On Sympathy
It's natural for any human to feel sympathy for someone who has to fuck a pig, even a despised politician. But while politicians seem to more like autocued ciphers every year, which has led a glut of post-modernists to harp on about how 'unreal' the whole thing is, we know that when the cameras are switched off, they still exist as humans (or lizards). This is why we sympathise with them when, like Gordon Brown and David Cameron, their children die.
If Simon Callow was a real person, or at least presented as something other than a vehicle for satire, we'd feel the same. If this was a fictional drama played straight, we'd suspend our disbelief and probably feel some degree of sympathy for him when faced with such a rotten choice. But the context of the show means that we're not supposed to sympathise with him at all. He is a literary metaphor for the cynical politician, and the pig-fucking is what makes it comedy rather than tragedy. Our reaction to the pig-fucking is reflected by the shots of people in the pub.
He's only doing it because the opinion polls say he should. Of course, this asks fundamental questions about democracy -- should we expect politicians to take principled (and sometimes unpopular) positions, or do we prefer them to be ideologically empty, taking their cues from the litmus test of public opinion? Post-Blair, that's certainly how things operate to a large extent. I think what Black Mirror shows is that politicians often believe, or convince themselves, that by letting opinion polls guide their actions, they are acting democratically. But the trouble is, people's opinions are shaped by a sensationalist and bigoted media. Hence, you get Labour governments under Blair and Brown taking stances they really shouldn't have, simply because they were following public opinion -- or to put it another way, they were scared of the Sun and Daily Mail. In Black Mirror, the PM goes back on his principled stand against fucking a pig to save his own bacon (ho ho!)
Just because the public was interested in the prime minister fucking a pig, was it in the public interest?
RE: Episode 3. I thought this was an interesting premise, since it is becoming easier to log our every action. It's possible, for example, to log in to your girlfriend's computer and read her emails, or check her phone messages. It's something we've all done. So Black Mirror E03 took this to its logical conclusion.
The conculsion I drew from it, though, was that on a personal level, this technology is a mostly positive thing. If it wasn't for the memory scanner, the protagonist would never have found out that his girlfriend had been carrying on with another bloke. Surely he has a right to know this, and she is a cheating scumbag who deserves her comeuppance?
Just because the conclusions we draw from a work of art are inconvenient or ethically dubious, it doesn't mean it's bad. It says more about us than it does about the artist. It says a lot about me, for example, that I'm instinctively in favour of being able to check to see if my girlfriend has been sleeping around by scanning her memory. I'd like to know whether she's thinking of someone else when she's having sex with me. So is it fair to argue that Black Mirror E02 is somehow guilty of making us more suspicious and voyeuristic, by promoting this technology? Or is it warning us that we are all snoopers who can't be trusted with this technology? I'd say the latter. But the trouble is, even after being made aware of how creepy it is, I'm still in favour of devices that may convince people to stop lying to one another.