timelines, police maps, facsimiles of the killers’ school essays and death certificates, recordings of 911 emergency calls featuring audible panic and gunshots, CCTV images of “the cafeteria” phase, videos of news footage and a walkthrough of the empty school by SWAT teams, not to mention the declarations of love for Harris and Klebold from “misunderstood” teenagers. Such vividly evocative supplementary detail, assimilated chaotically over a short period of time, served to recompose the event with an even greater degree of horror than I could ever imagine having experienced if I had seen the events unfold live on television. ‘Elephant’ became a distant memory.
In mainstream media, crime caught on camera is ripe for recuperation as “entertainment”, whether the footage is from grainy CCTV, overhead police helicams or fortuitously placed amateur video enthusiasts. But with unfolding, live atrocities of wider political significance, major news corporations can barely keep up with the speed of information relayed online, or compete with independent and uncensored websites whose agenda is not as thoroughly deflected by having to deliver advertising to an audience. During and after the event, the sadomasochistic curiosity of the viewing public can be instantly satisfied, with any number of a variety of perspectives available to choose as a preferred filter. The curious browser has to wade carefully through a vast kaleidoscopic minefield of conflicting opinions propagating every shade of conspiracy theory and minority interest; as a consequence,
“The morbid fascination with Nicholas Berg suggests that America is either a nation of voyeurs, or a people increasingly uncomfortable with the official story. Or both.” (Kareem Fahim)

material on the internet presented in such a wealth of contexts will always fail to generate the same degree of predictable “consensus” reaction which the broadcast media seeks to elicit.

 

 

 

 

Before September 11th 2001, the image of a burning Concorde was one of the most powerfully enduring visual symbols to engage the public’s interest, a neatly condensed, haunting reminder of technological imperfection and the limitations of human control. It is now hard to imagine any spectacular disaster, broadcast on worldwide media, which will surpass the symbolic power of the World Trade Center attacks. (22) The crystal clear skies and sunny backdrop provided a shockingly literal, over-real solidity to the scene, perhaps fuelling an even greater tendency for doubt and speculation in the face of such seemingly incontrovertible evidence. Distrust of the media and the motives of the US administration have developed in parallel ever since, and the search for mitigating factors and
questions of “why” such an event could be allowed to occur continues to occupy a great deal of people’s time. The inability to engage emotionally in mediated reality of this nature allows many voyeurs to view the grim truth of what is being shown with greater ease. Worse still, even independent media sources tend to present such material as part of a clash of civilisations, where agendas are blurred and dangerous oversimplifications can be peddled wholesale. (23) With the spate of beheadings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia in 2004,

Having managed to completely avoid the media frenzy at the time, I watched Van Sant’s ‘Elephant’ with nothing other than a cursory knowledge and vague memory of the Columbine shootings. (21) Intrigued by the motives of an artistic interpretation made such a short time after the historical event, I set about some basic research into the “facts” of the episode. Within a couple of hours, I had unintentionally been sucked into and spat back out of a sprawling multimedia torrent comprising detailed

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.GUY VEALE - "Voyeurism, Vaccum, Death", 2004 (page 7)
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