Here's a thing I wanted to talk about for quite a long time. During a certain time, I watched all these so called documentaries the Internet provides on serial killers, because I was working on a writing project (not in English, I assure you!) - So, after having been spoon-fed with Ed Kemper, Richard Kuklinski, Aileen Wuornos et al., I stumbled on the most extraordinary "buzz" you could imagine : "Three Guys, One Hammer" !
[- Kid, I didn't watch it!] -
And here are the rough lines of the story: In fact, it's about two 19-year-old guys - aka the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, because they lived and commited their extremly brutish murders in this Ukrainian city - who filmed an episode of their killing spree and uploaded it to the Internet, where it began its world wide career as a snuff movie. I repeat: I didn't watch it, I can't watch a man being slaughtered "live", having his head smashed with a hammer, his eye teared out with a screwdriver while still alive. But the kid above did. Look at him!
That's the whole story: reporting something you just saw that is so horrible you don't want others to watch it, reporting an event so barbaric that (human) words can no longer describe it. Only the image and the sound can, but each one of these "3 Guys 1 Hammer" reviewers, mostly young boys and girls, tell their viewers not to watch it, with a few exceptions of course, some even provide a link to the snuff movie, telling you better not to click on it!
Well, I didn't watch it but I heard some sound excerpts on the numerous "reaction-videos" I went through. The one above seems to have been made immediately after the "amok-show", many others are recorded while the "show" is going on. So I heard these assassins laughing, as if this was a dirty joke, and the dying man sighing... Some of the watching kids also laughed, especially two very young and very stoned chicks, many others acted as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing, and commented on the Maniacs' slaughtering.
There is a thought I have about all this: It's not only the very young kids watching this sort of extreme horror, not only the "buzz" made by the "reaction-videos", in majority by a (very) young public. It's also about this "double binding": One one hand you tell your audience (and these vids have many viewers) not to watch the snuff, on the other you stimulate it to transgress this "order". And it's also about the Indescribable, the Unspeakable.
German sociologist Adorno thought that poetry was no longer possible after Auschwitz. I don't think he is completely right, because of Paul Celan ("Todesfuge") and Primo Levi ("Si questo è un uomo", 1947). But an experience like this must leave a human being "speechless": There are no words strong enough to carry the extreme horror.
In this case, it is extreme voyeurism. Adult persons can resist to a tentation like that, we are disgusted in advance. Young kids can't. And their disgust afterwards - most of them are really traumatized - is far more dramatic than ours could ever be. But that's not a thought, that's a real problem.