Voyeurs of Suffering
Spectacles of violence are powerful modes of public pedagogy that function, in part, to fragment and alienate an active and engaged citizenry, transforming it into a passive audience. Who is targeted tells us a great deal about the strategic ambitions and rational underpinnings of the violence. Contemporary neoliberal societies deal with spectacles of violence in a particularly novel way. Unlike previous totalitarian systems that relied upon the terror of secrecy, modern neoliberal societies bring most things into the open. They continually expose us to that which threatens the fabric of the everyday. Even the violent excesses of neoliberal societies—which past generations would surely have viewed as pathologically deranged—are all too easily repackaged for acceptable public consumption. While serial murder, excessive torture, cruel and unusual punishment, secret detentions, and the violation of civil liberties are deeply ingrained in the history of Western imperial domination, in the contemporary moment they no longer elicit condemnation, disgust, and shame. Rather, they have become normalized—celebrated even—in both popular culture and state policy. A lack of public outcry in response to both reports of government torture and its legimation by high-ranking government officials such as former vice president Dick Cheney are surely linked to an explosion of coldblooded portrayals of torture in the mainstream media, extending from the documentaries and news that provide graphic detail of the activities of serial killers to more highbrow fare such the highly acclaimed television drama 24, or the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty, with their depictions of utterly unscrupulous characters as admirable, almost heroic, figures. Whereas popular representations of torture prior to 2001 were typically presented as acts of atrocity, the post-9/11 climate has accepted such representations as common fare, even those depictions of blatant human rights violations designed to elicit the audience’s respect. Today’s screen culture thus contains within it “an echo of the pornographic in maximizing the pleasure of violence.”72
Consider in this context the justification offered by director Kathryn Bigelow for the depiction of torture in her film Zero Dark Thirty: “Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.”73 There is no doubt some truth to what Bigelow points out here. It is incumbent upon the arts to waken us out of our dogmatic slumber. If art has any purpose, surely it is to disrupt what we take for granted, and thereby dignify voices and affirm differences that are customarily dismissed. Art in this regard is not simply communication. It is inseparable from the fight for the articulation of new sensibilities that by their very nature reveal and challenge the violence of the contemporary moment. Or else it merely becomes product or the worst type of sentimentality. What Bigelow’s statement fails to grasp, though, is the manner in which her movies (including The Hurt Locker) actively celebrate the militarization of entertainment while lacking any critical edge whatsoever in terms of their representations or a broader narrative. Not only does she fail to offer any meaningful rupture of mainstream representational narratives that continue to normalize the use of torture and indefinite detention, but she becomes complicit in her rendering of such atrocities as legal, useful, and necessary acts “of our time.” While she depicts violence as ubiquitous and inevitable, it is surely the absences in her films that define their overarching messages. Indeed, in The Hurt Locker, the voices of disposable “Arabs” are almost fully written out of the movie’s dialogue, while those who are killed in action (including the British mercenaries) are shown as having more rational and compassionate qualities. Also written out of her script is the fact that torture often does not even work in securing vital information. More often than not, it prompts its victim to say anything in order to get the torture to cease. Not only does the film make the false claim that the use of torture on the part of the CIA led to Bin Laden’s killing, it also, as Naomi Wolf points out, “makes heroes and heroines out of people who committed violent crimes against other people based on their race—something that has historical precedent.”74 A desire for violence, it seems, is the surest guarantee of survivability throughout Bigelow’s movie scores.
A case against artistic neutrality is likewise stressed by Slavoj Žižek: “Imagine a documentary that depicts the Holocaust in a cool, disinterested way as a big industrial-logistical operation, focusing on the technical problems involved (transport, disposal of bodies, preventing panic among the prisoners to be gassed). Such a film would either embody a deeply immoral fascination with its topic, or it would count on the obscene neutrality of its style to engender dismay and horror in spectators.”75 Hence, for Žižek, Bigelow’s claim to political neutrality is not only absurd in light of the subject matter, which is by nature deeply political, it is a mockery of the art of cinema, which cannot be divorced from the political content it consciously chooses to screen:
One doesn’t need to be a moralist, or naïve about the urgencies of fighting terrorist attacks, to think that torturing a human being is in itself something so profoundly shattering that to depict its neutrality—that is, to neutralize or sanitize this shattering dimension—is already a kind of endorsement. . . . This is normalization at its purest and most efficient—there is a little unease, but it is more about the hurt sensitivity than about ethics, and the job has to be done.76
Indeed, it would appear that the spectacle of violence now mimics a new kind of—to quote Susan Sontag—“fascinating fascism” that overtly politicizes representations of violence and discredits critically engaged aesthetics.77 Torturing people is now a mainstay of what might be called the “carnival of cruelty” designed to entertain and exhilarate on the screen, while in real life torture is militantly sanctioned as a security necessity. At the same time, mainstream entertainment programming is flooded with endless representations of individuals, government officials, and the police operating outside of the law as a legitimate way to seek revenge, implement vigilante justice, and rewrite the rationales for human rights and domestic law. Television programs such as Dexter and Game of Thrones, as well as a spate of blockbuster Hollywood films such as Oldboy, have provided a spectacle of violence unchecked by ethical considerations. Any action, no matter how cruel, is justified by the pursuit of ends that claim to provide greater security and often result in a retrenchment of uncontested power. In the actions of the surveillance state and its turn toward vigilante violence, we see these entertainment narratives writ large. This invariably has political and ethical implications for our societies, especially when the use of force and disregard for democratic accountability become familiar but comfortable entertainment themes—ones we can easily connect to. It is clear that the line between fiction and material reality, along with any distinction between the cultural sphere and the traditional sphere of politics and governance, has blurred to the point where it is now difficult to determine one from the other. If this perspectival and moral confusion has become characteristic of our daily experiences, it is likewise the case that forms of violence and violations of civil rights that should be routinely critiqued as unacceptable are now lauded as necessary and effective tactics in the maintenance of power, so rarely are they subjected to critical interrogation.
It is not merely traditional film and broadcast media that normalize a culture of cruelty and the inevitability of the contemporary crises of chronic social disparities and political domination. As already indicated, people are increasingly socializing—and publishing—through ever-evolving Internet-centered technologies. At the cutting edge of this is Google’s remarkable “Earth” platform. Acquired in 2004, it maps the Earth by the superimposition of images obtained by satellite imagery, aerial photography, and GIS 3-D modeling. Many people no doubt begin their use of this site by walking down various streets where they may have previously lived, harmlessly reminiscing about their childhood. They may even dwell on the corners of the streets where various misdemeanors of youth took place. Google Earth, however, has a more sinister dimension that reworks the voyeuristic terrain. Increasingly, media stories and news articles about high crime–rate areas are using various stills from the site as a safe and effective way to produce visual images. Camden, New Jersey—tragically anointed “most dangerous place in the United States”—frequently suffers from such digital representations. Camden is often described as a “no-go” area, not only for strangers and outsiders but also for the local police force, which is increasingly suffering