Virtual Murder
The great sea change, believed JG Ballard, was the assassination of President Kennedy. The author whose theory was expanded in his 1970 collection of stories, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, saw the shocking events of November 22 1963 as the moment when the media’s sensationalistic appetite for a dramatic death and the dehumanising effects of repeated exposure to such horrors on the consumer gave birth to the age we have lived in ever since. Of course, JFK’s fatal drive down Deely Plaza wasn’t transmitted live on television. When the story broke on CBS, news anchor Walter Cronkite wasn’t even seen onscreen for the first half-hour of the newsflash, as the TV cameras needed to warm-up before they could work. But the nation did witness the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald a few days later, thanks to Jack Ruby’s decision to shoot when the cameras were very much warmed-up and beaming live images into America’s living rooms.
Television had become the premier medium in the US over the ten years prior to the first Kennedy assassination, shaping the behavioural habits of the pliable viewers with phenomenal rapidity. Advertising was a crucial part of the package, not just the commercials, but the fact that virtually all programmes were sponsored, so that even the most celebrated elements of early American television – the live plays by leading playwrights and anthology series such as ‘The Twilight Zone’ – were presented as momentary diversions from the medium’s message. Along with the spread of enormous billboards coast-to-coast and the growth of the Pop Art movement that was both inspired by it and in turn inspired it, the American advertising industry created a climate in which everything and everyone seemed to be either for sale or selling something to an avid audience – and television was its most powerful weapon.
An event as brutally real as JFK’s assassination in an age that was already making the world increasingly unreal for the millions addicted to the TV mantra soon saw that reality absorbed into the same landscape across which the Lone Ranger rode Silver, Lassie ran for help and Speedy guzzled Alka-Seltzer. When the Vietnam War began to be enacted on a nightly basis, the initial shock of its graphic horror faded and relentless repetition turned what many regard as the first television war into something approaching a soap opera or serial. ‘Peyton Place’ followed by the latest pictures from Saigon; and in between, a word from our sponsor. Spot the difference.
Woody Allen brilliantly parodied the nature of US TV’s ability to reduce human tragedy to the same level as scripted drama or a sporting event in the opening to his 1971 movie, ‘Bananas’. The imminent assassination of the President of a Latin American country is presented by actual American TV sports broadcasters Don Dunphy and Howard Cosell, with the gruesome spectacle packaged to the public no differently from the Superbowl Final or the World Series. It’s a satirical take on the same point JG Ballard was making in literature and reflects the ongoing blur between fact and fiction television viewers were receiving at the time as well as anticipating a nightmarish future in which entire generations would perceive their surroundings and the people populating them as a TV show.
The democratising impact of personal technology in the 40+ years since ‘Bananas’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ were respectively released and published, taking the power to weave make-believe from the hands of the broadcasters and giving it to the public, has had a profound effect on the ability to distinguish fact from fiction. When a member of the public can do what was once the sole province of television, whether recording an air-crash or staging a street punch-up, all is as unreal as it is real. Everything ends up looking like a movie and everyone can play the leading man.
The appalling murder yesterday of two regional news reporters live on air by a disgruntled ex-colleague who recorded the crime on his own camera and then uploaded it to social media sites was something with a hideous inevitability about it. Alison Parker was the Virginia equivalent of the woman who co-hosts your local BBC or ITV teatime magazine programme and Alan Ward was her cameraman. Assassins don’t even bother aiming at Presidents anymore; everyone is the President now – reality celebs, talent show contestants, and regional TV journalists known to a few thousand at the most. The sickening footage shot by the murderer as an oblivious Alison Parker conducts an interview on some banal, typically parochial topic, particularly when his hand aiming the gun at her comes into shot, is like a ghastly parody of ‘CSI’, a cheap and amateurish imitation of a slick, big-budget cop series. The fact that two real people lost their lives because those bullets weren’t blanks and blood poured from their wounds rather than a plastic bag hidden under their clothing didn’t matter to the man who pressed the trigger. He was the star in his own show and couldn’t wait to share it with the world before dying a rock ‘n’ roll death by turning on the gun on himself.
The Atrocity Exhibition can currently be seen on a screen near you.
Petunia Winegum
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August 27, 2015 at 10:02 am -
Quite a lot to say about this. One thing concerns the gun lobby. When i started to visit the ‘States a few years ago to see my friend Dr. Pesta, a number of things about the USA became apparent to me very quickly. One of these was how entrenched and implacable certain “lobbies” were. Leaving aside the practical problems of trying to control guns and gun crime in a society which is in some ways already awash with guns, it seemed to me that there is no and never will be any prospect of changing the minds of a significant section, maybe a minority, of American Society. It is a simply a statement of fanatical belief for some people that they have the right to bear arms, and more, that guns should be freely available. Anyone who might suggest that it could, perhaps, have some unfortunate consequences to have guns so freely available is regarded as an agent of totalitarian control.
This is particularly ironic given the predilection for law suits in the US. Hence my friend relayed the anecdote of Walmart refusing to stock aspirin, in case some one took an overdose and sued them, but freely selling automatic weapons.
Another aspect of US Society which I don’t really get on with is a fundamental sense of isolation. maybe it’s the distances people have to travel in the non urban areas, maybe it’s the way the houses are built in the areas I visit, but my instincts always scream something about this. To take a silly example, there is no common equivalent to the local pub – although it might rightly be argued that this culture is dying out in the UK now. Another another level, there seems no sense of the social cohesion I find in my local village – I wrote the other day about just having a conversation about this and that in the local butcher. You don’t get that so much in the ubiquitous “Mall”. Somehow, whenever I visit America I come away completely understanding how a combination of these factors, coupled with the unhealthy aspects of the internet, can lead to weird kids festering away in their bedrooms, brooding on their grudges, until they erupt into the local school with an automatic weapon, wreaking carnage.
And of course, there is the moral aspect of reporting this. I did in fact see the video being recorded by the unfortunate duo. It was all over the social media like a rash. It was interesting that as soon as news came in of the “incident”, Radio 5 Live were playing the recording in full, including shots. later that was curtailed. I did not see, nor would I make any effort to see, the recording apparently made by the attacker himself. In any event, whether looking at the original broadcast is being interested in the news or gawping at tragedy for the sake of entertainment is perhaps a moot point. I am not sure my hands are clean on that one.
A sad day, and yet is it a shocking one when you stop to think about it?-
August 27, 2015 at 10:33 am -
“It is a simply a statement of fanatical belief for some people that they have the right to bear arms…”
Well, they do still teach the Constitution in schools, don’t they?
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August 27, 2015 at 10:47 am -
Badly put by me! That’s me told!
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August 27, 2015 at 11:09 am -
August 27, 2015 at 12:53 pm -
By far the most likely killer of the average person is either themselves, a loved one or the state. Two of those are largely unavoidable. The 2nd Amendment is an attempt to guard against the 3rd and versus a good number of disarmed European and Asian states the US are doing well on that score
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August 27, 2015 at 4:53 pm -
Very badly composed, US citizens obviously do have the right to bear arms, as Julia notes it is written into their constitution.
What is particularly egregious is your use of “fanatical”, there is nothing fanatical about choosing to be armed, it is a right. Given the climate of agitation between races that Obama and Holder have promoted, and the huge number of felons being released from their jails it would be foolish to ignore the threat that exists.
I believe Petunia has missed the gunman’s main aim, he may have desired his five minutes of video fame but the real reason for this atrocity was to start a race war. It is to the credit of many responsible gun owners that his perverted aim has been ignored. Your attempt to brand them fanatics is bizarre and ignorant .
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August 27, 2015 at 2:37 pm -
“Walmart refusing to stock aspirin, in case some one took an overdose and sued them, but freely selling automatic weapons.” Not quite! “Semi-automatic” weapons are indeed sold by Walmart, hard though that may be for us to imagine, “I’m just popping down to Asda darling, do you need anything while I’m there?” “Err…just some washing up liquid, oh and some more 9mm+p Hollow-Points for my Glock 19”! But fully automatic weapons are actually very tightly controlled, lots of forms/paperwork, background checks, references, fees, hoops to jump through etc. They are very expensive, limited in availability and very heavily taxed. (No surprise!) While not illegal, this puts them beyond the reach of the average U.S. citizen, and no, you cannot buy them at a Walmart! A case of “Yes we have no machine guns!”
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August 27, 2015 at 10:36 am -
“…by a disgruntled ex-colleague…”
No, by a self-aggrandising narcissist with poor impulse control and an inflated sense of his own worth who’d had his feelings of ‘racism’ validated by that same industry – the US media – that he ended up working for and then destroying live on camera. Ironic, really.
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August 27, 2015 at 12:14 pm -
August 27, 2015 at 1:33 pm -
I can’t help but thinking, given the current climate in the USA, that had the gunman been white and his victims black, that the media would now be constantly screaming “RACIST MURDER” and vicious “HATE CRIME” etc. The “disgruntled ex co-worker” aspect would have been relegated to inside page 4 paragraph 7 of the article. By now stores would be being looted, neighbourhoods would be in flames and mob violence/rioting would be out of all control. However, the “Black Lives Matter” mob, plus the Revs. Sharpton, Jackson et al. can stand down, it’s ok, its just a couple of dead YTs, nothing to see here. White lives, it seems, don’t matter and black people, so they say, are incapable of being racist! RIP.
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August 27, 2015 at 5:21 pm -
This what happens when you give losers the cloak of victimhood.
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August 27, 2015 at 11:03 am -
I’m not at all sure that it’s the place of British citizens to be lecturing Americans on their approach to gun laws. We could perhaps contribute to their debate (if asked) by outlining the British approach to shotgun and firearm regulations, with a measured assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of that approach. Whether there is anything for America to learn from that is for Americans to decide.
I do note the American constitutional right to bear arms. Maybe there is a question to be raised about why that right was enshrined in the constitution, and whether the circumstances prevailing at the time of it’s inclusion still prevail, or whether they are now somewhat different.
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August 27, 2015 at 11:11 am -
“Whether there is anything for America to learn from that is for Americans to decide.”
I can’t see them wanting to follow our example, somehow.
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August 27, 2015 at 11:53 am -
Have you compared the statistics for fatalities due to police shooting on both sides of the Pond?
Even accounting for the difference in population, US police kill something like 40 times more than in the UK.
And here’s something for all firearm related deaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rateThey may not want to follow the example of the UK, but there is definitely something to learn.
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August 27, 2015 at 1:30 pm -
Keep in mind that includes many thousands of suicides. The most relevant figure is the overall murder rate, which is 4.7 times that of the UK and comparable countries. Oddly, Switzerland is by far the lowest and every male adult has a gun.
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August 27, 2015 at 1:47 pm -
I returned yesterday from Switzerland. The only guns I saw were carried by (the many) police at London City Airport.
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August 27, 2015 at 5:23 pm -
After their national service period, all Swiss were sent home with their weapon – you may not see the guns on the streets, but they’re lurking in the lofts of all those charming, chocolate-box chalets everywhere. But your average Swiss is smart enough not to use it in the way some non-average Americans are wont to do on occasions.
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August 27, 2015 at 12:06 pm -
The reason why the right to bear arms was written into the constitution, and remains in it, was to protect the US citizenry against the government, not against each other. The distrust of any government after colonisation remained fresh and the ‘rebels’ were determined that any future elected US Government would always have to temper its approaches due to the knowledge that its citizenry had the means to resist anything too Draconian or undemocratic, with fire-power if necessary.
I’m sure all those gun-toting rednecks in the NRA retain their personal arsenals and armouries purely for that sound constitutional reason.-
August 27, 2015 at 5:00 pm -
Are you really sure about that? You may be partially correct.
Gun crime is predominently black-on-black, (same as the UK) are they red-necks do they belong to the NRA? Or are you ignorant and just spouting the BBC line?
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August 27, 2015 at 11:40 am -
August 27, 2015 at 11:54 am -
I’m not sure that showing the reality now, certainly in the UK, would be a be a bad thing
We have a generation that has been protected and mollycoddled like none before. The reality of war is beyond most people’s knowledge. Our broadcasting stations sanitise everything. What we see on TV is edited to suit the story and appease those who would be soft minded on our behalf
Occasional exposure to the realities of mankind’s inhumanity to its fellows might be both a sobering and thought provoking process
My kids have little grasp of such things. Periodic exposure to some of the type of material you can find every day on the likes of Liveleak might make a lot of people more grateful for what they have here and more appreciative of what atrocities are really done to others
Not to say also being a little more afraid of letting things slip because they couldn’t be arsed to do anything to counter the evil amongst us
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August 27, 2015 at 12:12 pm -
Television news reporting was certainly more graphic in the 60s and 70s. I remember seeing an archive clip with the old ITN reporter Michael Nicholson covering the Biafran War, when a suspect was shot dead in front of him and the viewers by soldiers clearly wanting to make an impression on camera. Even with a ‘And we’d like to warn some viewers…’ warning, it’s hard to imagine that being screened today. I agree that the brutal reality of any such atrocity should be seen in the way that the liberation of the Nazi death camps were shown in movie newsreels at the end of the war. I suppose what happened on US TV in the 60s, particularly with Vietnam, was a desensitising process due to excessive coverage of such sights. I guess there has to be a balance.
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August 27, 2015 at 12:21 pm -
And when you look at the current batch of ISIS killings, these are being done purely for media consumption – if they wanted to kill a prisoner, they could just do it quietly but they stage spectaculars, like beheadings, drownings, tossing off buildings etc, solely for the PR benefit they perceive will flow from their supporters and the horror it will generate amongst their opponents. And now that the authorities can no longer control the medium of broadcast, there is no reason to imagine that such inhumane stunts will cease any time soon.
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August 27, 2015 at 3:07 pm -
Interesting that we are debating whether death should be shown to be a reality – and yet in our ‘must protect the children from sex’ obsessed society, one can’t help but notice that virtually every American series shown on TV recently includes the now obligatory ‘in depth soft porn’ sex scene, full of heaving buttocks and gasping women.
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August 27, 2015 at 3:34 pm -
I noticed that in the otherwise excellent series, ‘Boss’, which was essentially a political drama, yet sex scenes that were called explicit when they appeared in ‘Last Tango in Paris’ were a weekly segment. I’m far from being a prude, but I couldn’t see the need for them most of the time.
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August 27, 2015 at 5:25 pm -
Maybe it was sponsored by Lurpak.
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August 27, 2015 at 5:41 pm -
Hah! Spread a little happiness…
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August 27, 2015 at 5:58 pm -
“I can’t believe it’s not buttered” (attributed to Marlon Brando).
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August 27, 2015 at 6:55 pm -
It is remarkable that the BBC haven’t mentioned the massacres in the Damascus suburbs over the past week or so at all. Not a word. It seems Assad can drop as many bombs as he likes on the Syrians.
Perhaps the photos were too horrible for the BBC staff to face. It is easier to report an interview with Assad than to report his actions.
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August 27, 2015 at 12:16 pm -
It could be argued that the moment when the blurring of broadcast fantasy and reality first started was when Orson Welles broadcast War of The Worlds back in 1938, causing considerable distress and even panic amongst suggestible US radio listeners that Martians had indeed landed and were creating mayhem.
We have now moved to the point where everyone is a potential ‘producer/director’ with the technical capability to launch any content into the broadcast arena without any thought for its impact, or sometimes with only the thought of its impact.
However, the latest tragic killing of the two TV staff was still only brought about by a lone nutter, and nutters are always around, everywhere, even in countries with strict gun-laws – perhaps the real story is how few of them actually carry out such horrors, rather than how many. -
August 27, 2015 at 12:35 pm -
America is indeed a foreign country.
The fact that they speak a similar language to ours does not imply that we have a shared culture.
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August 27, 2015 at 6:58 pm -
When the USA was founded, it was still common for gentlemen on both sides of the Atlantic to carry weapons. It is Britain that has changed.
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August 27, 2015 at 3:05 pm -
It seems in all of these cases the gunman is known to have mental health problems so perhaps that needs to be looked at. Ironically the cities with the strictest gun laws like Chicago have the highest rate of gun murders, mostly black on black. If Obama really wanted to do something he had total control for his first two years to do it. Given the way our freedoms are constantly being eroded perhaps the State should be a bit frightened of its citizens !
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August 27, 2015 at 5:03 pm -
At last a sensible comment.
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August 27, 2015 at 3:26 pm -
This shooting has a slim but real chance of being America’s Hungerford or Dunblane. A handy pretext for disarming the populace. If that ever happens there will be an explosion of murders of Whites.
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August 27, 2015 at 4:07 pm -
We have a culture vastly different to the USA or other states where personal weapons are concerned.
We have very tight gun controls, even over permitted guns. Further to Ho Hum’s comments, we no longer have a population of conscripts familiar with weapons or associated violence; it’s off to A&E for a cut thumb, & who could even gut a fish, let alone something furry or feathery? So although we may be desensitised by the casual showing of real or fictional bloodletting, there’s little opportunity, but also little apparent demand to copycat.
I was a little shocked at the visibility of firearms on my first, early ’70’s stay in the US, & even more shocked to be apprehended by a shotgun wielding officer in a car one evening. It seemed ‘…people don’t walk…’, so four young men walking from hotel to the local stores to buy some beer had to be questioned at gunpoint.
I later became familiar with the gun culture in RSA- we provided gun safes at the works entrance as we didn’t allow unauthorised weapons on site & leaving them in parked cars outside was risky. For many, just a part of life, including the opportunity for the nutters to shoot holes in speed limit signs leaving town.
If you haven’t spent time in the culture it’s difficult to understand, and I don’t think minds are going to be changed easily. The reality is that in these cultures there are sometimes more guns than people. We haven’t been in that position with modern weapons, ever, especially with handguns. Gun controls for the innocent have been tightened without dissent here. Wouldn’t happen elsewhere.-
August 27, 2015 at 5:33 pm -
As you observe, gun controls were successfully applied to the innocents in the UK but the villains can still get them whenever they want.
In my own nearest city, ‘fleet guns’ are available to rent for an ‘occasion’, complete with ammunition – if ever Plod manage to get their hands on one, it’s invariably been used on many different occasions by many different crooks. That way, the crooks are very rarely caught red-handed with them and Plod apparently have no idea where to look for the ‘rental warehouses’. Everybody’s happy – well, apart from the innocent target-shooters and the victims of the rent-a-shoot gear – and the government reckons it’s taken all the guns off the streets.
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August 27, 2015 at 7:25 pm -
I certainly had to surrender my legally owned target pistols. Thank you Tony Blair. My lifelong hobby discipline was snatched away because of a kneejerk reaction to the Dunblane shooting. The police were at fault in so many ways. It’s worth reading the history.
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