Window on the soul
I’ve seen Threads. I have, in fact, seen it more than once, which is some special sort of idiotic masochism. So I’m no sort of shrinking violet when it comes to crushing, soul-destroying bleakness. I’m made of reasonably stern stuff, backed up by the sort of misanthropy that serves as a “Well, duh” shield against the horror of humanity.
So I don’t speak lightly when I say I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything bleaker or more horrible than episode 1 of Black Mirror.
Charlie Brooker’s last TV drama, the zombie “comedy” Dead Set, was in itself about as cheerful as a root canal in a warzone. (I loved it, but I inadvisedly watched the whole thing in one five-hour sitting and was ready to shoot myself by the end.) Black Mirror #1, “The National Anthem”, made it look like an episode of Alan Carr Chatty Man.
*** SPOILERS FROM HERE ***
The first half was pretty good, persuasively setting the scene and piling on the tension from the opening moments. The plausibility started to fall apart after that, starting with the absurd turn-around in public opinion after the botched fake-job and descending into something approaching complete farce by the end, when it turned out the princess’ highly-trained secret service bodyguards had been overpowered by… an artist.
(The plotting nadir was possibly the bit where the terrified Susannah was somehow persuaded to connive convincingly in the portrayal of having her finger cut off, how it was successfully conveyed by the courier to the news station and how nobody bothered to check it for fingerprints or DNA. And the attempt to explain how the unfortunate PM could have physically managed to, let’s say, perform the required act in such appalling circumstances was also pretty desultory.)
But that’s all by the by, and easily brushed off by the show’s billing as comic satire, though it was about as funny as a global bird flu pandemic. The truly chilling thing, however, was the view it gave us not of humanity, but of the show’s writer. Or to be more specific, the latter’s feelings about the former.
Taken as a whole, I don’t like people very much. I blame a year spent studying horrifying Nazi war crimes for Higher History at the impressionable age of 15 for seeding my extremely low opinion of our species, and perhaps creating a prism through which all subsequent events were viewed.
But even with almost 70 years of hindsight and evidence like the Milgram experiment, by and large we still pretend that the Nazis (and those like them who’ve come afterwards) were inhuman, alien monsters, thereby freeing ourselves of the responsibility to confront the truth: they were just like us. Indeed, they were us, and they still are, because we’ve learned almost nothing. The USA – land of the free and home of the brave – openly runs a concentration camp, for God’s sake.
We are despicable, stupid and weak, and simultaneously clever and cunning and resourceful – a terrible evolutionary accident which threatens the existence of all life on the infinite universe’s only known populated planet. Our capacity for self-deceit (using “self” in the dual sense of meaning both ourselves personally and all mankind) blinds us to the reality that for all our many acts of kindness and philanthropy and caring, we’re essentially savage, primitive beasts three missed meals away from ripping our neighbour’s throat out for half a can of baked beans. A good 95% of us could die tomorrow and not be missed by the planet for a heartbeat.
Now, you can disagree with my assessment if you like, it’s not the point. What I’m saying is I’m a bit of an old misery-guts, philosophically speaking. (In person I’m the cheeriest of chappies, partly because I’ve come to terms with the above and expect the worst, and am therefore at least sometimes pleasantly surprised.) But next to Charlie Brooker, my worldview looks like that of Fearne Cotton on Ecstasy.
Some people have already told me that “The National Anthem” was a withering, contemptuous attack on the media, rather than on humanity. But if it aimed to be such a thing, it failed. The only thing it succeeded in making a case for was the line Paul McMullan offered to the Leveson inquiry last week – that the tabloid press only makes a living from its loathsome excesses because of the public’s appetite for it.
In “The National Anthem”, as with the reality of all the recent superinjunction furore, the media conducts itself with restraint. The show makes a very deliberate point of noting that the papers and TV stations are abiding by a voluntary D-notice restricting their coverage of the story, rather than being forced to stay silent. It’s the people who spread the ransom video, the people who turn on the PM after the failed fake movie, the people who crowd jeering around the screens and empty the streets, enabling the kidnapper to release the princess safely.
Brooker then has the show depict a moment of dawning horror, as the viewing millions are at first appalled and then overcome with sympathy. But as the credits roll he unleashes his final barbed attack, with a twist revealing that a year later the Prime Minister has continued in his position (a farcical idea that’s the closest the programme gets to genuine satire) and now has a higher approval rating… by a pathetic three percentage points.
The public’s attention has moved onto the next spectacle, everything is back to normal, there’s no suggestion that the PM’s awful sacrifice has achieved anything. An art critic is heard describing the event as “the first great artwork of the 21st century”. Hammering the message home with a bludgeoning voiceover just in case anyone had missed it, the show observes that “we all participated”, before closing on the shattered reality of the leader’s life. The artist had already released the princess, and never planned to harm her. The public, not he or the media (which barely had time to react to the explosion of opinions on the social networks, which were being monitored obsessively by the government’s advisers), were the ones who forced the sickening act. We are the monsters.
(The media aren’t exactly portrayed sympathetically, but as impotent and irrelevant. The devious reporter fails to get her story, and is riddled with bullets for her trouble.)
I’ve never met Charlie Brooker, but so far as I can tell from his work he’s an intelligent and hugely talented man. I don’t believe he’d set out to send a different message and screw it up so badly that it came out like this. And as such, it’s clear that he despises humankind on a level that makes mere psychotic mass-murderers look like they just got out of the wrong side of bed one morning in a slightly grumpy mood and stumbled across an assault rifle.
Threads is at least motivated at its heart by a love of humanity, a despairing plea to avert disaster. (It might even have been a successful one, given the greatly diminished threat of nuclear holocaust since it was made.) Black Mirror has no such redeeming grace – it does simply what it claims to, and shows us how awful we are without presenting any alternative (as Threads does with its long introductory act depicting normal lives), and without suggesting the existence of any hope. I don’t think I can take episodes two and three.
Just a few points…
* the turnaround in public opinion was a direct result of the apparent severing of the finger being down to the government's actions.
* The princess wasn't acting terror; she was terrified – a man has her tied up, gagged and has just walked behind her with a knife. She's feeling blood all over her hands, and he's doubtless cut her in some way to heighten the fear.
* Wasn't that a Viagra the PM was given as he walked into the studio?
1. Yes, it was. I just disagree that it was plausible – surely the public would expect and want the government to try such things.
2. Maybe, though that still leaves all the other gaping holes in that particular bit of plotting.
3. I didn’t spot that, so maybe you’re right. But as I understand it (not having tried it myself), Viagra only enhances and prolongs an erection when you’ve already at least got one started with some sexy thoughts. I don’t think I’d be feeling very sexy in the PM’s shoes even if they’d surgically implanted a vibrating iron bar in there.
4. DNA? Maybe not. But fingerprints? I mean, haven’t the police ever seen a kidnap movie? They’d be expecting body parts to arrive and have some records ready to check them against, surely?
As I say, though, the plot holes aren’t really what the piece is about.
Oh, and also this all happened in one day, and indeed the finger turned up around mid-day, the deadline was 4pm, so it's unlikely they'd be able to do DNA profiling in that short timeframe.
It was awful. As you say, the plot made vague sense for the first half, but when the public started turning against the PM it took a turn for the stupid and steadily declined from there. Impressively, however, despite my spending much of it going "No way. No fucking way.", it still managed to depress me immensely. Considering I was barely containing my misery when it started, I feel just about ready to off myself now.
Next week's episode sounds slightly better though, so I don't think I'll write the show off just yet.
Dan – I noticed the Viagra taken by the PM (or pill-popping, at least), and it became one more thing that made the scene implausible.
They go to great lengths to believably explain how the govt. were able to track the original transmission / upload (albeit falling down the 'oh no it's a proxy so we can never find it after all' hole of lazy writing in the end), but then we're expected to believe that Viagra works almost instantly, in unimaginably stressful situations, when performing bestiality.
Brooker would have been better off ignoring that plot hole rather than clumsily trying to fill it.
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I think Brooker's contempt for humanity continues to shine through the lazy writing he subjected us to throughout – we're expected to believe that ALL people are so transfixed by the spectacle, that no-one – not even the MI5 he establishes in-story as being competent, professional and constantly looking for alternatives – is paying attention to anything other than the TV (because that's the only way nobody in London would notice her release, including all the CCTV operators)
It's not just the idiotic morass of humanity within his tale that he hates, or the faceless 'other people' who glory in watching spectacle after spectacle – he assumes that the viewers of his own programme will be so entranced by the juvenile, puerile spectacle created that we won't noticed that the story itself is ludicrous, or require it to make any actual sense.
(it also would have been nice if there had been some female characters in there – I mean apart from their use as 'crying plot devices', but hey)
Milgram, not Mildram.
[REVSTU: Whoops. Fixed, ta.]
Konnie Huq helped him write it, which might be indicative of something. Perhaps major plot points were constructed out of egg boxes and your dad's old glue from the shed.
Regarding how anyone can be evil, Zimbardo's thoughts on situational vs. dispositional evil are worth looking at. He's written a book, which I forget the name of, but you can certainly pick it up from any library with a decent academic psychology section. It's extremely readable. I gave a lecture on it a few years ago.
I like giving lectures, it's the only time anyone pretends to listen to me.
I didn't see this (and probably won't now), but I did watch Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook. Depressing and terrifying in turns.
Pretty much agree with Stu. One of the most troubling things I've seen on telly for a long time.
I sussed it was an artist pretty much from the get-go: a news report playing in the background mentioned an artist getting his show pulled from the Tate Modern two weeks early.
The thing that irritated me most about it – apart from us all being drawn inexorably towards the spectacle of someone fucking a pig – was the extra sprinkling of misogyny on top. Did we really need the careerist female tv news journalist showing her tits to get a story? And his wholly unsympathetic wife. It was made clear to him that his family's safety was at risk if he didn't go through with it; you'd think she'd come round eventually.
" But fingerprints? I mean, haven’t the police ever seen a kidnap movie?"
Do the police keep the finger prints of the royal family on record though?
I enjoyed it. In the scene where the PM is walking down the corridor towards the studio he is being shadowed by two police officers holding rifles. When he stops one of the officers gestures towards the door with the rifle. It was little touches like this that made my stomach churn; he was being forced in at gunpoint, why else would you need armed officers inside a presumably secure government facility?
"… the extra sprinkling of misogyny on top…"
On the other hand the older female politician [the one who says that they couldn't guarantee his families safety] seems to become more powerful as the show progresses and has more or less taken control of the situation at the end.
"Do the police keep the finger prints of the royal family on record though?"
I would be staggered beyond belief if royal fingerprints weren't held somewhere, precisely in case of situations like kidnap.
I thought it was pretty good for a 1 hour programme predicated on a sort-of joke. Certainly amazingly bleak and unpleasant though.
I agree with Stu that it is an attack on all humanity rather than the media – I don't know if showing people's disgust offers some hope of redemption though. The idea being that the glibness of social network discourse and the detachment brought about by 24 hour rolling news makes us forget the reality of situations. Possibly the programme is reacting against that rather than suggesting that it some intrinsic human evil. The damage done to us by viewing the world through screens being kind of the central thesis that Brooker seems to be developing these days.
I'd say only the finger was a major plot hole. I think it might have been possible to work around it, but I suppose the limitations of the 1 hour format means a certain amount of short-hand.
The drug given to the PM is never named – you are assuming that it is Viagara, but again this is just cinematic shorthand. There are plenty of drugs that can produce erections.
Dave – of the important speaking roles, there was the PM and his wife; the newsroom head and the ethically-wayward reporter; the PM's Press Secretary and Lindsay Duncan.
I make that a 50/50 split, pretty much.
It was certainly misanthropic, but I don't think you can accuse it of being in any way misogynistic. Yes, the reporter used sex to get the story, but the weak man was easily swayed.
And as for the wife being unsympathetic, she was the only one shown *not* watching the broadcast. Her anger was in being ignored. The PM only talks to her at her insistence, and doesn't take her with him at a moment of great personal humiliation for both of them. She was precisely the person he needed, and yet he rejects her.
Brooker has been accused of going soft lately. I think we can be assured otherwise.
“The drug given to the PM is never named – you are assuming that it is Viagara, but again this is just cinematic shorthand. There are plenty of drugs that can produce erections.”
I remember that bit now – at the time I’d assumed it was an antibiotic or something to stop him getting a disease from, y’know, having sex with a pig.
I do agree that it wasn’t misogynist – his wife was more than entitled to be hurt at being ignored, twice, when she really needed him to talk to her, and the journalist was just using the resources available to her to get the story, ie the fact that men will do just about anything to see some tits. I think that reflects worse on men than women, tbh.
Viagra. Viagra. Dammit.
Thinking about it more now, I'm not sure how successful the programme was purely as a piece of drama or entertainment. It was certainly better than at least 76% of British television though, and more interesting than 93%.
I feel Brooker might have a genuinely brilliant film or mini-series in him.
Reading the comments under the Guardian review, a lot of people seemed to think it was poorly acted. I thought the acting was very good indeed, especially by the standards of British TV these days. Having said that, I am watching very little TV these days, and my critical faculties might have slipped a bit. Anyone else care to comment?
No, I thought the acting was pretty uniformly splendid. And Brooker already has had a great mini-series in him – Dead Set was really good, just not the least bit funny, so it was bizarre it got billed as comedy.
On receiving the finger, it'd take about 20 minutes, if that, to determine it was a female by staining the cells and looking at the chromosomes. Whilst it was being stained, you could extract the DNA and then real time sequence it, and compare it to your references. That'd take about an hour and a half all in. Maybe less than that. Your reagents and equipment could be sent over whilst the DNA is being prepared for sequencing. So, all in all 90 minutes, tops, I'd wager less than that.
I can taste who you are.
Put your finger in my mouth.
It is a quick service.
My reading of the wife was a bit different to that of the other posts here. It's not just that she was ignored, or that she didn't like him doing it, her dislike was based on what other people thought about her husband (and by extension herself).
I saw the reading of the facebook comments and twitter replies as what got here really worked up. I may be wrong, and perhaps it wasn't meant this way, but it fits the rest of the program for that to be caused by the public too.
You can't divine someone's world view from watching a thing wot they wrote. Maybe he just thought it was funny to do something silly in a hugely bleak, serious fashion. Which it kind of is.
Not sure what I thought of it, myself. Didn't strike me as anything amazing, just like one of the bleaker episodes of The Outer Limits. Interested to watch the next ones. (Oh, and I think K Huq co-wrote a different episode, not this'n.)
Dead Set, though, wasn't very good. It was alright, but very trad, sticking to zomb film tropes note by note, step by step. And with that hugely irritating thing of nobody going "aiee, they're zombs!" – awkwardly using other terms throughout – despite one of them deliberately bloody quoting Night Of The Living Dead early on, so they clearly live in a world of zombie films.
Also, not Brooker's domain (although he gets a production credit too, so…,) but Dead Set was shot in trad 28 Days Later style; Black Mirror in lazy orange and teal. It's a shame TV now often, in trying to be cinematic, just cribs a film aesthetic wholesale. But hey ho.
"You can't divine someone's world view from watching a thing wot they wrote."
No, but you can probably get a pretty good idea from watching and reading hundreds of things wot they've wrote over about a decade.
Surely no-one disputes that Nathan Barley was a thing of near-perfection? The only real problem it had was that ~80% of the UK population has never been to Shoreditch, and so presumably had a bit of work catching up on what it was skewering.
Just watched this. What a load of bollocks. All that left me feeling is that Brooker is juvenile and a bit sick.
I didn't read this article for a while because I was a bit late in watching the show and didn't want it spoilt.
I think it's missing the point to keep picking away at the inaccuracies in the way the plot developments were realised. Particularly since the idea that any PM would agree to ransom demands for him to have sex with a pig on live TV are obviously completely unrealistic.
What was realistic, I'm afraid, was the way the population reacted to the situation, the way the press reacted to the population and the way the government reacted to the press. That's what was being illustrated and satirised with this ridiculous situation and that's the point being made by the whole show. You can call it a bleak assessment, but it really feels like an accurate one.
That said, the show was only *quite* good, whereas 15 Million Merits was really very good indeed.
This post appeared in my email again in Nov 2025? I didn’t look at the date and as I was reading it I was wondering if Brooker had plagiarised something as the story sounded very familiar.
“I’ve never met Charlie Brooker, but so far as I can tell from his work he’s an intelligent and hugely talented man.”
I hope you have changed your opinion of him since then. He’s not intelligent enough to understand basic biology.