Watching execution videos not only hurts the grieving. It also harms us dreadfully
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Version 0 of 1. When Prince Charles warned that we should not watch bloodthirsty videos posted by Islamic State fanatics, my memory flashed back 20 years. Before email was in common use, before Tony Blair was prime minister, before Kim Kardashian had buttocks to speak of, I met the two young filmmakers behind Executions. Do you remember Executions? Featuring footage of capital punishment, and sold on VHS in high street outlets, it triggered a blizzard of public outrage in the summer of 1995. To give you an idea of quite how long ago that was: when I flicked through my old scrapbooks to find the controversy, I found it was around the same time as I wrote the following words in a newspaper piece. “If anybody knows how to maintain a happy and healthy relationship, it is surely John Cleese and his wife, Alyce Faye Eichelberger. They are truly harmonious.” John Cleese and Alyce Faye Eichelberger had just revealed the secrets of their idyllic partnership: they practised yoga together, played badminton together and bought two copies of every book so they could read in tandem. Twenty years later, John Cleese can barely order a bowl of soup in a restaurant without adding: “I would’ve had the lobster, but I can’t afford it after my evil bitch ex-wife took me to the cleaners.” Meh, I always thought the badminton sounded like a bad idea. Anyway, Executions was supposed to be a protest video. Its few minutes of genuine execution footage were buried inside an hour of statistics, history and argument against the death penalty. Sales were negligible, representing only a handful of weirdos and sickos. Snuff movies were a gruesome urban myth; nobody actually wanted to see violent death take place. There was a unanimous public outcry at the mere idea that the existence of this video meant one theoretically could. How is it that, only two decades later, half the population has watched at least one of the Syrian kidnap victims being beheaded? The viewing is so widespread that Prince Charles can worry about it publicly without being labelled delusional. Is it the wearing-down effect of excessive film violence and video games? Is it entirely due to new technology? All the shock in the reporting is focused on the acts that have been committed; none on the idea that viewers choose to witness it. That’s taken as read. Prince Charles’s argument is that watching these videos is an incursion on relatives’ grief. That’s true, but it’s also an appalling thing to do to yourself. It’s so brutalising, so emotionally destructive, to keep blasting your instincts for fear and disgust until they shrivel to nothing. And for what? Islamic State has beheaded about 27 people on film this year, which, relative to the numbers killed in other international fighting (never mind cancer and heart disease), is a negligible number; it’s not significant; you barely need to know about it, never mind look. The problem is, I think, the way the media makes money from the internet. It’s all click-bait. If an online news outlet can appeal to the ghoul in all of us with the announcement of a SICK NEW JIHADI BEHEADING, it can massively increase its traffic and convert that immediately into advertising revenue. Last week, I read a story on a mainstream newspaper’s website about the death of Scot Young, who fell from the window of his Marylebone flat onto iron railings below. I was intrigued by the story because I happened to have seen some episodes of a mesmerisingly vacuous reality show called Ladies Of London, in which Mr Young’s model girlfriend was a lead character and he often appeared. There was something Agatha Christie about the cold hand of sudden death reaching into this glitzy, moneyed social whirl. On the page was a video, which I clicked, assuming it would be an extract from the reality show. It wasn’t. Taken after Mr Young’s death, it was simply a repeated camera pan up and down from his top-floor window to the spiked railings below. It was an invitation viscerally to imagine the fall (or perhaps the jump): a disgusting, dangerous, indefensible thing to put in front of people. And it was prefaced by an advertisement for “dream holidays in Canada”. Seriously? They sell advertising space before this kind of pornographic shit? Do they sell it on the beheading videos too? “BUY KYLIE’S NEW ALBUM [You can see the decapitation in 5… 4… 3…]” ? Our readiness to be spooked by murder footage from Syria benefits three groups: the propagandists behind it; those who would restrict our civil liberty in the name of “terrorism prevention”; and a modern media so obsessed with hits, traffic and advertising sales that it has long forgotten a world where it did not depict corpses, or irresponsibly cover suicide, for fear of causing further damage. In a very deep way, these groups are all taking part in the same sick game. Don’t let us play along. Prince Charles is right to bring it down to the level of personal choice. There is no more protection in the media, no sense that “public interest” means anything other than “what the public is interested in”, and all we can do, as individuals, is opt out. I want to say: eschew news websites and buy papers, which have a different business model, but I might be shouting after a sailed boat. At least don’t scour the dark web for beheading videos, though. How did we ever lose our instinct to avoid that kind of thing, to be shocked even at the possibility of watching it? We have to look away again. Since 1995 we may have become better informed, but we are also angrier, more frightened and worse. |