In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon quotes Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land: “And above all, beware, my body and my soul too, beware of crossing your arms in the sterile attitude of the spectator, because life is not a spectacle, because a sea of sorrows is not a proscenium, because a man who screams is not a dancing bear (164).” There is an idiocy that our society adheres to today, one I cannot escape the shame of knowing personally, one which it is difficult to exempt any one of us from it is so pervasive. Césaire’s warning has not reached our ears; we have crossed our arms, and we no longer see screaming men all around us, because we confuse them for the dancing bears. We use pain, and blood, and violence as entertainment, and consequently the sterile attitude of the spectator is too easy to assume, inevitable even. I will explore here the taste for violence we have cultivated and the effects of such a culture on society.
We have made life into a spectacle. The accusation is incontrovertible. Cameras follow “real families” around, record their drama, and broadcast it on television; we have an entire city in southern Nevada dedicated to providing spectacular shows to tourists; tabloids jump off the shelves if they include juicy details of someone’s life. The list goes on, but perhaps the best indicator of our addiction to spectacles is the level of violence our culture devours. We have a film industry that thrives on bringing spectacles to every major city in the world. Industries do not exist unless they sell a product the market wants to consume, and this one is feeding a ravenous crowd- it made a record-breaking 10.6 billion dollars last year in ticket sales alone (Briggs, 2010). The film industry exists to make a proscenium out of a sea of sorrows, but Hollywood’s obsession with carnage is particularly ghastly. Action films ablaze with gunfire baptize us in gore; horror films portray our worst nightmares, turn pain into a form of entertainment, and are incomplete without some form of human dismemberment.
Take the Saw series for example. The Saw movies exhibit some of the most gruesome scenes to ever grace a theater screen. Its horror may not be unprecedented, but its market appeal is. Audience infatuation has prompted not one, not two, but five sequels of what one critic reviewed as an exhibition of endless creative evil. In one scene, “Spread-eagled on a rack of sorts, Jeff's primary ‘opponent’ in his game screams and writhes as his arms and legs and finally his head are slowly twisted off his body (Isaac, 2006).” The camera doesn’t politely turn away, but shoots forward to let the audience have a better look. Our lack of protestation to horror of this kind is nothing short of disturbing. We not only neglect to object to the spectacle nature of the violence we have just watched, but it is our patronage that clamors for more with an unquenchable appetite. The intensity and the quantity of vicious brutality currently available for public consumption is mind-boggling.
We have become so used to bloodshed that we have difficulty recognizing our own passive acceptance of it as part of our culture. If the twisted bodies and bloodied limbs of Hollywood films have not yet moved you, compare this form of entertainment to that of the Romans’ Colosseum. Picture the spectators of Ancient Rome; they sit on the edge of their seats as the gladiators circle and jab at each other. The warriors cross blades, one trips the other, he draws blood, and the crowd gives a deafening roar as it takes to its feet in excitement. Blood sprays, a head rolls, and the show is over. Today we look at the Colosseum and say to each other, “Ah, it was a different time. They killed people for entertainment, can you imagine? How savage!” and pat each other on the back for having greatly advanced society. Yet even the Romans cannot match our unique affection for violence. The spectators of the Colosseum, who paid nothing for their show, could be seated almost an entire football field from the action (Hopkins, 2009). We sit in a theater seat we have paid to sit in and stare at a larger-than-life screen as the camera rushes closer to a man whose head is being crushed by a slab of concrete as he screams. The entire audience is staring into his eyes as brain matter and skull fragments spurt toward the camera and the life fades from him. In the real world this experience might cause post-traumatic stress disorder, but not in the dark safety of the cinema. We leave satisfied and we buy a ticket to the exhibition next month. What’s that you say? “It’s just a movie with actors, it’s not real”? Actors do not diminish the problem, they exacerbate it. How could we possibly belittle death any more, make it any more of a spectacle, than by saying it’s not real?
Our society has not advanced compared to the Ancient Romans when it comes to our bloodlust. In fact if anything, our demand for gore has been recognized on a level possibly never seen before in recorded history. Although classic literature is sopping with violence, and wars and executions and bloody deaths have been a way of life for thousands of years, no society has ever made murder an up-close-and-personal event before. Our society has so long been immersed in violence, we have forgotten it was once unnatural to be so blood-soaked, and so we raise our children in this culture without thought to the consequences. In our society the average child will have witnessed at least 16,000 murders and 200,000 violent acts on television by age 18 (American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 2009). We teach them death is actors on a screen, not reality. Death is a silly Wile E. Coyote dropping dynamite on a Road Runner. The violence of 200,000 murders, hate crimes, gory brawls, dismemberments, and shootings isn’t traumatizing for our children; after all, we have taught them to view death with the sterile attitude of the spectator.
The massive quantities of blood in 300 should make us nauseous; the war crimes depicted in Tears of the Sun should make us close our eyes and leave the theater; the body count of Kill Bill should have us protesting. Instead we call for more. Instead we sit bewitched, begging for more dancing bears. Now that we have examined the culture of violence we have fostered, let us explore the consequences of such a society. What is the disease that infects a society which pays to be made to cry, made to fear, made to laugh, made to feel? A society that inundates its members with carnage creates a society of spectators. Our spectator status relegates us to a life on the sidelines, so anesthetized to the plight of a world of screaming men that we pay an industry to inject us with the catharsis we have difficulty achieving on our own.
Our culture puts humans in a spectator state, it creates emotionally ambivalent people desensitized to the pain and suffering of other human beings. We have trouble seeing hatred in violence, or fear in war crimes, or horror in the body count of an earthquake that drowns thousands dead in rubble. To us the news is just movement on a screen, it’s not real. Not only are we emotionally unattached, but we see life from the perspective of spectators, unable to join the activity of the world at large. We can cheer from the sidelines for our favorite team, and we can boo at an umpire who makes a poor judgment call, but we see ourselves as entirely inactive members of global society. We are virtually powerless in this cycle that makes us spectators; we must consume violence to make us feel less numb, while it further desensitizes us to the true violence of the world around us.
It may seem as though there is no escape from our dismal destiny of desensitization, but there may yet be hope. Although we seem trapped in a vicious cycle, we are not yet beyond saving. We must throw off the guise of the spectator and take up the mantle of the man of action. My father once told me that a man cannot steer a parked car, and I wondered what he meant. In light of our spectatorship it becomes clear. All too often we are content to park our cars at the drive-in movie theater and remain complacent with our status as immobile spectators, but it is crucial that we put the key in the ignition and choose action over stationary passivity. Will we allow our humanity to be pulled from our own hands without a fight, or will we cling to its last shred, and can we still reclaim it as our own? We must claim our emotionality, our humanity, in our reality instead of searching for catharsis in film. We must be men and women of action instead of inaction. We must fight with tooth and nail the tremendous power society holds over us, and break free of the indoctrination we receive from it.
I sit at my desk and examine the final prayer of Fanon, “O my body, always make me a man who questions!” and I frown. I know there is a spectator in us all, and “a man who questions” sounds like a spectator. A spectator can question a referee’s call, he can inquire as to why genocide happens, he can ask how he can help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, but he cannot actually involve himself- it’s not his place, he’s a spectator. Fanon suggests we should question, but I say we must take action. Go ahead and ask your questions politely, “Excuse me, pardon me, but why have you chained up that dancing bear?” I shall stride into the arena and cut the chains of the screaming man.
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