Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem

Abstract

This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist’s ‘theatre of violence’ and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret ‘the first great artwork of the 21th century’ (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard’s post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin’s reflection on technology and the aestheticization of violence. Technology and mass media carve out a ‘domain of the sensible’ where hegemonic power and reactive violence are, as in The National Anthem, theatrically staged with contrasting effects, carnivalesque and dramatic, funny and abject. In Brooker’s film, the aestheticization of dominant power and subversive violence obliterate, and at the same time unveil, a moral problematic. By manoeuvring the logic of the spectacle of hegemonic power, the artist short-circuits it, and clings to the aspiration to an alternative or a political ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin) the staging of a global carnival is a moral protest meant to free people from the delusions of political and mass media power.