Fucking a Pig: Black Mirror

I recently watched the first episode of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror the other day, entitled National Anthem. The series will consist of three shows, ostensibly unconnected, but with similar themes. It has been likened to The Twilight Zone.

After this point, I will freely discuss the events of The National Anthem, and will not warn for individual spoilers. This is your only spoiler warning.  If you want to watch the show first, go up a bit and click on the linky.  

This is not a daffodil.

National Anthem begins with a Princess, loosely based on Kate Middleton/Beatrice, being kidnapped. The ransom demand, made via youtube, is for the Prime Minister to fornicate with a pig on live television, approximately twelve hours later, else the Princess will be executed.

I will say that I was honestly expecting the demand to be that the Prime Minister shoot himself in the head. Therefore, sex with a pig did seem like a slightly preferable option.

Don't get me wrong here; this was sexual abuse, for both creatures involved. I would not hesitate to call it rape, for both parties. The pig, who has the intelligence of a three-year-old child has no way to give consent, of course. I don't even want to dwell on the physiological differences (namely, size) between a human male and a pig, and the discomfort this must have caused.

Then there is the PM, who is forced to commit a sexual act, to be broadcast live on all networks, to completion. The show does make the horror of this clear, when the program reaches that point.

A major focus of the show is on how the internet culture plays into the event. The video is first uploaded to youtube, and although the PM's office removes it as soon as possible, it is quickly copied and re-uploaded. It is impossible to contain.

The PM's office then tries to use a super-injuction, which the media goes along with voluntarily. However, Twitter, as we already know, isn't bothered by super-injunctions, and as the rest of the world starts playing the story, UK networks rapidly follow.

At first, many of the British public treat the event as a joke. However, as the PM goes through with it, their reaction rapidly turns to horror, not at the PM, but at the events.

A few things annoyed me, within the show. Firstly, the idiot who saw a porn actor being sneaked in, took a picture, and uploaded it to Twitter, tipping off the kidnapper to the PM's attempted subterfuge. Why do that? That's like taking a picture of Prince Harry heading to wherever he's serving and inviting someone to drop a bomb on him. I have no objection to anyone discussing events like that, but an ounce of sense would tell you that some things should be kept secret - unless you want to be responsible for someone's finger being sliced off.

Several other characters are holding the idiot ball, too. Take the news reporter who sneaks into the place where they believe the kidnapper is holding the princess. When she is discovered (by the police or army or whoever it was), she runs away, getting herself shot in the leg. Idiot.

Then there's the PM's wife. "Oh no, poor me, my husband was forced to go through a traumatic event. I'm so disgusted! Poooooooooooooor meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!"

What an awful person.

Then there's the 'artist' himself, who was responsible for the kidnapping. In the end, he releases her half an hour before the show begins, then hangs himself. The princess is not found until after the PM has gone through with the event, as the streets of London are deserted. Later, a character says that he must have been trying to make a point.

What point? That people would watch a broadcast like that? No shit. If that was the point, it's a stupid one. The princess was released in one tiny part of the world - what about all the people outside of London, who might have noticed her? What about the people who were in London, but weren't watching, and simply weren't outside, or in the right area, to notice her? What about the people who watched in a gesture of silent support and solidarity to the PM, as I might have attempted to, before feeling too ill and having to switch it off?

Honestly, that artist sounds like the kind of teenage wanker who goes on about how the entire world are sheeple, etc, etc. Y'know, the pretentious everyone-else-is-so shallow! type.

On another note; I wonder how the show would be different if the PM had been female? Firstly, that's unlikely; by this time, it seems like the election of Mrs Thatcher was more of a fluke than a great step forward in feminism, and the idea of a female PM seems laughable (in the sense that she wouldn't be elected, not in the sense that she couldn't do it). But if she were, what would the equivalent be? To allow herself to be raped by an animal? Would that be harder to watch? From a vegan perspective, you could argue that it's easier on the animal, even if he is no more able to give consent than the pig can. From a purely logistical perspective, it does seem like it would be easier to enter a member of a larger species than to be entered by one of them.

However, from the perspective of a woman (a woman, not all women), I don't think it could have been any harder to watch than it was. Not all rapes are the same, but rape is still rape.