Random Thoughts...
I just wanted to flesh out a little bit what Professor Santos said towards the end of class yesterday. He mentioned that this generation is exposed to brutality and gruesome violence in the media in the form of entertainment (he mentioned "The Saw") and it seemed to me that he hinted that this exposure makes a YouTube video of a beheading more palatable, or at least more familiar. I see his point in that we are already accustomed/desensitized to gore and violence and even pay money to see it as entertainment. But the YouTube beheading video is still incredibly horrific because unlike "The Saw," the beheading video has the element of Truth. We were having trouble defining what truth is earlier in class, and we were talking about how all "wars are stories" as if there is no Truth so much as multiple perspectives. But I think that the difference between "The Saw" and the beheading video might actually help us capture the essence of what Truth is: truth is the fact that outside of the media, these wars, violence, and beheading are still very real and physical. Because it lacks truth, "The Saw" and any Hollywood film can be incredibly gruesome and neither have the same effect as the beheading video nor make the beheading video more familiar. It is thus truth that makes the beheading video (and war in general) a new and horrible experience each time we stumble into it.
Comments
Great thoughts, Julia.
The link between fictive media violence and violent behavior or the capacity to rationalize violence has always been controversial.
What is striking in the current environment is that many of the most explicit media images of war's violence are restricted from wide public regard in some form of "in loco parentis" control. In other words, the public is not allowed to develop a deeper understanding of the meaning behind these images. We have to be protected from these images. We can carry on with ever more violent imagery in our entertainment, cinema, video games, etc., but the "real" presence of war's violence is subject to monitoring, exclusion, prohibition. So, the path to the "truth" behind the present conflict is full of obstructions and obfuscations, ranging from "war has always been hell" to claims of bias in some networks' (Al Jazeera et.al.)editorial decision to show explicit violent images from the war. What's to be done?
My best response is that we must find ways to develop critical understandings of media's rhetorical complexities, maybe beginning very early in our education. Just as the study of language helps us decode the complexity of texts, we've got to develop comparable means to decode the play of media images in the global body politic.
I think you're doing just that, and very well at that!
Best regards, JPS
Posted by: jdd | April 20, 2008 06:44 PM
To follow on: don't jihadist beheading videos share with Saw, Hills have Eyes, etc, share a common origin - the snuff film genre, which draws its emotive power on the undecidability of the image: is it for real? how do we know for sure?
VTY
JDD
Posted by: jdd | April 20, 2008 06:51 PM