It’s 6am and the abhorred ringing of your alarm pierces
the sweet tranquillity of your dreams. You’re suddenly thrown from a quiet, undisturbed
island paradise to the stuffy confines of the dishevelled hovel in which you
sleep; the last remnant of your Smart Price mattress’ springs digging into the
base of your spine. Something of which you’re concerned may have some long
lasting, negative consequences; why
exactly is it that you can’t feel your toes?
So what does one do after such a traumatic experience? To be
taken away from the blissful, surreal kingdom of dreams and thrown into the
sub-par pseudo-democracy of reality? Well one turns on the TV of course!
As one Jacques Lacan proposes, you awake to continue
dreaming. You plug yourself into the mystical box of alternate realities where absolutely
anything is possible; even someone knitting a fully functioning magic carpet
out of some children’s felt, or a purple, sexually confused teddy with a
television for a stomach eating the congealed pink tears of an infant child
trapped within the sun high above, so traumatised that he’s lost the ability to
communicate in anything other than short bursts of schizophrenic laughter. You
heard me, anything’s possible.
Mum: I’m sorry son… Come Dine With Me’s been cancelled.
Little Billy: …
Mum: Is everything okay son?
Little Billy: Yeah it’s fine, I just think the silicon chip inside my
head’s been switched to overload…
Mum: Oh my.
So I guess one may argue that I’m a great supporter of
television and they’d be right in doing so. It serves an important purpose. But
there’s one thing I’ve always failed to understand. It’s why people
consistently return to that recurring soap in which every week a new character
seems destined to die and no; I’m not talking about Eastenders.
I am in fact referring to the news. Or, as I like to call it;
your daily dosage of government sanctioned depression! That’s it folks, the
half an hour anti-Prozac in which men and women in suits hold a magnifying
glass to all that’s shit in life. When one turns the TV on in the morning to be
bombarded by images of Turban wearing threats to their lives and H20’s latest
attempts at altitude submerging large quantities of the eastern hemisphere one
can’t help but wish they were back in their cheap IKEA bed, drifting freely
into REM sleep, or perhaps... a coma.
This however is not the case. People willingly tune in on a
daily basis to hear what’s going to kill them next. They appear to relish the
news and its myriad of mournful, daytime matinees of disaster. It appears that
as a society, we’re addicted to bad news and this to me seems very strange.
COMING SOON TO A
REALITY NOT TOO DISIMILAR TO YOUR OWN!
With more explosions
than any film by Michael Bay it’s a must watch! The most famous towers since Tolkien
put pen to paper and thought, “Well one just isn’t enough…”
REAL SHOT’s filmed from
multiple angles as we see the passengers of American Airlines’ Flight 11’s
final moments!
Ever wanted to see the
multiple deaths of innocent men and women? YOU CAN NOW AND IT’S ALL BEFORE THE
WATERSHED! Family fun even the kids can enjoy!
You can even watch as
it all plays out in real time! The most tense drama since 24!
9-11 LIVE!
DON’T MISS IT! IT’S
ENTERTAINMENT TO DIE FOR!!!!
It seems to me, that the breaking news banner is something
that we’re all attracted to. When it’s on screen we’re pulled in to see who’s
died or what country is hiding chocolate from America and thus, is about to
have a dictator removed. It’s like when
one sees some police on the motorway; we instinctively slow to see what’s
happened; to hopefully spot a wreck. But why is this? Why are we – a supposedly
civilised society – obsessed with seeing disaster?
Well one may argue that it’s all a means of coming to terms
with such things. That in seeing the events played out we gain some form of
cathartic relief. The news, the modern day tragedy! King Lear it would seem has
been replaced by a Boeing 767… I’m not convinced.
“And
my poor fool is hang'd! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?”
– Boeing 767 (Act
5 Scene 3)
The concept of catharsis would imply that those watching have deep
routed feelings towards the events portrayed. With the news however, this is
most certainly not the case. In watching the news people become sterile to such
tragedies, as another death merely becomes a new statistic. King Lear, well
performed can move an audience to tears, it will have them laughing one second
and crying the next. To use a cliché, it’s a rollercoaster of emotion in which
the audience is taken along for the ride. But frankly Mr Shankly, one morning of the news successfully
articulates more sorrow than the whole of Morrissey’s discography, and nobody seems
to bat an eyelid. It is as if we are sat
watching the rollercoaster go around, always afraid to take a seat.
What the news in fact does, is removes us from the events it portrays.
We see them through a box in a studio, through a separate box in our living
room, or wherever your TV may be; I don’t know… your toilet? Guess it could
help with constipation; nothing gets the faeces moving better than watching a
political broadcast or any show with Piers Morgan. Then again, you could just
take the Daily Mail in with you… But that is enough of that.
The news turns these real life events into a story. It morphs these
disasters into something we can follow; it fictionalises them and makes them
its own. The shooting we see on the news, is not the shooting the Korean kids
at college saw. It is all a part of the story created for us by the news,
removing us from the reality of the events.
Allow me to explain further with an example. September 11th
2001, we all know what happened. Everyone would have had different
circumstances, but we all saw the same thing. At first it was truly shocking.
It was something entirely new! It was like Voldemort, it was he who can’t be
named. The events we saw were truly horrifying. I believe I’m right in saying,
many people did in fact cry. This however, was a first of its kind. This was
not a news story; it was something unique and unseen. It was within the first
week however that the portrayal of this event had changed. Names began
appearing such as, “9 11” and, “al-Qaeda”. The news was slowly turning the
tragedy into a story. The events were being fictionalised before our eyes and
before we knew it, we had become sterile to what had happened. Multiple
documentaries were shown displaying the crash from numerous perspectives and
films were in the early stages of production. The September 11th we
were now seeing, was something very different to what we saw on the day. Thanks
to the news’ handling of the events, it had become a story and thus, we had
become emotionally indifferent.
It is from this that each new tragedy was related back to this new
story of “terror”. September 11th had sequels on the news, “al-Qaeda”
a recurring villain. There was then the spin off story with the second Gulf
War, factually unrelated it was shown to us in relation to the on-going stories
of “terror” as a means of removing us from the reality of the situation. People
were dying but to society, it was merely another chapter in one of our
favourite series. This is how the news fictionalised September 11th
and how we as a nation, are able to digest the numerous disasters it offers up
to us. They are just new twists in a plot we are all used to following.
Personally I can’t wait for the next instalment of “Natural Disasters”,
the Japan episode was good but you know there’s more coming up!
This is why I find the news hard to digest. It’s how artificial it is
able to turn truly horrible events. It is due to the news we are able to joke
about things of this nature, they’re distant to us. We never see past the
statistics, but instead buy into the news’ fictionalised account.
And that to me… is the saddest thing of all.
Shaun Beale
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