Thursday, December 30, 2004
Tsunami coverage cont.
Several people have noted and wondered about the fact that many dying and/or dead bodies are being shown. It's awfully difficult to see, of course, although they bring the horror home as nothing else would do.
I was in the UK on 9/11/01 which was odd because it made the experience seem like watching a great big cosmic movie, not like a real event happening in the city where I grew up. I kept trying to see what had happened, locate it in a temporal and geographical context so I could wrap my awareness around it clearly, but all I found in papers and magazines (both British and American) were anesthesized images. Almost pretty. Remember that hazy photo of the side of one of the buildings looking like an op art grill rising out of the ashes? And those French film makers who were rebuked when they wanted to include a few pictures of falling and/or fallen bodies in their (wonderful) film? Why the difference?
Here's some of what I think. If I assume entirely good or neutral motives on the part of everyone involved, maybe 9/11 was so startling and horrific that no news people could stomach the most ghastly images. But now three years have passed and everyone's learned to assimilate more horror than ever. Yet I'm afraid that I find myself thinking that a more important difference is that the Asian casualities are so monumental - in quantity and in terms of having happened to faceless and numberless people - that no one is can be thinking of each individual involved, certainly not as individuals in the same sense as the people who died in the World Trade Center. There's a part of me that thinks it's viewed by the visual media the way herds of animals are viewed. And of course we can watch them die without cringing too much. Yes, that may be unfair (and even untrue) but it's how it feels to me.
I was in the UK on 9/11/01 which was odd because it made the experience seem like watching a great big cosmic movie, not like a real event happening in the city where I grew up. I kept trying to see what had happened, locate it in a temporal and geographical context so I could wrap my awareness around it clearly, but all I found in papers and magazines (both British and American) were anesthesized images. Almost pretty. Remember that hazy photo of the side of one of the buildings looking like an op art grill rising out of the ashes? And those French film makers who were rebuked when they wanted to include a few pictures of falling and/or fallen bodies in their (wonderful) film? Why the difference?
Here's some of what I think. If I assume entirely good or neutral motives on the part of everyone involved, maybe 9/11 was so startling and horrific that no news people could stomach the most ghastly images. But now three years have passed and everyone's learned to assimilate more horror than ever. Yet I'm afraid that I find myself thinking that a more important difference is that the Asian casualities are so monumental - in quantity and in terms of having happened to faceless and numberless people - that no one is can be thinking of each individual involved, certainly not as individuals in the same sense as the people who died in the World Trade Center. There's a part of me that thinks it's viewed by the visual media the way herds of animals are viewed. And of course we can watch them die without cringing too much. Yes, that may be unfair (and even untrue) but it's how it feels to me.
