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Terror, Image, and Narrative: Reflections on Las Vegas
I intended to write something else for this editorial: something less tragic and chilling. But that is the power of the gunman. His ability to absorb and re-center the narrative of a nation; his power reaching across borders. His face juxtaposed with the images of his carnage.
The mainstream narrative of the day is all around. Images move in front of our eyes in film-reel fashion. That is the internet’s power. Print and image wedded. The newspaper publishes a single haunting photo; the internet deploys raw unedited images, the footage of death and destruction. And we are asked to live with shooting after shooting. Attack after attack.
First I want to recognize what all other op-eds are discussing, save political pundits living in denial. America has two problems: it has a gun problem and it has a race problem.
America is drunk off their second amendment, blinded to its symptoms. No other nations have mass shootings at the rate of America. Australia is perhaps the leading example of the efficacy of gun control. After a mass shooting in 1996 where 35 were killed, Australia decided to restrict gun ownership. It worked. Between 1996 and 2006, gun-related homicides and suicides dropped by 59 and 65 percent respectively, according to the New York Times.
The second problem is the race problem. What would have been the response if the gunman was anything but white? If he was a jihadist, the whole nation could absorb the narrative through the same “us versus them” mentality that has propelled the unceasing war on terror. Were he black, I don’t want to know what the response of Trump’s America would be. However, the gunman was white, and he was, in the fullest sense, in the “us” camp of America’s aggressive foreign policy.
It is too early to tell if there was a political motive — some frightening ideology that transformed Stephen Paddock into a senseless killer. Perhaps he acted alone, some retaliation against the state and its manifestations: crowds, citizens, and their narratives.
The writer wants to understand an event; the political actor wants to appropriate it. The writer must look past the politics and rhetoric and look to the culture, calmly and meditatively, to understand terror’s effect.
The writer can attempt to capture their nation’s narrative, enter the zeitgeist, and shift the culture. But their power is disintegrating, their work becoming white noise compared to the power of the news machine’s relentless images. The gunman invades the news machine and conquers media. In today’s culture, it is he who has replaced the writer as the main driving narrative force.
The writer’s medium is print. One lone individual must pick it up and read and think for oneself. Print can only be consumed by one consciousness at a time, and in a way it individualizes. It cultivates the individual. The image works on the culture like it is a crowd. We stand in attention, gazing at its tragedy. It affects us collectively.
In his novel Mao II, American novelist Don Delillo contemplates the writer’s failing grip on a culture’s collective consciousness. He says it is the gunman that has replaced the artist.
“Years ago I used to think it was possible for novelists to alter the life of the culture, but now bomb makers and gunmen have taken over that territory. They make raids on human consciousness, what writers used to do, before we were all incorporated,” Delillo writes.
Indeed, the image is proliferated and contrasted with news segments, articles, op–eds. These images dominate the news cycles for hours, days, months, and a collective consciousness is haunted by its effect. One can choose not to read the writer’s work. One can avoid print. It is impossible to look away from the image.
“Today it’s news that has begun to influence the way we see the world. It’s news that has become so extraordinarily dominant. I think we’ve come to depend on news, the darker the better. In a way we need it, because it is the tragic narrative of our time,” Delilo says in a BBC documentary.
I do not intend to come up with any solutions for America’s mass shooting problem, though, gun control is a sensible beginning. I am more interested in the power of the image, its hold over the culture, its power to create a shift in our collective consciousness. The media espouses a dominant narrative and then a gunman enters, with his disintegrating self, with his counter-narrative of isolation and senseless violence. The gunman commits his act and then successfully hijacks the dominant narrative. Then, after the culture thinks it is healed, the cycle is repeated.
Photo courtesy of News