Man Overboard.

Wednesday, 05/09/11


It’s 4 a.m. my sleeping schedule is out-of-alignment again. I just woke up from a nightmare in which I was aboard a large, passenger ferry and I witnessed a man attempt suicide by jumping off into the frigid waters below. As in so many dreams, I was more of a spectator than a participant, I felt like I was watching this incident unfold from a comfortable remove, as if it were film or television. Within moments the alarms sounded and the ferry came to a halt and a rescue vessel was sent out to retrieve the drowning man. When he was being helped aboard later, someone out of nowhere, approached him and said something to the effect of “you should have asked me to help you with the deed” and then produced a pistol and shot him dead. While the assailant stood there gloating in the immediate instant after shooting him, another person walked up to the first assailant and proceeded to shoot him. In the dream, I was the unwitting bystander, forced to observe the dramatic playing-out of a circle of vendettas. The dream continued and as if it cinematic cut, it was suddenly nightfall and presumably, this was the same journey. There was a group of passengers gathered in the seating area, it looked like they were watching a movie or some form of entertainment, they seemed quite transfixed by whatever it was. I was somewhere amongst them and I noticed through the windows surrounding separating the seating area from the outside deck, three ghostly apparitions looking in through the windows at the focus of entertainment inside. I assume that the three “ghosts” were the recently deceased. It was at that moment that I felt that racing, primal fear and then woke up.
I could interpret this nightmare on so many levels of my psyche. The usual themes of inescapable mortality and the nature of the spectacle mostly come to mind.
The suicidal passenger’s deathwish gets fulfilled, but quite unexpectedly. He decided to act on his intention only to be rebuffed by death and then moments later, the deed is finished. A heavy-dose of existential irony to be sure. Also a conceivably religious metaphor that underscores the brazen arrogance of us humans in the face of divine plan.
The second and perhaps just as fascinating issue I visited in this dream was the voyeuristic experience of violence and death. I recently read an article in the July issue of Harper’s about how we as a collective, are being subjected to what the author describes as “vio-porn” or the pornification of violence. What this loosely means is that we - in the role of spectators – are over-saturated with witnessing acts of violence through popular media so much so that through this de-sensitization process, we derive a perverse thrill at the tragic misfortune of others – simulated or real. This in turn hardens us to feelings of compassion or any kind of human ethic. I don’t think these charges are too strong, I think they are honest evaluations of the wider social alienation that’s engulfing us and threatening to undo our civilization.
Hollywood producers have latched onto a formula that works, it’s in their interests to fuel, to placate our increasing appetite to consume all forms of brutality and depravity that are manifestations of are darkest impulses. Courtesy my roommate and his DVD collection, I’ve recently been “catching” up on the television and movies I missed when I was away in Taiwan for four years. While most of what constitutes his DVD library doesn’t attract a mainstream audience, a good portion of is popular amongst a sizeable demographic and so it presumes that the audience has a high-tolerance threshold for graphic language, violence and nudity. What I’ve found surprising is how much more harsh and extreme even smart t.v. drama has become in order to stay alive in the ratings game. I think that this nightmare was a sort of filtering process for the amount of simulated violence I’ve seen recently, but it’s also a filtering process for the news media that I consume – the reportages of the body count in Iraq, wrought by natural disasters or in my part of the world where just yesterday a family shooting took place in what the news described as a “respectable” suburb. Why is it no surprise that all of this has a cumulative impact? Why are we shocked when we hear of incidents in which a shooting takes place and the perpetrator was only sixteen? The coarsening of attitudes and the de-sensitization to violence are combining to instill mass psychopathy in our collective behaviour. This form of psychopathy (which I’m loosely using and not to be understood in the clinical definition thereof) takes its form in small and apparently non-threatening ways – from the aggressive pan-handler who shoves an old man, to the corporate executive who embezzles money from his own company. These are all symptomatic behaviours of individuals who actively ignore the consequences of their actions or for how those actions might effect others. This aberration is more commonly recognizable in our youth, which has been made crass and anti-social as result of being sold a seductively cool form of street-cred fashion. I may sound like a fulminating old man here, but no matter how one might dismiss my concern as being generational, the rebellion of today’s youth is all form without substance and devoid of creativity and politically unconscious – a marketer’s dream.
Much of what I’ve written here is a given. We can all identify the usual culprits – mass media being the leading one. Therefore, how can one frame this debate in a more invigorating or novel way? Is it possible we’re becoming jaded to our own reality to such an extent that active engagement and meaningful response are futile in the face of the onslaught of excess in our culture? Are we too cynical – too busy – to register a passing notice?