Curiosity is a funny thing, and sometimes breaking the taboo verbally, by merely suggesting it, leaves us all astounded, uncomfortable, and immobilized for a short amount of time. In that daze, nothing changes, but the opportunists and innovators find ways to profit by the new zeitgeist. At just about the time the public thinks that the verbally-broken taboo has gone away, the work of these opportunists and innovators surfaces and gives us a tangible artifact that the way we knew, whose existence had effectively been banished by the mere thought of the world with this change, will not be coming back.
Doubtless someone said this when the MP3 compression produced a small music file: “Hey, we could move songs over the internet in an acceptable time length over consumer-grade broadboand” I don’t doubt that those who were paying attention to this algorithm then faltered: “You mean, we could write software to move music about for free?” And then, a breath later: “we could destroy (or save the recording industry as we know it.”
Other examples are innovation, radio, television, the destruction of the newspaper, etc.
With these models in mind, it’s with some trepidation that I consider the case of [WARNING: GRUESOME FOOTAGE] Neda, the brave Iranian woman who, during a protest, appears to have been killed…on film. The legend of the snuff film is nothing new, but there’s something about the immediacy and the ubiquity of a this woman’s cruel fate that scares and awes me.
Here we are in the breathless moment I mentioned above: “Are we going to live in a world where we, and thanks to the Internet I do me all of us, see death – live?” Will this serve as that first drop of blood to our inner Audrey IIs that teaches spectator bloodlust to our culture as once belonged to the Romans and Aztecs of yore?
Don’t feed the plant
How would our world change. Perhaps with such spectator-grade gore there would be learning experiences from showing the charred bodies of those killed in combat. We would understand the horror of battle more clearly. And perhaps, too, seeing the bodies of the fallen we would better understand the incredible practice made pro patriam.
But the world we live in is not one of gravitas, a BBC world. We live in a world of fluffier stuff, and I can see a world, the ravenous chasm of which we now stand before, in which spectator bloodlust becomes blood entertainment.
If you have the stomach for the clip, you can feel it there, that adrenal cortex response as the danger grows great to the woman. As she crumples. Your animal circuits rage to run, or to fight but your cerebrum calms you down and understands it’s “just footage.” Nevertheless, the jolt was there, was real, and was vaguely stimulating in your life of Jon and Kate, of Paris Hilton, of church and taxes. It was a pituitary hypodermic straight to your “stay alive” center. Suddenly that pagan eros shoots up, the world is brighter, you feel sexier, and all those secondary adrenal responses fire reminding you to live and spread gametes.
And just like the porn genie that the internet let loose, I wonder what happens when they (probably some of those self-same entrepreneurs as they already have a taste for “extreme” entertainment) start collating blood-footage and giving it away in 30-second teaser doses for $30/month fees. Will they turn to a generation raised on mixed martial arts, war, and social dissociation to provide the willing fodder for the burgeoning market?
Mortituri nos delectabunt
If you think blood spectatorship, ask yourself is it so terribly far from martial implosion spectatorship?
June 25th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
I recall a similar question when “Faces of Death” was in release. A friend called while I was in college to alert me that a Faces of Death sequel was being shown atthe Showplace 6 out on North 183, and what we really should do is jump in the car and go see it.
I don’t believe for a moment that the same audiences that made the Saw movies and Hostel a phenomenon won’t show up for live deaths.
June 25th, 2009 at 11:10 pm
And, no, I didn’t go see “Faces of Death”, and talked the friend out of it, too.
June 26th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
i would think for most people at this point, unless you have a personal connection to the people on the film, it’s still just footage.
someone actually has to sit and think ‘that was a real life that was just ended; that person surely had future plans and hopes that are irretrievably scrapped, will never have the chance to marry / pursue that hobby / watch their kids grow old, etc.’ and also consider the secondary effect that death has on the people who knew the deceased, before any emotional impact (and revulsion) can be felt.
without that rumination it probably has the same effect as what they’ve seen expertly mimicked at the local cinema. that is, to say, none.
June 26th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Bobcat,
I’m pretty worried, actually, about your assertion «someone actually has to sit and think», my contention is exactly opposite that the Hostel Franchise Friendly mentioned by The League, supra, will not have that realization, but will have the full adrenal rush.
Nowhere is it said more poetically than in Proverbs 1:11-16:
I should amend this to say:
“Come with us, let us gorge on Cheetos and watch snuff footage, let us lurk privily for others deaths without thought: Let us our eyes swallow up their cessation and experience with them the voyage into that pit: let us find there the nothingness that our empty souls so luck for, cast in thy lot among us, let us have one voyage into the morbid: My son, walk not thou in the way with them; refrain they from their path: For their feet run to evil, and rejoice in blood shed.”