War Porn: A New Genre of the Dead

The spectacle of the tyrant, the most despised man on earth--as Americans like to think of their country--is over. The tyrant is dead, long live the tyrant. America the tyrant killer, the castrater of dictators, the lyncher of Babylon, regains its renown for frontier justice in a shoddy, sometimes despicable, affair that the politicians call justice, though a few call it what it is: a piece of theater whose genre has increasingly become known as Iraqi snuff films. ...

Like many an egotist, I imagine, who blogs, I watch my sitemeter readings religiously. Perhaps the best interpretation of this is that I--with my background in marketing and business writing--want to perform a minute by minute audience analysis so I can gauge the reading habits, the likes and dislikes of those poor souls who happen upon these pitiful postings.

Early on in this blog's evolution, I picked up on articles that piqued my fancy and either provided a blurb about the piece or simply quoted it and provided a link. One of those pieces was on an article about Iraqi war porn, which was first brought to my attention by Helena Cobban. I wrote some chatter about it and provided a link to the pages where these XXXXXXXX porn pictures were (once) housed.

(Also see Occupation, Sex, Murder, and Prositution, and Trophy Video.)

If I were to rate the most entered page on my blog--according to my maniacal site meter reading habit--it would have to be this posting about Iraqi porn. I know this because sitemeter provides a listing on the search terms that the visitor used on the search engine that pointed them to my blog posting. I can only imagine their consternation when they see that the posting contains some tripe about how immoral this type of porn is.

I first became aware from a Law and Order: CI show that there's a subculture that's grown up around this type of porn. The issue is rather tangential to the storyline of the show, but it's interesting nonetheless that the phenomenon has reached a level where it can form part of the action of the characters in the plot.

The genre of War Porn itself became known in the wake of the Abu Ghraib torture revelations. The couple involved in that torture were filming their acts and hording them, along with their own personal BDSM porn.

The fascination of BDSM porn is best exemplified by the David Cronenberg's film, Videodrome. There the main character (played by James Woods) is a small-time cable owner trying to find content that will increase his audience share. The famous scenes of moderate masochism with Blondie singer Deborah Harry is only a prelude to more and more violent forms of sadomasochism.

In one scene, the James Woods character is watching the torture of naked women and says something along the lines of, "I can't take my eyes off of it. There are no production costs. It's genius."

The moral of the story is that the signal carrying the can't-take-your-eyes-off-it video causes cancerous tumors in the viewer. The whole thing turns out to be the effort by a zealous Christian-style group who wants to kill off anyone who doesn't have the moral sensibility to react in revulsion at the pictures and instead becomes hooked on it like heroin.

I doubt that our own theocrats are smart enough to carry off anything similar to the one shown in Videodrome, especially given their anti-scientific prejudices. Yet, the underlying premise--that a normal, god-loving individual will find such acts shameful and therefore will turn in revulsion--that our god-given shame shields us from such temptations, is one that many Xtian believers assume, though they rarely state it.

(See my postings on Martha Nussbaum's work [here, here, and here]. She has documented this type of argument that is marshaled by those on the right to defend a conservative legal agenda.)

Yet, the film's message makes a powerful statement about the attraction of violence to a sensory-hungry public whose jaded palates crave more and more stimulating images that go farther and farther into depicting the dehumanization of other human beings.

Having said this, let me make a confession. I wanted to see the execution of Hussein on television. I think that it should've been beamed into every household in America and the world. If the man was a monster, and American justice was triumphing in having this execution go forward, then there should have been no qualms about televising it.

Perhaps this is the lesson then: Americans are so dishonest that we can't or won't face the products of our own violence in Iraq. Instead, we want to cover it up, hide it away, make like it didn't happen. But this type of repression is how neuroses form, not to mention psychoses.

Or is the repression itself an indication of the mass psychosis that realizes itself in a delusory world where the horrible deaths of men, women, and children become fantasy attractions for a libidinous tyranny that refuses to acknowledge its own depravity?

And maybe Videodrome is more realistic and prophetic than I imagine.

PS Sorry to all you folks on bloglines who'll see this posting twice; but anyway: I just remembered something I heard on a show dealing with Richard Ramirez, the so-called Night Stalker, who terrorized LA during the mid-19080s. According to one source interviewed for the expose, as a young teen Ramirez used to visit a former ViteNam vet with whom he did drugs. The Vet also showed Ramirez pictures that the Vet had taken of his rape, torture and mutilation of Vietnamese women.

With the prevalence of war porn on the web, it makes you wonder how many young Ramirez's are being formed for future night stalkings and that unique brand of American terrorist, aka serial killer.