Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781628921137
Google: xrMBCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2016-01-28T20:42:45+00:00

FIGURE 8.3 The beheading aesthetic. Screenshot from the Nick Berg execution video.

This represented a turning point in the war of images that accompanied the occupation of Iraq, with the clip coming to the attention of CNN and Fox News after a tip off. After the news channels had downloaded the clip, it disappeared from the jihadist site, only to be picked up by Ogrish who billed it as the big cyber-event of the day.16 Thanks to the new technologies of digital media and their ability to capture images and transmit them globally, Berg’s death, despite its rigorously concealed and intimate spatial and temporal setting, had become a globally broadcast public execution. As Kellner has noted, digitization had transformed culture, producing new modes of spectacle and domains of technoculture, and the Berg murder video, grainy, crudely edited, and pixilated, represented the spectacle of the “real” in the extreme.17 Pictures of Berg’s headless jumpsuited body hanging from a Baghdad highway overpass soon also found their way onto the net. New media technology, it seemed, had effectively eliminated the private sphere and everything was now visible, from the mundane to the macabre. For the mainstream media, the death of Berg resurrected and accentuated the dialogs that circulated following the surfacing of the Pearl murder video. In the context of the increasingly fractious Iraq occupation and the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse imagery that had filtered out to the mass media, the Berg case confirmed that the Internet was now seen by the public as an alternative to mainstream print and television news organizations. It was estimated that nearly one quarter of American Internet users went online to view some of the more graphic war images that were deemed too gruesome or horrific for mainstream newspapers and television to display, yet those who actively sought out explicit representations of the conflict testified to being uneasy about their availability.18 Mainstream American outlets used restraint in distribution of the footage, showing Berg sitting in front of his captors but cutting away before the execution.19 It was the second time in just under a fortnight that graphic images had appeared with the potential to alter the perceptions and attitudes of a mass audience of all cultural and political affiliations and degrees of engagement. Berg’s last moments appeared on a day when CNN reported that the U.S. government possessed photos of Abu Ghraib prisoners being sodomized with chemical glow sticks, presenting news editors, or at least those with aspirations to journalistic rigor, with extremely difficult editorial calls to make.20

However, it was soon apparent that anyone wishing to view the uncensored execution (not unedited: the shock sites often played bowdlerized versions of executions that cut more or less straight to the violence) or the Abu Ghraib tableaux merely needed Internet access. Berg’s killing precipitated a number of hostage execution videos being released, the majority being issued by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s Tawhid and Jihad group and another insurgent group, the Army of Ansar Alsunnah.21 Usually, the group issued an initial video

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