This week’s film and the readings have an interesting duality to them that has unexpectedly forced me to question some of my own perceptions towards media (and mediated depictions) of terror and the voyeurism of spectacle. I think this duality stems from the alignment of the expansive, transnational and political nature of discussing the nexus of terrorism, war, and news coverage, counterpoised by the highly personal and interiorized aspect of our own relationship towards these images, most palpably and problematically in the unintentional but implacable desire to screen carnage, pain, and suffering. I think Ahmed’s “The Contingency of Pain” evokes this dialectic in terms of the experience of pain as one that is simultaneously private and internalized as well as something shared, public, and publicized. I found these readings surprisingly moving in that I was left with the sense of something intimate and corporeal, rather than external, and I believe my reaction is due to the way these spectacles of terror become ingrained and somewhat sought-out in our daily lives.
I want to look at the readings in concert with an interesting interview with Jil Godmilow, a filmmaker who would probably resist and resent being called a documentarian because of the highly fraught associations and assumptions about the genre, including its naturalization and presumed veracity, its reliance on classical fictive narrative tropes such as resolution and closure, and its tendency to appeal to and exploit the emotive capacity of the (usually privileged, white, Western) audience who can feel a cathartic purging, only to return to their safe normal lives. Godmilow, who espouses a type of agit prop often Brechtian style of filmmaking that defies expectations and refuses typical identification, sums up her ethos as follows in describing what doc films should do: “I want them to do two things: first, acknowledge their interpretive intentions (their instrumentality), that is, cease insisting on their innocence as pure description; and second, but their materials and techniques in the service of ideas—not in the service of sentiment or compassion-producing identification” (“How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film? With Ann-Louise Shapiro).
This cleaves to Bennett and Tyler’s interpretation of the formal properties and artistic restraint of Road to Guantanamo, which they view as an intentionally spare attempt to avoid affective manipulation and traditional pathos, “In the absence of dramatic visual effects, the formal minimalism seems designed to neutralize the emotional impact of the interview so that the emphasis is placed on the factual details of the men’s incarceration, rather than an evocation of the psychological consequence of their experience” (31). They continue to suggest that “in resisting it [the conventional emotional breakdown shot] the film also refuses to offer the spectator the emotional drama and perhaps, the voyeuristic/sadistic pleasure she/he expects and desires” (32). I want to return to the concept of voyeurism below, but on a quick note I personally believe the authors are overstating the lack of affective appeal here—I think the very use of oblique images and often wry understatement or downplayed scenarios actually serves to stimulate and rile up the audience—perhaps we as a audience have become highly sensitized to a typical docu-drama’s manipulative pathos and its appeal to sentiment, so this is simply a more savvy and sophisticated way of hailing us a co-suffers. I personally found that the lack of heavy-handed drama and pathos in no way diminished my affective response. Not despite of but because the characters were so dead-pan and nonchalant as they described unendurable torture, it allowed me to take up the pathos for them—I became angry, upset, disgusted, taking up the mantle of fury and righteous indignation that they seemed to refuse. I would argue that Winterbottom paints a neutralized palette that allows the audience to inject their own highly colored, intensified emotions.
To be fair, Bennett and Tyler do acknowledge that Winterbottom's formal decisions were not entirely without intended affect, “Affect is conveyed not through a humanitarian appeal to empathy, but by provoking in the spectator a residual sense of bemusement and politicized anger at the illegality and injustice of Guantanamo and the wider ‘war on terror’ represented synecdochically by the film” (32). True, but this seems to imply a more detached, pragmatic type of response. Even the term "politicized anger" sounds controlled and purposive and does not (in my opinion) encompass my own emotional reaction to watching it. “Politicized anger” connotes a sort of detached indigence about iniquity, the bureaucratic morass, and the general inefficiency and farcical nature of the government—but during the screening I got the sense that we were all reacting on a more visceral and primal level, with this impotent anger that we can’t do anything about the situation--not a politicized anger but a human one.
Back to voyeurism and “Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy”….Jil Godmilow frequently refers to the “pornography of the real” in reference to the unbidden and often unconsciously sought pleasure we get from delving into the suffering of others or witnessing extreme disaster and tragedy, and then returning unscathed, “there is no escape from the ethnocentricity of the viewing position. The audience has to struggle with their pornographic desire for the real (in this case debasement) and their discomfort with the documentary form that delivers it to them” (86). The pornography of the real concept forced me to interrogate my own relationship to and experience with spectacles of pain and suffering. I’m not a monster so I wouldn’t classify this as unadulterated pleasure, but it is a sort of stimulus, an intensity (or intensification as Ahmed might call it)—it turns the sensorial dials up a bit and definitely offers us a taste of the outré, dangerous, or horrific, while allowing us to maintain our position of safety, order, and political and cultural hegemony, as opposed to the depictions of danger, chaos and abject alterity on the screen.
Jil Godmliow and perhaps Winterbottom (though it’s arguable) engage in a sort of refusal of this type of affective porn, which in turn results in an almost perverse frustration on our part that we are denied this visual main-lining. Once the gratification is denied, it makes me all the more aware of how problematically conditioned I am and how disturbingly strong my desire is to see these images. I want to see the gore, hear the harrowing details, see the suffering or the CGI-like explosions. Kellner’s article brought up the oft-referenced point that the Twin Towers imagery belongs indelibly to the hyperreal—it looks so inescapably like a shot from a blockbuster action film, that we are almost incapable of conceiving and processing this image any other way. Similarly, I’ve noticed that whenever I watch a 9/11 special on TV, even if I’m only paying cursory interest or it's on in the background, I always wait for and watch the shots of the towers going down, and even more so, the shots of falling bodies. I hope I’m not alone here and sounding ghoulish, but there is this intrinsic urge to bear witness and “feel” more deeply, if only temporarily by watching the pain of others. I’m hoping there are inherent humanist elements of empathy in trying to reconcile that horror by projecting yourself in to the situation and imagining what you’d do, but there is also dark side in the way that this voyeuristic/sadistic desire has consumed and assimilated mediated spectacles of death and destruction.
This then leads me to wonder about the artistic responsibility or productivity in denying the audience these moments of dark pleasure—When artists intentionally (for political, idelogical, or formalist reasons) decide to de-center the supreme reign of visuality and explicitly not show certain images, is that an effective mode for articulating a mobilizing message, or is it denying something fundamental and humanist that would ultimately lead to empathy? Basically, when in comes to pain, show don’t tell or tell don’t show?
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