Spectacular Media

Tragedy, Performance, and Baudrillard

Let’s start with an event.

Summer, 2028: a passenger jet crashed into the prairies, leaving no survivors. What caused it wasn’t clear, but video footage had it careening out of the sky and landing on a large dairy farm in central Kansas. Some of the workers managed to escape, but the livestock were destroyed, and hundreds of people were without jobs.

Further footage from close up to the scene went viral for its bleak horror. Limbs scattered about, charred bodies young and old, burnt beyond recognition. Several people who took these videos vomited on camera. In every one of them, wailing cries could be heard.

Almost immediately, the White House released a statement describing their horror and sadness at the news. The press took the story up with a committed verve, interviewing anyone and everyone with even the remotest connection to the tragedy, all the while promising to get to the bottom of what caused this terrible event.

Coverage lasted twenty-four hours a day. The President released a daily statement updating everyone on the status of the investigation. This level of scrutiny inevitably bled over into the social sphere, where it became the standard dinner subject.

At the end of a week, the tone of everyone’s response became standardized: people expressed horror or sadness, and nothing else.

But as this settled in, a strange and disturbing voice emerged from the crowd. It was a comedian, who, on stage in Austin, Texas, saw an opportunity in the tragedy, and put it into his act as a joke.

This was what he said: “Apparently nobody knows what caused the plane to go down. But I do. They flew over Kansas. They took one look at that piece of shit state and decided they’d rather be dead.

“And you know they used to complain about being a flyover state? Well, I wouldn’t worry about that anymore. Nobody’s gonna be flying over Kansas from now on. We’ll fly around it, thank you very much.”

The audience grumbled, shuffled their feet. The comedian smiled, aware that the joke hadn’t worked, and moved on.

But if he expected that joke to float away into the aether, he was wrong. It seemed someone had filmed the performance and posted that joke online. That post drew a lot of negative reactions, which increased in both fury and frequency until it got the attention of somebody who decided to play it on the TV.

The newscaster who introduced the video said this beforehand: “Ladies and gentlemen, what you’re about to see will disturb you. I’ve been at this job twelve years, and I’ve never in my life seen such hatred, such vitriol, from a so-called comedian. I urge you to caution yourselves, to take your children out of the room, and to change the channel if you’re sensitive.”

The video played. After it was shown, a panel of experts convened to discuss the content and determine what its potential impact might be. Every one of them agreed that this was a sign of a degraded culture, and that there was a high risk of trauma, if someone were to be exposed to this.

The story blew up from there. Every website, every magazine, every social media app was filled with takes on the comedian’s performance. Dinner conversations shifted to be about the comedian, during which some members would gleefully go on wild, angry rants about how the comedian embodied all manner of vice, and how he should lose his job and, some suggested, his health.

The conversation ripped through society like a tidal wave. Everyone found themselves swept up in it, unable to ignore it. Some people said the comedian was a monstrosity, some people disagreed — still other rejected the framing of the conversation altogether. But no matter what they did, the Event, the joke, was the centre of everyone’s universe, establishing itself as the point from which all manner of being was relative.

Then, a few weeks later, Hurricane Marlowe landed in Florida. The death toll was in the thousands. But it would be one journalist’s take on living in hurricane-addled states that would create a new tidal wave, and a new reference point.

And just like that, the comedian was gone.

***

When we watch two actors fighting onscreen, we know it’s staged, choreographed. Bruce Willis does not actually throw Alan Rickman off an L.A. high-rise, any more than Kane Hodder actually punches a high school athlete’s head off in Manhattan. These are images, stories — they’re performed for us in such a way that they give the illusion of having stakes, when we know that they don’t.

But if this is true of the dramatic arts, there remains the question of whether this applies to media in general. For example, when the news media picks up on a particular controversy, or during an election cycle or a promotional tour for a movie, we might ask ourselves to what extent we’re dealing with images and performers, rather than factual representations of real life.

Promotional tours for movies provide a great example of this. While previously, actors and directors would go on late night shows or sit down with magazines to discuss their newest release, nowadays they’re expected to play all manner of childish games with one another, for our amusement. They play guessing games, trivia, even beer pong, all for the purpose of telling us, the audience, that they have a new movie out that you should see.

These events are most obviously performances. Whether or not the actors playing Pictionary actually got along with one another is certainly one question, but the idea that they enjoy playing these mindless games in front of entertainment reporters is quite another. Nonetheless, they give every impression of being happy, of laughing, of having fun, which connects us to them as performers, and makes us more invested in the success of their project.

This goes for controversies as well. When a comedian makes a joke that rubs everyone the wrong way, that event plays itself out through media. It becomes mediatized, meaning it quickly gets coded according to various stances or narratives being played out across the media, thereby robbing it of the depth and ambiguity that’s behind every instance of every spoken or written word. It shrinks, becomes something other than what it was.

In this way, the controversial event becomes a performance, whether that was the original intention or not. In fact, even if it began its life as a performance, the event quickly becomes a performance of another kind, often with a different intention behind it than was the idea to begin with.

But the most interesting part of a controversy isn’t how it’s stripped of meaning. The most interesting part is in how the reaction to a controversy is itself a kind of performance, one that is itself divorced of meaning, signifying nothing except sound and fury. This is how Baudrillard puts it in “The Powerlessness Of The Virtual”:

The power of the virtual is merely virtual. This is why it can intensify in such a mind-boggling way and, moving ever further from the so-called “real” world, itself lose hold of any reality principle. For these technical forces to extend their grip over the world, they would have to have a purpose — power must be power to some end — but they do not. All they can do is transcribe themselves indefinitely into their own networks, their own codes…[T]here can be no strategy of the virtual, since the only strategies now are themselves virtual ones.

Any and every reaction to a controversial event is just as virtual as its inciting incident. They contain nothing, these reactions. Reacting at all is just a way of living within a media landscape, where people become actors, images: the moral guardian, the dashing hero, the little guy with a strong sense of justice.

But these performances can only flail their arms at another, previous virtual event: a non-thing attacking a non-thing, resulting in nothing at all. Ghosts fighting ghosts fighting ghosts.

In a totally mediatized environment, every one of us becomes Bruce Willis throwing Alan Rickman off the roof at Nakatomi. We play the part we’re expected to, perform feats that have no actual stakes attached to them, but do so in such a way that it feels like there might be stakes after all.

And then, just like a real actor, one job leads to another, one character to another. We pick up the next role, hit our marks, say our lines, and move on — except that while real actors understand they’re playing a part, we’ve gotten so lost in character we’ve forgotten we were ever anything else.

***

It happened over dinner. My brother told me what he thought of the comedian. He just said it out loud, right there, in front of everyone. He said words I never thought I’d hear from a human person’s mouth.

I didn’t wait for him to be through before I tore into him. I told him everything that was wrong with what he’d said and everything that was wrong with him for saying it. I yelled and screamed at him, I made broad, dramatic gestures. I kept yelling until all I had left were insults and then I ran through all of those.

He didn’t get defensive. He shut down. He stared between his legs and didn’t say anything. Nobody else said anything either. Even when I stormed off, nobody tried to stop me or say anything back to me.

I laid down in my room. I folded my arms over my chest. I smiled and I felt warm.

I know what I did was right. Or, I feel that it was. But I need to know — was it? Did I say everything I was supposed to say? Did I leave anything out?

I know you’re out there, whoever you are. I can feel you watching me. I felt you especially when I first heard about the comedian, because I got this sense that I knew exactly how to understand what had happened. I knew the right words, the right way to frame it, everything. It wasn’t like a voice, but more like a blanket that settled over me.

When my brother said those things, I felt like he was trying to hurt you. That made me so mad, that he’d do something like that. I hated him for trying to hurt you, for wanting to attack you. He shouldn’t have done that. I had to stand up for you.

But now that I have, I need to know — did I do it right? Did I leave anything out?

I don’t want you to abandon me. You make me feel warm. Without you, I’m nothing. I need to know that you love me. Without you loving me, I think I’ll just die.

Did I do it right?

Are you listening?

(Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash)