Black Mirror ep 1: The National Anthem

I found The National Anthem, the first episode of Charlie Brooker’s new Channel 4 drama series Black Mirror, both funny and discomforting in almost equal measure. Almost as soon as I laughed at fictional Prime Minister Michael Callow’s insistence that ‘I’m not fucking a pig,’ or his aide’s advice to take his time with the said sex act as ‘to rush might be interpreted as eagerness or even enjoyment,’ I squirmed uncomfortably, immediately questioning my own response. Is watching a man (albeit a fictional one) forced to have sex with a pig hilarious or is it sickening? Aside from this, The National Anthem threw up enough interesting questions on the media, art and social relations for me to want to produce a blog-sized reading of it.

Who is responsible for Michael Callow acquiescing to the artist Carlton Bloom’s demands? Throughout the episode, Callow is adamant that he will not have sex with a pig. ‘Nothing is going to happen,’ he tries to reassure his wife, Jane. Initially, public opinion supports his refusal – a number of interviewees on fictional news channel UKN agree that he shouldn’t have to do it and an opinion poll indicates that only 28% of people would watch.

It is only after images of Bloom cutting off what is supposed to be Princess Susannah’s finger are widely disseminated that public opinion alters: 86% of people are now in favour of the demands being met. Even up to the eleventh hour, Callow is still raging against his fate: ‘It’s not going to happen.’ ‘Fuck the public!’ But the public pressure being applied to Callow proves too much. If he doesn’t go through with it, ‘you will be destroyed’ his aide assures him, ‘a despised individual.’ His security ‘cannot guarantee [Callow’s] safety or that of [his] family.’ Ultimately, Callow fucks the pig out of self-preservation and concern for his wife and child; he does not choose to out of concern for the princess.

Crucially, it is not Bloom but UKN that is directly responsible for the swing in public opinion. The finger-slicing video is not uploaded to YouTube like the original hostage video but instead sent by Bloom to the UKN newsroom. It is they that choose to broadcast it. Had they not, support for Callow might have remained constant. The media, far from being an impartial apparatus simply relaying information to the public, take an active and self-interested role in Bloom’s artistic project coming to fruition.

  

The power of the media to shape public opinion is not lost on Callow himself. The Prime Minister makes another choice after his fateful rendezvous at the TV studio: he decides to carry on being Prime Minister. On the one-year anniversary of the event, Callow puts in a PR appearance with his wife, during which UKN reports that ‘the incident failed to destroy a Prime Minister who currently holds an approval rating three points higher than this time last year.’ Rather than retiring from public life having saved the princess, himself and his family, Callow emerges from the event a more popular Prime Minister. It’s possible to infer that Callow met Bloom’s demands out of self-preservation but not solely of his family’s physical safety; he also wanted to preserve his position. Even in moments of desperation, Callow always has an eye on the news reports (‘I can’t think about coverage now… But it’s onside?’) Some dictionary definitions of the adjective ‘callow’: inexperienced, raw, unfledged. Michael Callow is an unfledged Prime Minister until he faces a trial by the media: participate in an event we’ve helped construct and enjoy more popularity than ever; refuse, and face political oblivion. He passes with flying colours and his approval rating shoots up, to the detriment of his marriage.   

As much as he really, really doesn’t want to, Callow can’t help but play the game. Interestingly, neither can the public. The wording of the second UKN poll is significant: 86% of voters now believe the demands should be met. Believing the demands should be met is different to wanting to watch them being met (the question posed in the earlier poll). And yet, as the 4 O’clock deadline looms, the streets of central London are shown to be deserted – pubs, workplaces and homes alike are full of people tuning in to watch the event, eagerly anticipating Callow’s humiliation. ‘It’s history, this!’ one of the hospital workers protests when a colleague tries to turn the broadcast off. The initial looks of amusement and fascination on the faces of viewers quickly turn to disgust and revulsion at what they’re seeing, but try as they might, they can’t quite tear their eyes away from the screen. They might miss something. The public, as much as UKN and Callow, is complicit in the realization of Bloom’s artwork: without an audience, the event could not exist as a work of art.

During UKN’s one-year-on news report, a newspaper headline briefly flashes up on screen: ‘Bloom’s dark vision accuses us all.’ Everyone is accused because everyone is guilty of acting in their own self-interest. That is the meaning of the artwork; concern for the safety of Princess Susannah is never at any point foremost in anyone’s minds. The three main players in the saga – Callow, UKN and the public – come together to create the event for purely selfish reasons. Callow wants to preserve his family and his position (unfortunately for him, it’s one or the other); UKN want viewer ratings and, by extension, profits; and the public wants to partake in an ‘historic’ news event. Social relations, mediated by, well, the media, break down. The result is a disgusting spectacle in which all participate.

Last Ideology Standing

Is there a more surreal cultural sphere than that of advertising? In no other discourse would it be considered either funny or tasteful to depict infamous third world dictators as belonging to a bizarre club in which they have water fights, push each other on swings and make sand angels.

But corporate restaurant chain Nando’s ‘went there’ with its latest ad campaign, entitled ‘Last Dictator Standing’. In the ad, Robert Mugabe mourns the loss of his ‘friends’, fellow tyrants Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, P. W. Botha and Idi Amin. The foregrounding of Gaddafi is a clear nod to the Libyan revolution and the dictator’s recent death. There is no doubt that the advert would like to be interpreted as a funny, satirical celebration of the Arab Spring and the fall of authoritarian regimes throughout Africa and the Middle East.

The problem with that, though, is this: no matter how much it tries to disguise the fact, this advert exists for one obvious reason: to sell spicy chicken. ‘This time of year, no one should have to eat alone,’ a voiceover intones as a morose Mugabe slumps at the head of his deserted dinner table. ‘So get a Nando’s six-pack meal, for six.’ What is not immediately obvious is how the selling of fast food here is used to subtly reinforce consumer-capitalism as the dominant ideology.

This is achieved by taking a group of disparate dictators and reducing them all to a single type, that of the ‘bad guy’. The depiction of Mugabe, Gaddafi et al as friends effaces all political and historical context surrounding these figures: the social and economic conditions in which they were able to rise to power; the specificities of crimes and human rights abuses they committed; the ideologies they constructed in order to subjugate their various peoples. The absurdity of this reductionism is encapsulated by the image of Mugabe pushing the apartheid-era South African president P. W. Botha on a swing.

The caricature is made cruder by depicting the dictators as childlike. The machine guns that turn out to be water pistols, the tank that becomes the Titanic; these images ridicule by infantilizing their targets. This is where the ad’s tastelessness is most overt: its implication that millions of people were persecuted, tortured and murdered by bad men with the mental age of a six year-old, instead of complex political systems of control, coercion and terrorization. By depicting the dictators as immature, the ad also implies the same of the societies over which they exercised power. With particular regard to Gaddafi and Libya, it is as if the ad is taking the pre-Arab Spring Western assumption that Slavoj Zizek among others has identified (at around 22m15s): look how immature Arabs were back then under dictatorship, for many years incapable of mounting a credible movement for democracy. Great that they’ve finally seen the light.

The light, ‘Last Dictator Standing’ would have us believe, is Nando’s chicken. Into the surreal fantasy of the dictators’ dining club the deal is inserted as an injection of the ‘real’, rational world: we are offering a great deal. Buy our chicken. By juxtaposing the craziness of the world the advert constructs with the apparent ‘reality’ of corporate fast food, consumer-capitalism as it exists in Western-style democracies is asserted as crumbling authoritarianism’s logical, inevitable replacement.

Let’s hope that those currently fighting to overthrow tyrants, as well as those campaigning for greater equality of wealth and resources worldwide, will win something better. The only thing more surreal than the fantasy of this crass, unfunny advert is that it was conceived of in the first place to further globalization in an age of global revolution.   

The Dream of a Home

On Monday I read reports of the coalition government’s brand-new housing initiative, which David Cameron himself announced from a building site somewhere. Surrounded by people wearing hard-hats and hi-vis jackets (Nick Clegg was also in attendance, wearing his customary gold tie), Cameron announced the mortgage indemnity scheme, which will allow first-time buyers to borrow 95% of a property’s value, meaning that they will need to scrape together just 5% for a deposit. That’s down from the 20% that banks are currently demanding in exchange for loans.

‘One of the reasons why house-building has been so low is because of the credit crunch,’ said Cameron. (What caused that again? Can’t remember. Labour over-spending, probably. Or the Eurozone.) The banks don’t want to lend so the builders can’t build and the buyers can’t buy.’

And how has the government convinced the banks to renew their lending? By offering to underwrite loans. The risk banks take in handing out the mortgages will therefore be part-shared by UK taxpayers. If all goes to plan, financial institutions will profit from interest rates. If not, public money will cover their losses.

‘But Dave,’ you might have said, if you were in attendance on the construction site wearing a hi-vis jacket and a hard hat. ‘Dave, Dave – if the financial crisis was in part caused by banks giving out these kinds of loans, a crisis which for some reason resulted in us having to give them our money to keep them afloat, is it a good idea to revive those insane banking practices by offering further bailout money should things go wrong?’

He’d have ignored you of course, ploughing on with his sales pitch in that odd way that’s something like a Modernist stream-of-consciousness monologue in which sentences merge into one another and pausing to draw breath isn’t necessary. ‘It’s not just about the economy it’s also about people’s hopes and dreams you always remember that moment when you get that key and you walk into your first flat it’s a magic moment and it’s a moment I want everyone in this country to have not just better off people the dream of home ownership is something that should be available to everyone…’

‘But Dave!’ you might have yelped if you were determined to break this disconcerting performance of a man pretending to talk to people. ‘If our taxes are going towards paying off the deficit rather than funding things we want like healthcare, education, decent pensions and a functioning public infrastructure, why are you now encouraging us to once again take on massive amounts of unsustainable personal debt?’

At this point, unused to interruptions or genuine engagement, Cameron might have started to simply repeat ‘the dream of home ownership’ again and again like a malfunctioning robot parrot, until they stopped filming.

Actually, many people aren’t dreaming about owning their own homes right now; they’re dreaming about simply having somewhere to call home in the first place. According to Empty Homes, a charity campaigning to raise awareness of the vast number of vacant properties in the UK, there are 1.7 million families on housing waiting lists. Building decent social housing and bringing back into use the quarter of a million empty homes is the answer to solving this crisis.

Instead, the government is introducing a 50% discount on right-to-buy (another part of the initiative), allowing people to purchase their council houses for even less. According to Cameron, the coalition will put money made from right-to-buy ‘into more affordable homes’. Yes, because selling off social housing for far less than it’s worth will allow the government to somehow provide even more affordable housing than existed before the discount was brought in. Of course.

Cameron doesn’t expand on exactly how this money will be used to create ‘more affordable homes’, but it may have something to do with the £400 million fund the government is making available to house builders. Not only is taxpayers’ money going to be made available to bail out banks (again), it’s also going to be given to builders who can’t build without bank loans. In return, house builders have committed to making 3,200 of the hoped-for 16,000 new houses ‘affordable’ – just 20%. That’s £400 million of public money, then, going on new houses of which 80% are not affordable.

We need to stop using the housing market as a way of boosting a failing economic system and once again think about housing in its primary function: that of providing people with a place to live. Although an extra £50 million has been added to the project of refurbishing empty homes (perhaps the initiative’s sole positive), it is relatively little compared to the hundreds of millions of pounds the government is willing to put into private hands that will do nothing to make housing more affordable or available.