Seemingly minor in the context of Black Mirror’s five seasons, Carlton Bloom is a near cipher for the series’ signature authorial tone: ideologically observant yet provocative-and sometimes gimmicky.
A final twist wrings the conceit even tighter: The setup is a social experiment orchestrated by Carlton Bloom, a Turner Prize-winning conceptual artist, who releases the kidnapped princess 30 minutes before Callow’s broadcast-though the public is too distracted by schadenfreude to notice or care.
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Even as it seems obvious Callow’s viewers are a crowd of sheeple who should just look away, we’re also watching, fully aware of our own collective zeal for the bizarre public humiliation playing out (the series premiere on the UK’s Channel 4 drew an audience of 1.9 million viewers). Such pronounced diegetic attention to spectatorship established Black Mirror as a self-reflexive show. Callow’s porcine sex act is broadcast for an eager audience of millions, and the scene carousels through their reactions in packed pubs, on the job, or alone in their homes as expressions turn from anticipatory mirth to open-mouthed astonishment and finally repulsed endurance. Embedded in this transgressive denouement is both a spectatorial wrist slap and clever narrative twist that Black Mirror became well known for. That it’s now colloquially referred to as the “pig-f-ing episode” gives away the episode’s shocking conclusion: Callow does it. As an hourlong contained narrative, “The National Anthem” bore more similarities to a film event than an episode of television. Ten years ago, the British dystopian anthology series Black Mirror aired its series premiere “The National Anthem,” in which a ransom video is mass disseminated on YouTube demanding fictional prime minister Michael Callow (Rory Kinnear) broadcast unsimulated sex with a pig his onscreen humiliation the only stipulation that ensures the release of a kidnapped royal.