Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

SPECTACLE AS FAILURE (or Failure as Spectacle)

 

I wonder how good your memory is for silly news items.

There are three incredibly silly news items which, out of the mass of trivia that passes as the evening “news”, have stuck in my mind. All are rather old; but all (I think) were broadcast within the last twenty years.

 

First Item: With invited television cameras watching him, an hubristic chap said he was going to row, single-handedly, across the Tasman Sea. He pushed his boat into the water of one of Auckland’s wild west coast beaches, and began rowing. But before he set out on this epic journey, he felt obliged to make an inspirational statement for his audience. So he announced that his adventure would be a triumph of the human spirit. “Human spirit! Human spirit!” I recall him saying, “You can’t beat the human spirit!”

Alas, his epic journey didn’t last very long. After a couple of hours battling with the big incoming rollers, he had to give up, exhausted. He was helped back to shore. He had managed to row at most a couple of hundred yards. As far as I know, he never resumed his journey.

Of course I sniggered gleefully at this. (Alright. There is a sliver of cynicism in me.). I would greatly admire somebody who really was able to row across the thousand or so miles of the Tasman Sea. It would be a truly heroic endeavour, and require great reserves of stamina. But surely one makes inspirational statements only after the deed has been done. Sounding off about the “human spirit” before you have actually achieved anything can only come across as idle boasting.

Another thing occurred to me. The failed-Tasman-crosser could only have picked up that phrase about the “human spirit” from all the tele-movies he had seen. In his intended farewell, he was aping the cliché dialogue of a teleplay. He was acting as if he was the star of a movie. Human life was confused with scripted fantasy.

 

Second Item: I feel a little more contemptuous of this one.

In attempting to scale a mountain in freezing conditions, a mountaineer had just failed to reach the summit. He was rescued and returned to base camp. In this ordeal, he had lost his legs and become a paraplegic, with steel legs in place of the legs that he was born with. So far, the story is one of real endeavour and real trauma and we naturally sympathise with the climber.

But some time later, a television producer decided he could make a “human interest” documentary by following the mountaineer as he “finished the climb” and reached the summit. Alas, the producer was interviewed by a journalist. The journalist asked how the paraplegic ex-climber would be able to scale the whole mountain in his disabled condition. The producer admitted that the ex-climber was going to be flown up to a certain level by helicopter. Finally the journalist prised out of the unwilling producer the information that the ex-climber would in fact be flown up to within yards of the peak he had never quite reached. In effect, he would spend a few minutes crawling up to the peak, thus “completing” his climb before he was flown down again. At this point, the producer lost his temper, saying that the journalist would be destroying the whole impact of the programme if this information were made public. As I recall it, the producer called the journalist many angry names.

I may be wrong (if you know better, you can correct me on this) but I believe the projected programme was never screened. It was an attempt to curate reality like a TV show – to manufacture artificial heroism out of a staged and artificial event.

 

Third Item is the most artificial and contemptible of the lot – as well as the silliest.

During America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, a young woman and a young man, both in the American military, announced before cameras that they had made a special “promise” to each other. Should either of them be in danger, the other would come to his-or-her rescue, no matter how perilous the situation was.

A few days later they were sent into action… which in their case meant rushing into a safe building which had already been abandoned by Iraqi forces. They were briefly separated from each other… but with cameras following them, they were reunited. They embraced. See! They had fulfilled their “promise”. What an heroic story.

I do not know if the whole world guffawed as I did at this obvious play-acting, but I do know that there was no follow-up and to the best of my knowledge nothing was heard of them again.

What on Earth was all this about? The best I can interpret it would be this – two servicepeople decided that they could earn big money if they sold their story to a television network. I surmise they saw themselves as the basis for a miniseries. “They were true to their promise. In the midst of battle their friendship endured. The true story of…” blah blah blah. But even by the low standards of network television, this one simply did not fly.

 

What do these three stories have in common? They were all artificial events played out for the camera. They all revealed a confusion between real heroism and acted-out spectacle. They showed how real thinking, breathing people can be persuaded to think and act like fictitious characters as projected by the media. That’s what these stories have in common. That, and a degree of ingrained stupidity.

 

FOOTNOTE: I have reported these three stories as I remember them from years ago. If you recall, and know more about any of them (dates; people involved etc.) than I have noted here, please send me the details via a comment posted below this posting.