It is no secret that television news ratings soar in response to catastrophe. Reports of cable news addiction were widespread following September the 11th. The response has apparently been no different in subsequent disasters as well as following the recent tsunami disaster along the coast of the Indian Ocean. American television networks scrambled to put their best talent in front of the backdrop of rubble and ruin, grappling for their share of the ratings blitz. Up-and-coming newsmen like CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in the midst of contract negotiations, have proven that one man’s catastrophic incident is another’s career opportunity. Despite the depressive effect that witnessing the relentless display of disaster footage may have on viewers who could avoid the souring tragedy by changing the channel, viewers continue to watch these calamities unfold and re-unfold in droves.
Is it empathy that makes people watch disaster compulsively? Or voyeurism? I would argue that it is an uncomfortable marriage of the two. Viewers watch compulsively attempting to empathize. They attempt to achieve this through a medium whose capacity to faithfully transmit reality has been diminished by its multiplying versions of reality. The viewer watches the destruction of the tsunami compulsively in order to overcome the barrier caused by this multiplicity, to convince themselves that this is, in fact, real.
Just as the viewer watches compulsively to overcome this difficulty in sorting out reality from its varied counterparts, the television news media reports the disaster compulsively, repetitively, in an attempt to both capitalize on the viewer’s rapt attention and overcome the distortion they’ve been a part of creating. So the news media employs a number of tactics, all with the same simple objective to drive home: that this, what we are bringing to you, is real.
The media are fairly heavy-handed in their attempts to make this point clear. They often say things like, “these images are being brought to you live.” What they mean to make clear with statements like these is the authenticity of their transmission of reality. It would not make the footage any less real if it were twenty minutes old but somehow the catastrophe is made more immediate and therefore more authentic free of editing, a process which creates, rather than reproduces.
Another tactic to penetrate the unreal gloss that any message gets as it comes through the television set is to make connections with familiar articles in the viewer’s memory. Television journalists had the added obstacle of viewer geographical ignorance in the case of the recent tsunami. Americans are notorious for being unaware of the proper nouns belonging to entire continents. This is why CNN reported that film star Jet Li had escaped almost unharmed, injuring only his foot and saving his daughter in the process. After we all stop holding our breath, able to sleep soundly knowing that Jet Li is resting his foot comfortably, it makes sense that the news media would report this essentially pointless story. Jet Li is perhaps the only living Southeast Asian whose name is recognizable to the average American. The news media uses his celebrity to at once report the scope of this tragedy (even a privileged celebrity is not untouched, however small his injury is) and a region of the world, where landmasses with unpronounceable names worm out strangely into the exotic Indian Ocean, is transformed into the homeland of that Asian action star, the one who dodges bullets in slow motion.
Early movie-goers are said to have screamed and ran from the locomotive barreling towards them as projected onto the screen in front of them. This inability to cognitively differentiate between a train reproduced with light on a screen and an actual train seems laughable now. The early viewers’ response came from an impulse to believe that what was in front of them was substantive, real. Witness reports from recent disasters like the tsunami and the World Trade Center attacks demonstrate that many Americans now share the opposite cognitive defect: to equate what was happening right in front of them, like a substantive locomotive, with a movie, with something utterly unreal.
It’s easy to see why. The images of waters rushing in, engulfing scores of people, upending trucks, and disassembling buildings, might have been virtually identical to a carefully orchestrated hybrid of film and digital imaging. What destroyed billions of dollars of infrastructure could be recreated for mere millions in a Hollywood special effects studio. The cognitive defect mentioned earlier in regards to the first movie-goers is essentially the same one troubling the witnesses of recent disasters. It is the inability to see moving pictures and reality as distinctly different. In one case, they are both viewed as real, in the other, as unreal.
The compulsion to watch real disaster unfold repetitively on the screen is essentially a struggle to overcome this cognitive defect. The viewer watches again and again the grisly footage of bodies floating amidst broken buildings, and the images of a single man wandering in circles searching across a leveled landscape, in order to understand that they are real. Only after you’ve convinced yourself that what you are seeing is real can you empathize. And empathizing is what someone who has spent two hours watching reports of unmitigated sorrow will tell you he has been doing.
Similar to the reactions to the World Trade Center attacks where witnesses described the jets tearing into the office building as “like a movie,” there is a home video taken by a vacationing Australian family from their hotel room as the tsunami rose against the horizon and came rushing inland. The actual photography of the video is the same as all the rest, a torrent of water overrunning the ocean’s edge and beginning to raze the seaside community. It is the audio from the family that is so troubling. As the wave begins to swell upward and pitch forward the father shouts, “Look at that! Look at that!” to his children. The children are heard hollering in excitement: “woah!” and “awesome!” The father, too, sounds more excited than concerned. As the water rushes towards their hotel, their excitement does not diminish or turn to fear or worry.
This is another instance of the cognitive defect mentioned earlier. If the danger and its impending consequences were perceived as wholly real, could the response have actually been excitement? The tones of their voices held the marriage of awe and excitation seen on the faces of audiences staring upward at the movie screen as the light washes over them. If voyeurism is being excited by watching, then the Australians videotaping the tsunami were voyeurs to their own disaster.
This returns us to the role of voyeurism in the compulsion to watch disasters unfold. It is understandable to be transfixed by a vision as singular and as awing as a forty foot wave. It was an attractive image: a wall of water rising up, pitching, curling forward seamlessly from left to right, a glassy hollow in the middle. The wave itself was beautiful.
Of course, saying that invites accusations. To be accused of being a voyeur in this context is to be excited by the images of the disaster without empathizing adequately for the consequences. The physical consequences themselves only become images. The ghastliness of the floating bodies, the rows of dead, become a kind of new landscape, fascinating in its strangeness and vacancy. The attempts made by the news media to convey the reality of the disaster, repetitively, only fix the viewer into the role of voyeur, able to see the physical consequences but unable to feel the internal consequences, and therefore, unable to empathize, no matter how long he watches or how he justifies his watching.
David Coulson
David Coulson
Disasters and the Compulsion to Watch Them
It is no secret that television news ratings soar in response to catastrophe. Reports of cable news addiction were widespread following September the 11th. The response has apparently been no different in subsequent disasters as well as following the recent tsunami disaster along the coast of the Indian Ocean. American television networks scrambled to put their best talent in front of the backdrop of rubble and ruin, grappling for their share of the ratings blitz. Up-and-coming newsmen like CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in the midst of contract negotiations, have proven that one man’s catastrophic incident is another’s career opportunity. Despite the depressive effect that witnessing the relentless display of disaster footage may have on viewers who could avoid the souring tragedy by changing the channel, viewers continue to watch these calamities unfold and re-unfold in droves.
Is it empathy that makes people watch disaster compulsively? Or voyeurism? I would argue that it is an uncomfortable marriage of the two. Viewers watch compulsively attempting to empathize. They attempt to achieve this through a medium whose capacity to faithfully transmit reality has been diminished by its multiplying versions of reality. The viewer watches the destruction of the tsunami compulsively in order to overcome the barrier caused by this multiplicity, to convince themselves that this is, in fact, real.
Just as the viewer watches compulsively to overcome this difficulty in sorting out reality from its varied counterparts, the television news media reports the disaster compulsively, repetitively, in an attempt to both capitalize on the viewer’s rapt attention and overcome the distortion they’ve been a part of creating. So the news media employs a number of tactics, all with the same simple objective to drive home: that this, what we are bringing to you, is real.
The media are fairly heavy-handed in their attempts to make this point clear. They often say things like, “these images are being brought to you live.” What they mean to make clear with statements like these is the authenticity of their transmission of reality. It would not make the footage any less real if it were twenty minutes old but somehow the catastrophe is made more immediate and therefore more authentic free of editing, a process which creates, rather than reproduces.
Another tactic to penetrate the unreal gloss that any message gets as it comes through the television set is to make connections with familiar articles in the viewer’s memory. Television journalists had the added obstacle of viewer geographical ignorance in the case of the recent tsunami. Americans are notorious for being unaware of the proper nouns belonging to entire continents. This is why CNN reported that film star Jet Li had escaped almost unharmed, injuring only his foot and saving his daughter in the process. After we all stop holding our breath, able to sleep soundly knowing that Jet Li is resting his foot comfortably, it makes sense that the news media would report this essentially pointless story. Jet Li is perhaps the only living Southeast Asian whose name is recognizable to the average American. The news media uses his celebrity to at once report the scope of this tragedy (even a privileged celebrity is not untouched, however small his injury is) and a region of the world, where landmasses with unpronounceable names worm out strangely into the exotic Indian Ocean, is transformed into the homeland of that Asian action star, the one who dodges bullets in slow motion.
Early movie-goers are said to have screamed and ran from the locomotive barreling towards them as projected onto the screen in front of them. This inability to cognitively differentiate between a train reproduced with light on a screen and an actual train seems laughable now. The early viewers’ response came from an impulse to believe that what was in front of them was substantive, real. Witness reports from recent disasters like the tsunami and the World Trade Center attacks demonstrate that many Americans now share the opposite cognitive defect: to equate what was happening right in front of them, like a substantive locomotive, with a movie, with something utterly unreal.
It’s easy to see why. The images of waters rushing in, engulfing scores of people, upending trucks, and disassembling buildings, might have been virtually identical to a carefully orchestrated hybrid of film and digital imaging. What destroyed billions of dollars of infrastructure could be recreated for mere millions in a Hollywood special effects studio. The cognitive defect mentioned earlier in regards to the first movie-goers is essentially the same one troubling the witnesses of recent disasters. It is the inability to see moving pictures and reality as distinctly different. In one case, they are both viewed as real, in the other, as unreal.
The compulsion to watch real disaster unfold repetitively on the screen is essentially a struggle to overcome this cognitive defect. The viewer watches again and again the grisly footage of bodies floating amidst broken buildings, and the images of a single man wandering in circles searching across a leveled landscape, in order to understand that they are real. Only after you’ve convinced yourself that what you are seeing is real can you empathize. And empathizing is what someone who has spent two hours watching reports of unmitigated sorrow will tell you he has been doing.
Similar to the reactions to the World Trade Center attacks where witnesses described the jets tearing into the office building as “like a movie,” there is a home video taken by a vacationing Australian family from their hotel room as the tsunami rose against the horizon and came rushing inland. The actual photography of the video is the same as all the rest, a torrent of water overrunning the ocean’s edge and beginning to raze the seaside community. It is the audio from the family that is so troubling. As the wave begins to swell upward and pitch forward the father shouts, “Look at that! Look at that!” to his children. The children are heard hollering in excitement: “woah!” and “awesome!” The father, too, sounds more excited than concerned. As the water rushes towards their hotel, their excitement does not diminish or turn to fear or worry.
This is another instance of the cognitive defect mentioned earlier. If the danger and its impending consequences were perceived as wholly real, could the response have actually been excitement? The tones of their voices held the marriage of awe and excitation seen on the faces of audiences staring upward at the movie screen as the light washes over them. If voyeurism is being excited by watching, then the Australians videotaping the tsunami were voyeurs to their own disaster.
This returns us to the role of voyeurism in the compulsion to watch disasters unfold. It is understandable to be transfixed by a vision as singular and as awing as a forty foot wave. It was an attractive image: a wall of water rising up, pitching, curling forward seamlessly from left to right, a glassy hollow in the middle. The wave itself was beautiful.
Of course, saying that invites accusations. To be accused of being a voyeur in this context is to be excited by the images of the disaster without empathizing adequately for the consequences. The physical consequences themselves only become images. The ghastliness of the floating bodies, the rows of dead, become a kind of new landscape, fascinating in its strangeness and vacancy. The attempts made by the news media to convey the reality of the disaster, repetitively, only fix the viewer into the role of voyeur, able to see the physical consequences but unable to feel the internal consequences, and therefore, unable to empathize, no matter how long he watches or how he justifies his watching.