Week 2

The Voyeuristic Spectacle

It is easy to confuse what we see on television, or in movies, or on the internet as reality. It looks like reality, it acts like reality, and it feels like reality. You know for a fact that everything that you are seeing did happen, but at the same time the thing that you are literally viewing is merely a visual representation of it, placed there for us, the audience. Everything that we see is a result of that mediator, the image. Visual media is the link between what did happen and what the person who put it there wants us to see. As stated in the reenactments in "The Eternal Frame", we live in a world now where we think that we know the things that we see on screen, but in reality what is happening is just a cultural reaction to a series of images. It is an illusion that does not always accurately depict. The person or group of people responsible for the images has not always deliberately deceived us, but, as Guy Debord states, "It is far better viewed as a weltanschauung (world view) that has been actualized, translated into the material realm ­­ a world view transformed into an objective force." There is no way to accurately bring us to that place in time without inadvertently becoming spectacle. When it comes to translation, in any form, be it with language or with transforming real life events into video, something will always be missing. Something is lost in translation. What truly alters the reality is our own reaction to it as the audience. We are naturally drawn to spectacle of any variety. As Laura Mulvey writes about in our assigned reading, one such example of this can be found in how genders are represented. Film as a medium is very susceptible to manipulation. Often we find that women are represented as a subject for the active male gaze. She is represented as both a literal and a symbolic representation of our fantasies. 

The same ideas hold true beyond gender differences. Everything that we watch is based on some sort of spectacle; something that we want to see but are not necessarily always able. In the film, "Man Bites Dog", we get an experience not unlike that that we saw last week in "Peeping Tom". In the film, we follow some documentarians as they themselves follow around a sociopathic serial killer. The film sort of reminds me of the more modern film, "Nightcrawler", in the sense that it plays on our voyeuristic tendencies. Even if we are horrified by something, we want to see it. It is the car crash that we can't look away from. Real, horrible events have turned into spectacle for the curious mind. This impulse to capture real events can be deconstructed to it's cultural roots.

I saved discussing the episode of Black Mirror, "White Bear" for last, because it perfectly consolidates all of these ideas. In the final twist of the episode, we learn that the girl that we have been following the entire episode as been lied to. Everything that she has experienced has all been an elaborate hoax for the spectacle of eager viewers. This woman (a convicted killer) has been repeatedly tormented by being a part of some kind of twisted amusement park ride for the benefit of more curious audience members. Like the documentarians in "Dog Bites Man", the viewers of this "Justice Park" are drawn to the voyeuristic fantasy of being able to watch from an outside perspective this girl's torture. It is reality turned commodity. It is a fabrication, no matter how convincing, made for our benefit.

SHAME.