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22 June

I keep shivering when I think of what might happen to Kim Sun-il, the South Korean hostage who's been kidnapped by 'militants' and threatened with beheading. I have a horrific image in my head, and it's all my own fault. When the same group beheaded American hostage Nick Berg, filmed it and released it onto the internet, I went and watched it. Why? Because a friend had done so and told me not to, and that meant I had to. It was the most horrific thing I've seen for a very long time, but the really disturbing question, for me, is why I wanted to see it at all? I knew it would be hideous. I knew it was prurient and voyeuristic. I knew I shouldn't have done, but I did anyway.

I still don't quite know why I, and apparently millions of others, watched that video. The only explanation I can come up with is that, however much we try many, or most, of us are fascinated by evil. There's a thrilling risk involved in seeing things we shouldn't see: a strange, prurient, modern-day, risk-free risk. We know we shouldn't watch, but we do anyway. It's like looking at internet porn with the door closed, or slowing down when we drive past a car crash. We feel guilty afterwards, but we do it again next time. It's so far away from our everyday experience that we can't tear our eyes away.

Perhaps there's another explanation too: that we're a generation which has seen so much fake horror, on film and TV, that we see the real thing in much the same light. The number of explosions, deaths, mutilations, beatings etc that we see every year on various screens must number in the hundreds, or thousands. We're a screen culture. In real life, most of us never see death in the raw. In the media, we see it all the time: it's become Spectacle. Would someone who had lived through Kosovo or Rwanda want to watch that video? I doubt it. Perhaps only the over-comfortable can afford to be fascinated.

It makes me think of another grainy video I saw at the weekend, in the house of a journalist friend who had somehow managed to obtain some US military footage from Afghanistan. It was film taken from the inside of a US Apache gunship, on a night mission to 'engage' a 'terrorist base' somewhere in Afghanistan. We watched through the night sights as unbelievably huge explosions tore into mosques and tunnel entrances, and listened to the pilots and gunners calmly liaising with each other as they 'took out' tiny, running white figures - people - with anti-tank rounds. 'Target neutralised', they'd say. Or, in one case, 'affirmative, he's come apart.' It was a video game: pure and simple. War as a Doom upgrade. It's horrific, and it's ours. We can moralise as much as we like, but we're all part of the Spectacle.

Posted by paul at June 22, 2004 10:48 AM

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