On Watching Disgusting Things Online
Those of us who feel an overwhelming and unpleasant compulsion to look up the videos of, well, escaped Canadian murderers dismembering bodies (he’s in France! be careful, French ‘Pinners!) and pictures of unfortunate individuals whose faces have been eaten by drug-addled zombie-types (more drug-addled, less zombie-type, likely) are really having a banner week. What’s wrong with us? Who would watch the news and hear “the foot was delivered to Conservative Party headquarters, and a hand was addressed to Liberal Party headquarters,” and wonder, with a frisson of anticipation, if any damp packages are currently being signed for at the NDP offices? Everyone? Most people? A few? One?
It’s not as though online spectators are participating in the process, or condoning it, obviously, but you may wonder if the same people would have happily eaten popcorn while watching early Christians being consumed by lions. Probably? You can chalk it up to a (reasonably) benign dose of sick curiosity, but these are, after all, real people with families and partners and children, and their pain isn’t there for our idle consumption while taking a break from data entry. It gets hazier as we drift backwards in time, but it doesn’t become comfortable. Rachel Shukert’s first collection of autobiographical stories has an incredibly horrible/funny/fascinating piece on what a childhood of obsessively consuming books about the Holocaust will do to your development (picture Sally J. Freedman: The College Years).
Maybe we just want to see something real, because we’re so safe. Maybe that’s why we can’t stop reading about serial killers. But when the news story pops up, and your friend wants to change the channel because “they can’t watch that stuff,” why can’t you? Seriously, what’s wrong with you? There are people in this world who have seen the Angelina Jolie movie about Daniel Pearl who HAVEN’T watched a grainy video of him being tragically and sadly and ACTUALLY beheaded on some weird streaming site out of Ukraine. Those are the normal people.
My father, who is a terminally honest sort of person, and a mess, like most of us, once said of the Paul Bernardo tapes: “I would watch them, if they ever leaked.” And when asked why, he shrugged.
“I want to know. Everything.”