A screen in Tokyo shows reports about Japanese hostage Kenji Goto, January 28, 2015. Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty
Even though every caution label and trigger warning screamed at me not to, and even though I knew what would happen to my head and my stomach if I did, I watched the video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive by ISIS militants. (The video is not linked there, by the way.)
In another iteration of my existence, I’d like to join the well-intentioned ranks of Twitter users who advocate for ignoring the ISIS videos, but I haven’t. I’d like to say it’s not my fault, that a sickness inside me made me watch. That as a writer and editor, knowing about violence and death is, you could say, part of my job. It’s my duty to find and face the details.
Except my beat is not international terrorism. And it wasn’t until I’d seen the screenshots—and the warnings about how graphic the video was—that I started to think about it, what it might look like. About what this pilot’s life had been like. What his death had been like.
Brianna Snyder
Brianna Snyder is an editor and writer for the Times Union in Albany, New York. She’s also an editor for the news site Kicker. Follow her on Twitter @briannaLsnyder.
Whether or not a person should have access to this kind of footage is well-trodden territory for many arguments related to freedom of speech. Media want clicks and shocking, provocative content gets clicks. Protectors of hearts and heads think such content is harmful and shouldn’t be available. Proponents of The Truth say if you’re censoring, you’re not telling the whole story. Last week, Piers Morgan wrote in the Daily Mail that everybody should see the videos, saying that for him, watching them “allows me to feel such uncontrollable rage that no amount of reasonable argument will ever temper it.” The Internet is the perfect place for all these positions, because all of them can exist in one huge, confusing space. You have access to anything you want, but you get to decide what to look at, and here’s where all of it is, so stick to your position. Or don’t.
Of course, it’s possible to know of what’s going on without exposing yourself to explicit violence. Traditional news outlets like the New York Times offer a sanitized, mostly safe description using vaguery and euphemism. But that’s a tease, too. And just how much teasing of a bad thing can you do before your audience wants all of the bad thing and more? Images can be stark and terrifying, but they also naturally provide a kind of curiosity gap, especially when video is available. And I’m deeply, disturbingly stuck in that curiosity gap.
It happened a little while ago: I’d never even heard of BestGore.com until that story about the Cannibal Cop. You remember that story from last year? The guy had a fetish for cooking and eating women, and he sought out realizations of that fantasy online, reportedly at sites like BestGore.com. Which made me go, “Oh, what’s at BestGore.com?”
Which is not really the question I was asking. The question was: What does it look like when a woman is cooked and eaten? And then the question becomes: What does it feel like to be cooked? And if you knew, after you were dead, that you had been eaten, what kind of humiliation and devastation would you feel?
Those are the questions I assume I’m looking for answers to when I dig my way through search results into the disgusting depths of BestGore and LiveLeak to watch James Foley’s decapitation and Muath al-Kaseasbeh’s immolation. I turn my laptop away from my husband, mute the volume, and let the horror make my head go dizzy and my stomach turn upside-down. Sometimes he catches me.
Last night he said, “What is wrong with your face? Why do you look like that?”
I guess that’s what I look like when I watch a man beaten brutally with a tire iron, then moved on to his side to be stabbed dozens of times around his spinal cord, which will not immediately kill him (the snarky commentary explains in the video description) but will leave him conscious for more torture before he eventually succumbs to his bludgeoning.
Why do I do this to myself?
Here’s the thing. I am not a fan of horror movies. I hate violence on TV. I refuse to watch “Game of Thrones” because of what people tell me is unprecedented levels of brutality. For a while, I wondered why a “Game of Thrones” decapitation makes me turn my head, but then I dedicate minutes to searching and finding a video of Nick Berg having his head sawed off.
I am not alone.
Studies have explored these inclinations. Some suggest that we want to be prepared for the worst, so the implausibility of horror movies moves us to consider abstract environments from which we might someday be able to escape, if we’re prepared.
Thing is, when it is fiction it is escapism. Kenji Goto’s decapitation is not. It is the very opposite of escapism. It’s hyper-reality and it is devastating.
Here’s what I think when I choose to face this hyper-reality from the comfort of my home: How are Foley and Goto and Daniel Pearl so calm before they’re gored? Are they on drugs? Could their murderers be humane enough to sedate them before cutting into their necks? Or are they so psychologically battered from captivity that they’re paralyzed?
I guess I’m just so scared of death that I’ve become obsessed with looking at it and trying to understand it. How much it will hurt. How sad and scared and furious I’ll be when I die. I’ve watched maybe a hundred of the worst kinds of deaths and I still can’t find peace with the knowledge that I will die—and maybe horribly. Car crash. Plane crash. Home invasion. Homefire. Cancer. Mass shooting. And maybe I shouldn’t be at peace with that. These people certainly didn’t get to be.
I like to think I’m not like the commenters on BestGore—who call murdered women “bitches who deserved it” and LOL at “incompetent” Mexican drug lords who have to switch knives partway through a decapitation because theirs aren’t sharp enough to cut through the neck tendons of their victims. But I am like them. I am clicking. I am driving traffic. I am letting the creators of these videos know their headlines are SEO-engineered effectively. I’m part of the problem. Am I “informed”? Am I, like Piers Morgan, enraged beyond reasonable argument? Am I going to enlist in the military?
I think not. I’m just scared.
There’s a part in the Muath al-Kaseasbeh video, just before the fire reaches the cage, when al-Kaseasbeh puts his hands together in what I assume was prayer. If it was prayer, did it help him through the agony and the terror of his death? I hope it helped. And for the people who loved him who also watched the video—and God I hope they didn’t—I hope it brought them some small comfort.
I know I am contributing to the humiliation and dehumanization of the victims whose deaths are caught on video. Knowing that millions of people— including your family and your friends and your enemies—will watch what should be your private, natural death must be an added psychological torment. And I can’t apologize enough to them for contributing to it. My guilt doesn’t absolve me of my voyeurism. It only makes me more a part of these victims’ abuse and pain. I’m doing what the bad guys want us all to do, which is: watch.
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