This review contains spoilers.
A couple lies asleep in bed, their rumpled forms lit by the dim light of early morning. Into their quiet intrudes sound, and light: the vibration of a phone, the glowing of its screen. The man is British Prime Minster Michael Callow, and he’s being summoned by his aides to address a crisis. A princess has been kidnapped, and the kidnapper is threatening to kill her if the PM doesn’t meet a simple demand: I’ll let her go if you go on live TV and have sex with a pig.
So begins “The National Anthem,” the first episode of the BBC’s digital age anthology series Black Mirror. It’s a killer premise, isn’t it? Almost too good, in fact—it practically obscures the episode itself. But then, maybe that’s the point. The screw-a-pig-or-the-princess-gets-it setup is a killer hook for the same reasons that make it effective as a kidnapping demand, and if we as an audience can’t look away until the whole sickening scenario has played out—well, in the episode itself the public can’t either. That’s why it works.
The potency of the kidnapper’s demand is built into its transmission. The ransom video, showing the weeping princess reading the demand into the camera, is uploaded to YouTube. In the nine minutes it takes Downing Street to pull it down, the video has been copied and spread. Every copy they delete, a dozen more pop up. Soon, the video is trending on Twitter. It’s gone viral.
Meanwhile, the news media is at a loss for how to cover it. Downing Street has asked them to say nothing, but every reporter’s Twitter feed is exploding with viewers who’ve already seen the video and are wondering why they’re not seeing it on their TV screens. When a harried newsroom manager tells his staff that none of their competitors is running with the story, one of his reporters quips, “I hear Facebook’s coverage is pretty comprehensive.” Then they discover that American news has picked up the story, and it’s all over. They have to respond.
Anyone who’s even remotely plugged into social media can attest that this is exactly the way it would happen. There are dozens of real news stories that went from obscure to obsession in exactly the same way, gaining their own organic momentum completely as a function of our technology and the way it channels the best and worst impulses of the hive mind. But what makes “The National Anthem” wickedly smart is the bitter irony at its core: the kidnapper’s demand would lose power if no one was watching. The situation would be easier for Callow to deal with if the public could just look away. But they can’t. The kidnapper’s demand is OMG WTF LOL: shocking, and disgusting, and a little bit funny. It taps into the public’s interest in celebrity, and the humiliation of exalted figures. It plays into their worst, most voyeuristic and prurient impulses. Once they’ve seen the video, there’s no turning back. They’re in it through the end.
That the same dynamics are at play with us, the audience for “The National Anthem,” might open the episode to accusations of being somewhat sadistic toward its audience—enticing us to watch and then punishing us for doing so. And this accusation is at least partially true. But Funny Games the episode isn’t. The first time I watched it, I spend the entire 40-plus minutes in a state of nauseated anticipation: Would Callow go through with it? He couldn’t possibly, could he? But what other choice did he have? And how would it be shown? What would I be forced to watch by the episode’s end? (“Forced”—see how the mind of an audience works, as if we have no choice but to watch?)
But on a second viewing, I was struck by the way the episode keeps focus on the human reality at the center of the story: on the Prime Minister, wondering if he’s capable of the humiliating degradation he’s being forced into, and his wife, who’s the only one who seems to know that in the public’s mind, her husband is already a ruined man.
Ultimately, the heart of the episode is not in the dizzying velocity with which the kidnapping story develops a mind and momentum all its own, but with these two people: a married couple with a child, the sacredness of their privacy and their intimacy violated by a kidnapper’s demand and the technology by which that demand is given the power to destroy their lives. Which is why that beginning scene is so powerful: the husband and wife in bed, their peace disturbed by the buzzing of a cell phone and the glowing of its screen. Information can’t be kept at bay, whether we want it or not. It will just keep coming until we give in and reach for it.
The other scene that’s important to the episode is the one where people gather in a local pub to watch Callow fulfilling the kidnapper’s demand. The atmosphere is bacchanalian and anarchic at first; when an announcer comes on TV to warn the audience that the prime minister is about to commit an indecent act with a pig, they raise their pints and cheer. Then the thing comes on, and the episode cuts away to show us the faces of the crowd, their smiles turning to disgust, their disgust to pity, their pity to sadness.
This, then, is the national anthem of the episode’s title: the thing that unites us. Not what we say, the cultural and national values we attest and pledge our allegiance to, but what owns us. The images we can’t look away from, no matter how hard we try.
The final twist—that the princess was released a half-hour before the deadline, and could have saved the Prime Minister from his humiliation had anyone been paying attention to anything but their TV screens—is a bitter one, if a bit unbelievable. Is it really plausible that nobody was around to notice a princess stumbling down Milennium Bridge in the heart of London? For that matter, does anyone really believe that the public would stay glued to their television screens while a man screwed a pig for an entire hour? I, for one, suspect that most would look away after a few minutes. But these are quibbles, and “The National Anthem” is committed enough to its own internal logic that these plot holes barely register on the first viewing.
The post-credits reveal that the whole thing was a piece of performance art by an artist named Carlton Bloom who subsequently committed suicide, meanwhile, is an added twist that brings interesting shades of meaning to the episode. Bloom, it turns out upon repeated viewings, is a constant presence throughout the episode. He’s one of a seemingly random assortment of audience extras, a man who’s shown watching his TV throughout the episode with something like sadness and resignation in his eyes. Moreover, early on, before the news stations have picked up the kidnapping story, we’re shown a snippet of a story revealing that Bloom’s exhibit at the Tate Modern has been shut down.
It’s not entirely clear what Bloom’s Tate show consisted of or why it was shut down early—controversy or lack of public interest?—but the bit of added information opens up some interesting interpretations. It’s possible, for instance, that the kidnapping scheme was Bloom’s response to his failure at the Tate, a sort of poisoned suicide note to a world too obsessed with the images on their screens to notice him.
Odds and ends:
• The Prime Minister’s name is Michael Callow. Is there any significance to the last name? “Callow” means “inexperienced and immature,” which doesn’t really describe the PM, except in the way it describes us all: as neophytes to the information technology that has nonetheless taken over our lives. “What’s the playbook here?” Callow asks an aide. “There is no playbook,” the aide replies. “We’re in virgin territory here.” Indeed.
• It’s hard to see, particularly for an American audience, but “The National Anthem” really is funny, albeit in that blackly British “not really funny at all” sort of way. The HBO producer and porn star initially brought in to create an FX fake, for one thing. There’s also a moment near the beginning, just after the video plays and everyone’s standing in stunned silence, where all you can do is laugh bleakly.
• “The National Anthem” is a strong opener, but the next two episodes make it look shallow by comparison. Look for my analysis of episode 2, “Fifteen Million Merits,” later this week.
i liked ‘The National Anthem’ very much. Have you seen the second series yet?
I have indeed. Not as strong as series 1 IMO, but still some great episodes. I’ll get there soon!
Unpopular Culture (@upcpodcast) says
Awesome Analysis- Great Writing! 🙂 —Corey
Craig says
It isn’t just the ending that’s unbelievable — the entire episode is nonsense, and the screenwriter seems to have no idea how a situation like this would be handled in the real world. The idea that the Queen or anyone else in the government would even consider encouraging the PM to give in to such a demand, and humiliate himself and the government by doing so, is absurd. Any kidnapper who made such a request would be assumed to be a lunatic and therefore couldn’t be trusted to release the princess anyway. No way would the PM go through with this, nor would anyone want him to. The whole situation is therefore false.
Beyond this fundamental failing, the episode is poorly written in a number of ways. For example, the female reporter who gets information by sending sexy pictures from her phone, and who ends up disappearing from the episode after being shot in the leg, is basically unnecessary to the plot; you could drop her from the story without doing it any harm.
The one sensible point the episode makes is that the British government’s use of D notices to prevent the media from reporting sensitive information is not effective when the information is already on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But this is so obvious that the D notice would probably never have been issued in this case. What’s the point of telling the BBC and Sky not to report something that’s already available to the British public?