Arguments about watching stuff have almost always come in one of two forms. The first has to do with whether or not watching bad stuff (however “bad” gets designated and defined) will poison people with its badness. This is the basic argument of the Taliban, for whom any statue or television show must be destroyed, the very act of re-production proving offensive. It is an instinct moral majority types share when they want to do away with pornography and so forth. Most people buy into this idea at least a little bit, accepting, for instance, the rating system of movies or the idea that there are some things children should not see. Call this the Plato instinct.
To express a desire to remove a person’s fingernails, one at a time, to say how much you wish to attach wires to another’s genitals and burn them with an electrical charge, to drool over killing someone’s parents as they watch is, for most folks, hard to articulate. It is rightly uncomfortable. and, the hope is, actually distasteful. Still, the things that make up the horrors of this world are a tad harder to stand when phrased that way (as personal desires) and thus easier to put on film, to artify. It is easier to let Jack Bauer and the torture aesthetic be something someone else does or something that falls under the “pretend” category. It is only a movie, a television show, whatever. If it must be real then it is either barbarous or–far too often of late– justified.
No less so with big explosions.
Exactly six months after 9/11 (all the radio and television channels remarked on the day as the half year anniversery) one of the major networks (can’t remember which) broadcast the 1998 version of Godzilla. If the Japanese monster movies were allegories for nuclear war (it is always some nuclear explosion that cause monstrous growth and, of course, the Japanese knew something about the terrors of such explosions) then this movie was more an allegory for terrorism. Godzilla is huge but can disappear into almost anywhere, ready to pop up everywhere. Destructive and terrifying, Godzilla easily outthinks and outmaneuvers incompetent military and self obsessed politicians. And in this movie, Godzilla (or the missiles fired at him) destroy half the Icons of New York City (The Pan Am Building, Madison Square Garden, Lincoln Tunnel) until finally killed on the Brooklyn Bridge, caught up in all the suspension wires. In fact, in this film Harry Shearer, playing a reporter and referring to the event of 1993, says something to the effect of “This is the worst disaster in New York since the bombing of the World Trade Center.”
What did the decision to air that movie exactly six months after 9/11 say about some understanding of “appropriate,” let alone the sacred? However absurd the plot (it’s a big fire breathing lizard after all) Godzilla shows things getting destroyed in a way impossible not to connect with the way the towers were destroyed on 9/11. Fun before 9/11? Maybe. Tolerable if you did not know anyone killed half a year earlier? Perhaps. But what about those in the audience still grieving? What if Bin Laden lizard had managed to take out all those city blocks and drop them not on extras and computer animation, but on your family? Do the obvious connections between the movie and a national tragedy mean the movie should stay off the airways or not be broadcast? Or at least not on an anniversary of that tragedy? Does it depend on the anniversary? How long before art become part of what you will never forget?
One widow of 9-11 commented that she hated how world media kept replaying the video of the planes crashing into the towers because that was the moment her husband was murdered. Hard to argue with that. Maybe too she hated the scent of pleasure people had in the replays. The pornographic sense that the previously unreal but excitedly imagined–buildings toppling with great aplomb and enticing effects–was now real. The confrontation for her was with murder. For everyone else it was with a deeply hidden or all too public desire, a sense that the art this culture and society enable wanted this, put forces into motion to make imagination real.
That the imaginative capacities of The West wanted to see, again and for real, the kind of disaster its movies love would confirm the argument the actors on 9-11 would themselves make . . . had they not been busy fulfilling, in actuality, their evil roles.
The second argument about watching stuff is that it does not matter too much what you watch or how you watch it. Call that, instinctually, some form of hope, another kind of helpful lie.