Medium
Cool is partly a commentary on the mass media’s
fly-on-the-wall amorality in the face of violence, and it is as valid as
criticism now as it was forty-three years ago.
In a broader sense, television news and other mass media give us front-row
seats at society’s tragedies du jour. Wexler’s
damning commentary came to mind last week after the New York Post published a front page photo of the man pushed off a subway
into the path of an oncoming train with the caption, “Doomed!”
Yesterday’s school shooting in Newtown,
Connecticut, and the public reaction to it, evoked another scene from Medium Cool. In this sequence, the TV cameraman who is the
main protagonist (Robert Forster) is riding through Washington, DC, as the city
prepares for Robert Kennedy’s funeral. He observes to his soundman (Peter Bonerz) that
after the JFK and Martin Luther King funerals we had public mourning down to a
scripted ritual.
So it has been with the Newtown
massacre. There have been candlelight
vigils and wreaths and other tributes left at the scene of the tragedy. The community is lauding the bravery of the
teacher who led her students to safety. Pundits
of varying persuasions argue over gun rights and the state of mental health
care in this country. The shooter committed
suicide, further intensifying the speculation over his motives as reporters and
law enforcement pick apart every aspect of his life in search of clues.
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, we are
slogging through another round in our periodic, fruitless discourse over the nature of violence in
American society. Each incident is
treated as a fresh shock, something seemingly unprecedented. (A New York Times article from 2000
attempted to identify common patterns among spree killers but its conclusions
differ little from current popular wisdom.)
We express our anxiety over the angry white males who so often, though not always, commit
these terrible acts. The passage of time has
diminished popular memory, but the first of the contemporary run of school
shooters, Brenda Spencer, was a 16-year-old girl. That said, it was her father, a white and possibly
angry male, who had given Brenda the .22 rifle she used as a gift…along with 500
rounds of ammunition.
The recurring discussion leads me to a
recurring point I’ve made in this space, which is that there are certain common
threads in our culture which create a propensity for such incidents, a roiling
anger bubbling just beneath the placid surface of daily existence which erupts
suddenly and with terrifying ferocity in unexpected places at unexpected times. The perpetrators may be outliers, but they
are nonetheless emanations of our collective unconscious as increasingly
isolated individuals contend with a hypercompetitive, celebrity
obsessed, all-or-nothing, winner-take-all culture. Bowling
alone, to appropriate Robert Putnam’s metaphor for lack of community in American
life, seems to have farther reaching consequences than a mere sense of
disconnectedness with our neighbors.
Sometimes it can be fatal.
The 24-hour news cycle amplfies and indulges
our morbid fascination with atrocity. It’s hardly surprising that the attention lavished
on spree killings grew in tandem with the rise of the cable news networks followed by the deluge of content afforded by the internet revolution. Pop culture magnifies the deeds of famous
murderers, shining a lurid spotlight on celeb antiheroes. A
favorite tune of mine in middle school was the Boomtown Rats song “I Hate
Mondays,” not realizing then that the track was inspired by Brenda Spencer’s
smartass explanation for her crime. Even
after more than a dozen years after their rampage, the public retains a fascination
with Columbine murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold that has been manifested
in numerous TV documentaries and several film treatments of varying historical
accuracy. Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers came out as our national fixation on random violence
was reaching its stride, a fitting bookend to Medium Cool not only in its reflection of the zeitgeist but also in its implicit critique of the media as
omniscient voyeur.
The emotional remove we experience watching real-life
events unfold on television and online desensitizes us to the suffering of
others. A few recent news items have asked
whether a generation of youth weaned on electronic diversions is less
empathetic than its predecessors. I’m
not so sure of this. The so-called “bystander
effect” has been implicated in the aftermath of tragedies ranging from the Kitty
Genovese murder a half century ago to last week’s subway death of Ki-Suk Han. It’s a cousin to the collective action
problem in that each individual witnessing a crime or accident tends to assume
that someone else will render aid. Belonging
to the global village Marshall McLuhan described provides immediacy without the
intimacy one would have had in traditional society where every person was sure
of his or her place and whose neighbors comprised an extended family. In other words, the sense of unreality experienced
through visual media is carried over into daily life so that when emergencies
arise in public spaces we respond passively as if we were watching the events unfold on
screen.
It’s fitting, I suppose, sitting back and
watching things unfold. We’ve already been
reduced to consumers and replaceable labor in our plastic corporate utopia. Having been rendered spectators in our own
lives, all that remains is to become spectators of the lives of others. Being a bystander is really the only
community we have left. Perhaps whatever shred of sanity it is possible to grasp in these times resides in accommodating oneself
to this fact.
No comments:
Post a Comment