Shocking images
You only know they are, once you've been shocked
I remember seeing Friday the 13th, a horror film, in which a young couple on a bed, making love, are pierced, both in a oner, by the monster wielding a spike. It gruesomely raised from some audience members cries of what I might describe as “exhilarated revulsion.” But all were safe in assuming that what we saw was a trick of cinema. No one died. Still, I did only see it once, and once was enough.
Friday the 13th is just play-acting.
When a plane crashed last month in Nepal, a passenger who survived took a film of the incident, whereupon the wreckage caught fire and he and many others were consumed by the conflagration. It's a sad state of affairs that warranted publicity, if only for the fact that air safety is paid but lip service in Nepal.
Belgian news channel VRT NWS showed the video, first unexpurgated and then with identity “blurs” and some viewers raised complaints with the Ombudsman, who concluded, “It is permissible to show dramatic footage, but it's best done with circumspection and in limited measure.”
The report is available here (in Dutch).
I've myself raised the issue (when two young children were killed as an articulated lorry turned a corner in Antwerp - they were in the driver's blind spot) of the news editor showing as an “illustration” for the piece a photograph of the location as screened off by investigators behind awnings intended for “discretion” purposes.
The clear intention of the screens is to say “Please, do not gawp.” So what do the photographs of such screens serve? Do we instead "gawp" at those? What is the point? I feel a pang of guilt at just seeing such "discretion".
When pictures came out from Bucha showing what Russians had done there during its occupation, some editors found them to be too shocking to show and referred the incurably curious to the Associated Press website, where they could be viewed. There, I viewed them. I suspect that, like many, in Ukraine, in Russia, elsewhere, there persisted a sense that what had been described simply could not be true: that no human in the modern age can be quite so barbaric as the reports led one to believe. I was one, and I looked and I saw and I came to a realisation that this kind of barbarism is all too easily true. And, I was shocked.
Shock is not always necessary. It can concretise resolve. And it can banalise, inure the shocked into an expectation, whereby such events shock no more.
It's a hard call for news editors. One thing we can always resolve: that we shall not be inured to what shocks, when it does shock. For that, we only need to see it once.