Snuff, Reality TV, and the Issue of the "Too Real": Part 2

I concluded yesterday’s blog with the observation that although its existence has never been proven, the theoretical existence of the “snuff film” was made thinkable because of photographic technology’s automatism, its vulnerability to intrusions of the too real. The intrusion of the too real marks the limit of representation; to go beyond this limit is to be “obscene,” “pornographic,” to be subject to prosecution, and so on. While the proscribed limit is popularly understood as restrictions on the representation of sexual acts, the other side of the same token, of course, is the representation of death.

An example that immediately comes to mind to illustrate the vulnerability of which I speak is Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on national television, this in 1963, long before the invention of “Reality TV.” And a non-televised example is, of course, the 8mm “home movie” footage of President Kennedy’s assassination taken by Abraham Zapruder—the famous “Zapruder film.”

In a sense, the vulnerability of photography to intrusions of the too real always threatens to put the viewer in the same situation as Abraham Zapruder: eye-witness to disaster. There is an infamous short film by Stan Brakhage that was shot in a morgue, consisting of the dissection and study of cadavers, titled “The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes,” the title of Brakhage’s film a pun derived from the dictionary definition of the word autopsy: “Seeing with one’s own eyes, eye-witnessing; personal observation or inspection” (OED). The word autopsy is an example of an interdisciplinary homonym, the locus where two or more fields converge at a single set of terms. While autopsy literally translated means, “seeing with one’s own eyes,” it is also defined in the OED in the more common understanding of the word, as “dissection of a dead body; so as to ascertain by actual inspection its internal structure, and esp. to find out the cause or seat of disease; post-mortem examination.”

Brakhage’s film thus links the discipline of cinematography with that of coroner: the eye-witnessing of the camera and the “I witness” of the coroner. Brakhage’s film is an act of revelation (Andre Bazin’s privileged mode of mimesis) of the hidden mystery of the body’s dead end, similar to the disassembly of a machine. In a cold, clinical fashion, he showed how faces are peeled off the skull, how the top of the cranium is sawed off in order to allow access to the brain beneath (which is subsequently removed), how the blood is washed out of an eviscerated torso—the truth, as Godard once said, twenty-four frames per second. Jorge Luis Borges, in a short story, once linked death and the compass; Brakhage’s film links death and the camera.

The ability to record cold, implacable death is an illustration of the revenge effect of photography’s automatism. Indeed, the clinical recording of death is almost as old as the cinema itself. The title of the Thomas Edison short, Electrocuting an Elephant (1903; pictured) blatantly names its diegetic action; although the electrocution of the elephant was staged for the camera to demonstrate to onlookers the dangers of electricity, the film nonetheless recorded an actual event: the electrocution of an elephant named Topsy. Did Thomas Edison make the first snuff film?

Of course, “Reality TV” is not premised on the capturing of atrocity, but that is precisely its vulnerability. In order to reveal just how vulnerable the medium is to intrusions of the too real, an example is in order. For my example, I’m going to refer to an event that occurred over thirty years ago, doing so in hope that the event will be largely unknown to a majority of present-day readers. In the years since, similar events have occurred, but my example serves as an illustration of the sort of vulnerabilities of the medium I wish to identify. It was sufficiently sensational to have influenced the medium since, and inspired at least one motion picture.

On Monday, 15 July 1974, a 29 year-old anchorwoman for Sarasota, Florida TV station WXLT, named Christine Chubbuck, committed suicide while delivering the station’s morning newscast. (In the years since she seems to have been transformed into a sort of folk hero, as witnessed by the number of websites devoted to her; there's even footage of her on youtube. Whether there's a link to her theatricalized suicide and later events such as Columbine is a subject for further research.) The following account comes from a UPI report filed by Sally Quinn, dated August 4, 1974.

Christine Chubbuck flicked her long dark hair back away from her face, swallowed, twitched her lips only slightly and reached with her left hand to turn the next page of her script. Looking down on the anchor desk she began to read: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in”—she looked up from the script, directly into the camera and smiled a tentative smile. Her voice took on a sarcastic tone as she emphasized “blood and guts…and in living color.” She looked back down at her script, her left hand shook almost unnoticeably.

Her right arm stiffened. “We bring you another first.” Her voice was steady. She looked up again into the camera. Her eyes were dark, direct and challenging. “An attempted suicide.” Her right hand came up from under the anchor desk. In it was a .38 caliber revolver. She pointed it at the lower back of her head and pulled the trigger. A loud crack was heard. A puff of smoke blew out from the gun and her hair flew up around her face as though a sudden gust of wind had caught it. Her face took on a fierce, contorted look, her mouth wrenched downward, her head shook. Then her body fell forward with a resounding thud against the anchor desk and slowly slipped out of sight.

She died roughly fourteen hours later at a local hospital. Predictably, the story was soon reported on radio and television, and on front pages of newspapers around the world: “TV Star Kills Self,” “TV Personality Takes Own Life on Air,” “On Camera Suicide,” and so on. The event was immediately likened to similar intrusions of the too real which had preceded it: Jack Ruby’s shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, Arthur Bremer’s attempted assassination of George Wallace in 1972, Eddie Adams’ 1968 photograph of the execution of the Viet Cong prisoner, yet, “Never in history had anyone deliberately killed herself on live television,” Sally Quinn wrote. “It was a first.”

Christine Chubbuck’s suicide prompted Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay Network (1976), and is intertextually related to films such as Videodrome (1983). Directed by Sidney Lumet, Network stars Peter Finch (who won an Academy Award for his performance), William Holden, Faye Dunaway, and Robert Duvall. Although her suicide was the inspiration for Chayefsky’s screenplay, the line in which her suicide is alluded to is not actually in included in the released version of the film. However, Sam Hedrin’s novelization (Pocket Books, 1976) of the screenplay contains the allusion: protagonist Howard Beale (the character played by Peter Finch in the film), during a drunken conversation, says, “I’m going to blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news, like that girl in Florida a couple of months ago” (8).

Christine Chubbuck’s suicide is one of many instances of the intrusion of the too real in television, suggesting that if indeed television is a window to the world, that window better be made of bullet-proof glass. Hers was not the only such event. A similar event occurred on 22 January 1987, when, again on live television, R. Budd Dwyer, a Pennsylvania state treasurer then under criminal investigation, during a press conference placed a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, committing suicide. In yet another example, during an episode of 60 Minutes that aired on 22 November 1998, footage of Dr. Jack Kevorkian euthanizing Thomas Youk was shown on national television, prompting great outrage: viewers compared the footage of Kevorkian’s assisted suicide to a “snuff film”—the limits of representation had been exceeded, prompting public outcry. Exploiting photography's automatism, Kevorkian videotaped the entire procedure and made the tape available for broadcast on 60 Minutes. Subsequently, he was charged with first-degree murder and convicted of second-degree murder, and was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison—was he actually guilty of murder, or was he punished for violating the limit of the representation of death?

I could provide many, many other examples of the too real intruding on the little theater called television—a device the function of which obviously is not to show us the world, but rather to shield us from it.

Death Valley Days: Two (Over And Out)

The L. A. Times reported late this afternoon (4:58 PDT) that the two areas near the Barker Ranch site where bodies were suspected of being buried yielded nothing but a shell casing, ash and small animal bones. According to the latest report, Inyo County sheriff's investigators today apparently called off their search for human remains at the site. Lt. Jim Jones of the Inyo Country Sheriff's office is quoted as saying, "forensic testing indicates that there were no human remains in or around that site." Whether Charles Manson and his "Family" committed murders heretofore unaccounted for thus remains unconfirmed.

Initial reports indicated the investigation would continue through Thursday, but apparently the investigation was ended today given the complete absence of any promising evidence. As I noted in an early blog entry, there was a similar kind of search at the ranch a couple of months ago, which also turned up nothing. The claim that there were bodies buried there was never entirely believable, but now, in any case, the matter can be laid to rest in the absence of any leads.

And that, as they say, is that. The question remains as to why investigators found the assertion "within the realm of probability." I should add that I have no idea how often Ed Sanders (author of The Family) updates his website, but I noticed no comment on the investigation on his website, which could be interpreted as an indication of his skepticism regarding the recent endeavor. I have ordered a copy of his 2002 update of The Family; if there is any information in it that can shed light on this recent activity, I will certainly let you know.

Snuff, Reality TV, and the Issue of the "Too Real": Part 1

The question of Charles Manson and the “snuff film” has preoccupied my thoughts the past few days, prompted, of course, by the forensic investigation currently going on at the Barker Ranch (see my recent blog entries on the subject, below).

It occurs to me that the controversy surrounding the possible existence of the “snuff film” (never proven) is in fact no longer relevant—if the issue is simply one of transgression, the exhibition of content that is putatively considered “obscene”: this is merely a question of propriety, what ought to be shown and not shown. In a culture such as ours that is so preoccupied with the technology of war, we are able to see snuff film, in the sense of the filming of murder and the recording of death, just about every night on the national news, comprised as it is of video footage of missiles striking enemy strongholds, rockets raining down on “insurgents” hiding behind city walls or within buildings, the aftermath of car bombs with bodies littering the street, and numerous other atrocities.

The issue of televised snuff reveals that the so-called problem or controversy surrounding the snuff film exists because of photographic technology. In his essay on the art of the cinema, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945), André Bazin argued that photography had a privileged access to truth because it was the result of a mechanical, reproductive process over which human agency had no control. He thus regarded the cinema primarily as a vehicle of revelation, rather than transformation, of reality. “For the first time,” he wrote, “an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative invention of man.” Bazin’s idea of an image being formed “automatically” is called the principle of automatism. Historically considered, Bazin privileges the form of mimesis known as aletheia (revelation), in contrast to adaequatio (correspondence). But in both of these modes of truth, the act of representation brings into appearance the physis (essence of life) of that which is imitated.

The history of photography reveals that automatism, the potential for revelation, became one of its primary attractions. A marketing campaign by Kodak once touted the importance of photography’s automatism—there was a camera nicknamed the “Kodak Automatic”—by its ability to capture “precious moments”—weddings, births, anniversaries, graduations, award ceremonies, family reunions and the like, all of those “once in a lifetime” events upon which so much of our modern memory is formed. By the same token, photography’s automatism has enabled some catastrophic historic moments to be captured on film: the explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, on May 6, 1937, at the naval air station at Lakehurst, New Jersey (pictured), or the stark truth of the Nazi death camps. There’s the famous, Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken by photojournalist Eddie Adams in Saigon in 1968, capturing the execution of a Viet Cong prisoner. Most Americans, I imagine, have the images of the collapsing World Trade Center Towers indelibly etched in their memory—I certainly do—an event made possible by the automatism of photography and the ubiquity of the inexpensive video camera.

Thus the principle of automatism allows photographic technology to capture atrocity as well. Considered strictly as a form of technology, photography illustrates what Edward Tenner calls the “revenge effect” of all technology: a process designed for one purpose turns out not only to subvert that purpose but to achieve its opposite.

The principle of photography’s automatism enables “Reality TV” as a form of representation but, paradoxically, creates a problem it must simultaneously overcome: there is the real, but there is also the too real. Reality TV must disclose (reveal) but also occlude (shut off, hide) at the same time. For instance, the subject of a "Reality TV" may use the toilet, but the camera doesn't intrude on the subject's privacy. In order to illustrate the nature of this dilemma, an anecdote is in order. Some years ago, I read a letter in Ann Landers’ column from a woman who, while snooping through her teenage daughter’s purse, had discovered birth control pills. She was writing to Ann Landers for advice on how to best handle her dilemma: she wanted to talk to her daughter about the daughter’s presumed promiscuity, but to do so she would have to admit to her daughter that she had been snooping through her daughter’s purse. (In her reply, Ann Landers suggested the problem originated with the mother’s lack of trust in her daughter, which is precisely why the daughter kept the pills hidden away.) The moral of the story is that in her remorseless, voyeuristic search for what was real, the mother became an eye-witness to something she didn’t wish to see—to know (knowledge as seeing). The mother should have been more familiar with Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

The makers of “Reality TV” programs face the same daunting problem that the nosy mother did while rummaging through her daughter’s purse: how to reveal the truth, but not to go too far, not to pass a certain proscribed limit. The problem isn't so much what you can show as what you can't show. If you go too far, for example, you find yourself confronting the outrage caused by the exposure of Janet Jackson’s breast during the Super Bowl XXXVIII half-time show (2004)—the problem of the intrusion of the real, which gets you into trouble. On the other hand, if you don’t show (reveal) enough, you can’t claim to be presenting “reality.”

The Lacanian critic Slavoj Zizek conveniently addresses this problem by using as an illustration a love scene in a Hollywood film:

Let us take an old-fashioned, nostalgic melodrama like Out of Africa and let us assume that the film is precisely the one shown in cinemas, except for an additional ten minutes. When Robert Redford and Meryl Streep have their first love encounter, the scene—in this slightly longer version of the film—is not interrupted, the camera “shows it all,” details of their aroused sexual organs, penetration, orgasm, etc. Then, after the act, the story goes on as usual, we return to the film we all know. The problem is that such a movie is structurally impossible. Even if it were to be shot, it simply “would not function”; the additional ten minutes would derail us, for the rest of the movie we would be unable to regain our balance and follow the narration with the usual disavowed belief in the diegetic reality. The sexual act would function as an intrusion of the real undermining the consistency of this diegetic reality. (Looking Awry, MIT Press, 1992, p. 111)

Stated another way, movies are commercially successful only to the extent that they are magical, that they enchant the viewer. They cease to enchant or enthrall when brute fact intrudes on the theatrical frame: dreary fact is rather like a spoilsport who destroys the illusory world of the game. To “show it all” is to go way too far, to dispel the illusion, that is, to allow the real to intrude—just ask Janet Jackson. The revenge effect of photography’s automatism is the vulnerability of the photographic medium to the too real. For his example, Zizek uses sex; in my subsequent blog, I will use death—flip side of the same token. While its existence has never been proven, the theoretical existence of the "snuff film" was made thinkable in the first place because of the potential for photographic technology to so easily—automatically—record the too real.

Death Valley Days: 1.1

The current dig at the Barker Ranch is promising to become the equivalent of Geraldo Rivera's opening of Al Capone's vault. Here are excerpts from this afternoon’s Los Angeles Times website report, filed by Louis Sahagun at 4:36 p.m. PDT (updates may supplant this initial report):

A day’s work in 100-degree heat at a remote ranch once used as a hangout for the notorious Charles Manson family yielded only a .38-caliber shell casing today. But a posse of Inyo County sheriff’s investigators was expected to continue the dig in Death Valley National Park.

[...]

Of particular interest today were two sites where cadaver dogs and analyses of soil samples produced mixed but somewhat encouraging results that could possibly support lingering rumors that bodies may be buried at Barker Ranch. The collection of sheds and a rock-and-plaster ranch house are five miles up a rugged black rock canyon at the park’s southwestern boundary.

Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze has said a total of five sites may be excavated over the next few days amid temperatures forecast to hover near 110 degrees. Sheriff’s authorities were expected to provide reporters with a progress report later today.

To reiterate: we shall see. Aside from the allegation, without source, by a former Manson "Family" member that there are bodies buried at the Barker Ranch, there may be other motivations for the dig that are, in fact, unrelated to the Mansion "Family."

Death Valley Days: One

An update on yesterday afternoon's blog about the archaeological/forensic dig going on at the Barker Ranch, the remote set of buildings in the Panamint Mountains at the southwestern edge of Death Valley used by Charles Manson and his “Family” as a refuge in 1968-69: this afternoon the Los Angeles Times provided an update on the excavation, but no new details were added to the report.

However, after having re-read yesterday’s blog, it occurred to me that I might have given too much emphasis to the issue of the “snuff” film rather than the issue of whether there might be bodies buried near the Barker Ranch in that remote area of Death Valley. As I pointed out, the use of “snuff” to refer to films (or videotape) purportedly containing scenes of actual murder was originated by Ed Sanders in his 1971 book on Manson, The Family (most recently reissued in 2002). But it occurred to me that there are actually two, unrelated, issues here: whether there were, in fact, any “snuff films” ever made, by Manson and his “Family” or by others, on 8mm or other storage media; and whether there might be any bodies to be found buried in the environs of the Barker Ranch.

Having reflected on the issue, I'm now wondering why law enforcement authorities believe there might be bodies buried near the Barker Ranch in the first place. My interest rekindled by the archaeological/forensic research mission presently going on, this morning I was motivated to re-read Ed Sanders' The Family, the first edition hardcover I bought in the early 1970s (the edition published prior to a lawsuit that required its author to remove any references to "The Process"). He makes no reference to murders or burials that might have taken place at the Barker Ranch, although he does refer to murders in the state that occurred when Manson Family members were placed in the area. One brief sentence, however, in today's report explains the reason for the recent investigation:

A member of the Manson family later suggested that there were bodies buried at Barker Ranch.

Apparently this information surfaced many years after Sanders published his book. I should note that a preliminary dig occurred at the ranch in February of this year, so perhaps the information surfaced only recently.

To reiterate the conclusion I made at the end of yesterday's blog: we shall see.

Silly Love Songs

I am sure it will come as no surprise to anyone for me to say that the vast majority of popular songs are love songs. And although this fact may surprise no one at all--indeed, may be a painfully banal observation--no one, to my knowledge, discusses it. Indeed, it is one of those "obvious" facts of our daily lives that is rarely, if ever, discussed. I'm sure we've heard it said a thousand times, "it is a fundamental desire for human beings to love and to want to be loved," but the insight is no more startling or profound or meaningful, as a simple declarative sentence, than "the sky is blue." For scholars who approach popular music from a sociologist's perspective, such as Simon Frith, the fact that the bulk of popular songs are love songs "is more than an interesting statistic; it is a centrally important aspect of how pop music is used" ("Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music," in Music and Society, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 141). For Simon Frith, it is one of the social functions of popular music "to give us a way of managing the relationship between our public and private emotional lives." Why are love songs so important to us? Frith asks.

Because people need them to give shape and voice to emotions that otherwise cannot be expressed without embarrassment or incoherence. Love songs are a way of giving emotional intensity to the sorts of intimate things we say to each other (and to ourselves) in words that are, in themselves, quite flat. It is a peculiarity of everyday language that our most fraught and revealing declarations of feeling have to use phrases--'I love/hate you', 'Help me!', 'I'm angry/scared'--which are boring and banal; and so our culture has a supply of a million pop songs, which say these things for us in numerous interesting and involving ways. (141)

There's another way to explain why our culture has a million songs about love, though, and it has been expressed by a prominent musician and songwriter, jazz sage Mose Allison. During an interview with Joel Dorn (cited in the liner notes to Allison Wonderland: The Mose Allison Anthology, Atlantic, 1994) Allison said this, which I hope we'll ponder the next time we hear one of those "silly" love songs on the radio:

A prominent white educator was studying the culture of the Hopi, a desert-dwelling Native American tribe of the Southwest. He found it strange that almost all Hopi music was about water and asked one of the musicians why. He explained that so much of their music was about water because that was what they had the least of. And then he told the white man, "Most of your music is about love."