Watching Me Watching Them Watching You
Andrew O’Hagan
I spent the first of my teenage years living in the grounds of an approved school, a place that faced onto a ruined castle said to have given a night’s shelter to Mary Queen of Scots. The escaping Queen was never there at all, but people preferred to think she had never left: every castle in Scotland seeks to have its part in Mary’s story, and her eyes were felt to burn through the night from a high window. Looking at the ruins, I always hoped that Mary would just speak some of her great last words from the darkness; I believed she was there and that something of us all was there in those eyes of hers that seemed to make a ritual of watching.
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[1] Some still claim the boys never saw the video. That is wrong: there was a copy in Venables’s house, and they knew it frame by frame.
[2] A strange collective guilt has now attached itself to the use of such film. People with images of the jumpers were rebuffed by the families, most of whom, according to a recent piece by Tom Junod in American Esquire, were unwilling to accept that their loved one could have chosen to jump from the towers. 11 September strained the taste for reality to the maximum: there is a tendency to prefer the notion that the buildings were a tomb from the moment the planes hit them. Pictures showing people waving their shirts from the upper windows were pulled from all bulletins, and a man called Pavel Hlava, who filmed both planes hitting the towers, is suing the cable station New York One – part of AOL Time Warner – for using the videotape without his approval. Michael Cohen, Hlava’s boss, who gave the tape to the television station, said he was against Hlava receiving what he considered to be ‘blood money’ for the footage.
[3] From CCTV, edited by Martin Gill (Perpetuity, 168 pp., £35, July, 1 899287 71 x).
[4] A fabulous irony attaches itself to reports of the surveillance society proposed by John Ashcroft. The nation with the biggest spectacles and most powerful hearing-aid in history, with an ability to see round corners and observe from outer space, simply can’t find what it said it would find in Iraq.
Letters
Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003
From Matthew Scully
Andrew O'Hagan's essay about the culture of watching was rather well timed (LRB, 9 October). After reading about David Blaine, 'the man in the perspex box being watched to death', I turned on the television to see another man, Derren Brown, playing Russian roulette for the edification of a Sunday-night audience. Apparently three million people tuned in to enjoy the experience, as Brown sweated and panicked, fearing for his life. O'Hagan's indictment of the tabloid press seemed vindicated when its TV critics began falling over themselves to say how brilliant the broadcast had been. 'On Sunday evening,' Dominic Mohan wrote in the Sun, 'I spent one hour studying a man whose brains could have been spattered over a camera. That didn't happen, but while watching Derren Brown's Russian roulette, I realised I was staring down the barrel of great TV. Voyeuristic, yes. Sick, possibly. But magic merged with reality television – what a blast.'
Perhaps O'Hagan could have made more of the way 'reality' is constructed in these presentations. People may enjoy the 'frisson of reality', as he said, but production companies will go to almost any fiction-making lengths to provide it. Those of us in the entertainment industry chuckled darkly when it was leaked (by the police) that Derren Brown had been using blanks in his TV spectacular. Channel Four knows its audience: they still insist it was a live round.
Matthew Scully
Manchester
Vol. 25 No. 21 · 6 November 2003
From Gareth Dixon
Andrew O'Hagan describes the atmosphere among the people gathered to see David Blaine suspended in his perspex box above the Thames as 'vicious' and 'desperate', and makes the more general comment that the relationship between Blaine and his audience was 'one of great sickness' (LRB, 9 October).
I joined the crowds walking east along the Thames Path through Southwark to the Blaine-zone on the afternoon of 18 October, the day before he was to end his stunt (he managed to utter a few mystical vacuities before being carted off to hospital). Viciousness and desperation weren't much in evidence. There were some ardent admirers, the ones who had posted messages on the security fence, saying 'We're with you, David' and 'For those who believe, no explanation is necessary; for those who don't, none will suffice.' Most of these seemed to be young girls and boys, looking at Blaine with the same love in their eyes that my sister had whenever the Bay City Rollers or David Soul came on TV in the mid-1970s. They cheered and waved and gave the thumbs-up whenever Blaine looked their way. Most of the other people there seemed mildly intrigued, or quizzical, pleased to be somewhere that was in the news, or admiring of the fact that Blaine had spent 44 days swaying in the wind – didn't he feel seasick? The crowd filed into the fenced area, had a look, mooched about, and filed out again, before moving off. Perhaps it was hindsight, but no one I spoke to had ever thought Blaine was going to die in his box, and they seemed reassured, rather than cheated, on realising that he was evidently OK.
I'm not sure that many people – newspaper columnists excepted – took the whole thing that seriously, so isn't O'Hagan's interpretation over-dramatic? If it's not the case that Blaine was ever going to be 'watched to death', is today's 'entertainment ethos', which O'Hagan sees as having 'gone awry', so different from what it's always been? O'Hagan is more percipient than most Blaine-watchers, but perhaps he's more gullible, too. We may be, as he says, 'mawkish' and 'servile', but we're not stupid.
Gareth Dixon
London N22
Vol. 25 No. 22 · 20 November 2003
From Lindesay Irvine
Gareth Dixon is right that the atmosphere by Tower Bridge during the closing days of David Blaine's hunger artistry was not one of mob hysteria (Letters, 6 November). But then Andrew O'Hagan is not wrong, either, that the spectacle was profoundly bound up in our morbidly scopophiliac culture. What I think they've both missed is that Blaine in his box was a remarkable work of art, deserving much more serious attention than it received at the time. In staging the spectacle, Blaine was clearly inviting – and inviting reflection on – the jealous attention which we all focus on the famous these days. And, contrary to what Gareth Dixon wrote, the murderousness of that fixation was all too evident in the early days of Blaine's vigil.
For those who visited the spectacle, there were striking satirical ironies to observe in the piece: the weird excitement over the most ordinary reality, the fact that the tremendously visible Blaine was, in his hoody and blanket, indistinguishable from hundreds of other virtually invisible homeless people living on the South Bank. And there was also great beauty: I can't have been the only person who was moved by Blaine's Zen assertion of his private will under the most relentless glare of publicity. He remained inscrutable in an almost heroic way. I am surprised that his endeavour has not been taken more seriously: it's not as if art historical antecedents – Joseph Beuys, Cornelia Parker – are all that hard to think up. But perhaps we will have to wait for Harmony Korine's film of the occasion to realise fully how untrivial it was.
Lindesay Irvine
London E5
