Amusing Ourselves to Death

The spectacle of entropy of truth on prime time television in India did not come without a forewarning. In 1985 Neil Postman augured that “we’re a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are now given form by TV, not by the printed word.” To add to the burden, dystopia lurked in the backdrop as we would turn into a captive culture, in George Orwell’s opinion, while Aldous Huxley’s concern was that the truth would be lost in a sea of meaninglessness.

Night after night in the orgies-porgies around the prime time television where knavery was decanted as truth, television became the end of conversation.

In the times when we are surrounded by images, everyday lives saturated by images, why do we lack imagination? What is this relationship between politics and our capacity to imagine? And by an extension, does it deter us from defining a new politics for our social? 

On the night of April 15, a posse of police were escorting Atiq Ahmed and his brother Ashraf to a hospital in Prayagraj in the state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Atiq was a gangster and a former elected member of the UP assembly and Indian Parliament. 

Television cameras captured the killing in full view and telecasted live. The brothers were handcuffed to each other at the time. As Atiq answered a question posed to him by a journalist, a hand pointed a gun at his head. The shots were fired in quick succession. Live television in India had never seen anything so horrific and dramatic.

The live incident took over the mediascape as snippets of video reels of the killing went viral to satiate morbid curiosity of people.  

It reminded me of the photograph that changed the course of the Vietnam War. What came to be known as the Saigon execution, Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, caught the precise moment in his frame of Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Vietcong prisoner, Nguyen Van Lem. The still image diffused with multiple reprints around the world to  emerge as an iconic representation of the brutality and nihilism of the war.

It seemed as if the pathology of a “normal” state apparatus was playing itself out. As Kyle Grayson writes in his book on targeted killing, arguing “how the current social relations prevalent in liberal societies contain the potential for targeted killing as a normal rather than extraordinary practice. Assassination and targeted killing embody cynegetic relations of power that separate predator from prey.”

But the incident in India was not that of war. The killing on live television in India tells “a story not only of impunity but of a fumbling police force caught clueless – as citizens conduct their own encounter”, an editorial in Indian Express attempted to make apparent sense. Other editorials followed suit to define, substantiate, and question the killing while talking heads on television had a field day polarizing the narrative, some contrived, to suit the ruling regime. Spin masters spoke of these killings as something to be celebrated and justified in their bid to shuffle the news agenda from the previous day’s explosive interview with former Jammu and Kashmir governor Satya Pal Malik by Karan Thapar published in the The Wire. 

A lot has changed, and a lot remains the same as the news value has become a subject of debate.  Today the story isn’t whether the video is disturbing, but what kind of society does television produce that finds it acceptable to repeatedly consume such violence? Constant exposure to such brutality only coarsens us. It numbs our society and sanitizes violence.

Yes, we all know that in a highly saturated mass media world of live-streaming and social media the conventional wisdom is that violence sells. “Violent content costs less to export, it costs less to translate, and it has way fewer problems being picked up by markets in different cultures than ours. As a language, violence is easy to understand and requires little context in order to present a plot.” By the end of the Cold War, journalist Eric Pooley coined the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads,” in pursuit of ratings in the advent of 24-hour news television.

It is an event reminiscent of the time of the cold blooded killing of a man in his car during a traffic stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the US in the summer of 2016. Victim’s girlfriend who recorded the entire episode on her camera-phone streamed the aftermath live over Facebook and later posted the 10-minute video on YouTube. 

One may point to another instance in March 1991 – the infamous Rodney King tape which went viral for the first time in history! George Holliday, a local businessman in Los Angeles shot that tape on his handheld Sony camera filming the gruesome beating of the taxi driver Rodney King. It was the Rodney King Tape that sparked the 1992 LA riots a year later when the four officers involved were acquitted of all charges.

In the white noise on the Indian television what got lost was the ethical question about telecasting a killing live on a TV.

In 2015, this question was posed when two television journalists, 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker and 27-year-old photographer Adam Ward, were shot and killed during a live broadcast in Virginia.  When asked about watching such live telecasted image of killing, Randy Cohen, a former ethics columnist for the New York Times Magazine, said “it’s tricky, because there’s a thin line between viewing something to increase your understanding of your world and the human heart and wallowing in it—you know, when does education become pornography? I’m not suggesting that we should avert our glances from every disturbing fact of life. On the other hand, if you find that you regard human suffering as a form of entertainment, I think something really bad has happened to you.” 

Talking of killing and a photographic frame, one cannot but mention here Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. Originally made for Polish television in 1988, Kieslowski’s loose commentaries on the Ten Commandments, Dekalog series, out of which two were extended into feature films: A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love.

A bleak and depressing reality is not the backdrop but is foregrounded. Raised on the commandment, thou shalt not kill, the film tells a tale of killings. Not one, but three. A tale of a young adolescent Jacek who kills an innocent taxi driver for no reason. Subsequently he is tried and executed by the state for the crime. The film  narrative and cinematography sucks in the undiscerning viewer and puts it in the midst of unfolding drama. It is a complex indictment on all forms of killings – in this case: an unsuccessful suicide (killing by self), a gruesome murder (killing another human) and capital punishment (killing by State). Such was the powerful impact of the film that it led to the suspension of capital punishment in Poland. Unlike Kiesloswki’s films, Indian television now functions at the level of the real, mythic and historical.

Television is now emerging as a site similar to a concentration camp, where viewers are reduced to bare life as they are exposed to the sovereign’s power over life and death, French philosopher Michel Foucault conceptualised the power over life, in the notion of biopower – “the right to make live and let die”. The realities of bare life, where sovereign power does not extend to protect individuals, is pervasive at the site of the killing as much as on the television. To borrow from the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, there is a new space of contemporary politics in which individuals are no longer viewed as citizens but are now seen as TV-inmates, stripped of everything, including their right to live and feel.

Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.

A version of this article was published in The News on Sunday Magazine.