frightening about Black Mirror, The Twilight Zone,
and even the Daleks (particularly their creation myth) is the
closeness of the possibility of these alternate worlds. We hate what
we have been, and we fear what we could become.
Mr
Brooker's Twitter followers today [the day after broadcast] tweeting
at him regarding their desire for David Cameron to fuck a pig. “I
bet he already has,” said one. I would get upset about it, but I'd
like to get back to my TV. I'll probably have forgotten about this
stupid program soon enough.
