My dear friend Bill the Lizard, he who is a fellow Star Wars aficionado and occasional conversation partner on The Chauncey DeVega Show, called me yesterday.
He explained that "I had a dream that you were shot by the police like Walter Scott in that horrible video".
Dreams do often portend the future. As is evident by my non-poltergeist act of answering the telephone, it would seem that I am okay.
Bill the Lizard also sent me a picture of "Herbert the Pervert" to confirm my safety. Friends of many years develop their own language with which to communicate with one another. I will leave the origins of our Herbert the Pervert inside joke suitably unstated.
He and I both agreed that viewing killed by cop videos such as those featuring Walter Scott, Eric Harris, and Eric Garner have a negative impact on one's soul and psyche.
But, this conclusion does not explain why the video-recorded images of black Americans being shot, killed, and otherwise abused by the police are captivating to (what would seem to be) so many in the global viewing public.
The corporate news media shows those images of horrific and spectacular violence against the black body because they garner ratings. Ratings equal cash.
But again, why would someone who is not paid or otherwise materially compensated view such a thing?
Writing at Medium, Jade Davis offers the following insight:
Black men being the first to die in horror movies, and being lined up for execution on death row is the norm — but that is for fun, or behind closed doors. These killings of regular black men, however — in public, dying on camera and reproduced on the Internet — speaks to the same kind of forbidden desire that Girls Gone Wild tapped into. The ability to easily capture and distribute video of overly horny co-eds out to have a good time fed the desires of overly horny people who wanted to experience the thrill of barely legal girls submitting to the lens.
Now, instead of barely legal porn, these actual snuff films, not like those staged versions from the 1970s, are the forbidden jouissance of the moment. The black man’s death is repeated, reproduced, shared, and celebrated in a macabre way specific to the snuff genre. These films and activities have always existed, but in the past people didn’t consume them so publicly, or so proudly outside of public executions and lynchings.
She continues:
It might seem that the difference between these snuff films and Girls Gone Wild is that people paid cash to watch the women perform for them. But that is merely a sign of the times. The Internet eventually won when the audience decided to pay with clicks instead of cash: The places that brought Girls Gone Wild to an end still have age disclaimers for mature content, and can be blocked by enabling parental controls.
But, when the most explicit imagery of the violence enacted against black bodies can be at the top of The New York Times and the Daily Mail, it says that these are the images that sell in a world where clicks equal cash, and there’s no warning necessary.
This is content everyone should see! Don’t miss this amazing new footage of a black man dying. Warning, graphic content, but the screen capture really sells the tale. The distribution channel isn’t the same as those videos of gyrating youngsters, but it is distributed and monetized just the same.
It is not for me to say, but I believe that the late great Stuart Hall would likely be in agreement with Davis's analysis. On matters of race, representation, and semiotics I can think of no higher complement to give.
Are the video-recorded killings of black men by police and their allies the next iteration of snuff films?
A type of fantasy wish fulfillment for some of the most deranged and racist in the audience (example: those white people who donated money to Darren Wilson's "defense" fund) while also simultaneously serving as a non-therapeutic exterior projection of the fears and worries that black Americans carry within themselves about police violence and America's history of committing extra-judicial murder against them?
In a society where the lie of "reality television" is believed to be real by the mass public, the carceral society (with all of its anti-black violence) is popularized by shows such as Cops, The First 48, and Lockup, and the Culture of Cruelty extends along the colorline, the killings of unarmed black people by America's police may simply be the dystopian near future vision offered by the 1980's classic movie The Running Man made real.
Technology is a way for white supremacist racial ideologies to be circulated.
Lynching photographs were one of America's most popular forms of mass culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now, in the 21st and late 20th centuries, digital media circulates images of violence against the black body by America's police to a global super public.
Are you not entertained?