TV's Snuff Porn

In the intro to the book of her 1990 documentary Bodywork, Australian Chris Pip recalled the words of social historian Michael Gorer* in 1955:

"Pornograph would appear to be a concomitant of prudery... whereas copulation has become more and more 'mentionable', particularly in Anglo-Saxon societies, death has become more and more 'unmentionable' as a natural process."

The emphasis (probably added by Pip) in this quote from Gorer's essay The Pornograph of Death highlights a disturbing development just over half a century later as television shows led by CBS' CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) break one of the final taboos of the small screen.

Gorer was writing of natural death, that which comes from old age or, distasteful as it may seem to many in the early 21st century, disease, which is, after all, a natural process.

Pip observed:

I was in my mid thirties. I had never seen a dead body in my life. In other cultures and in other times contact with a corpse would be commonplace at my age. Had I been born a century earlier I would no doubt have borne six children, half would have died before the age of five and I would have dressed, wrapped and buried those bodies myself on the family property. As it was I had never even seen the body of a close relative.

But what she had seen had also been observed by many others:

At the same time violent deaths reported in the media, and shown 'live' on television news, have become commonplace on an unprecedented scale. It is part of the fantasy offered to the populace.

Seventeen years later, the fantasy is a full-blown orgy, played out with realistic prosthetics and sophisticated computer generated imagery on prime-time TV.

When Gorer incisively noted the pornographic nature with which death had been imbued in mid-20th century culture, a person depicted as being shot on a TV show might be shown grasping their white-shirted chest and slumping to the ground with not a hint of blood.

Today, we are treated by CSI and other shows to multiple replays from multiple angles of not only the moment of death but also the bullet's eye view, the passage of the projectile as it pierces clothing, skin, bone, muscle, organs. Then into the mortuary and the lab where, in graphic detail, we see autopsies in detail, learn to recognise the techniques of the post mortem examination and soon nod knowingly at phrases like 'medium velocity blood spatter'.

I've been considering the removal of the last taboo - the showing of corpses, gratuitous rather than glimpsed - in TV dramas for some months. In many ways, it's less the lingering on the freshly-deceased on the sidewalk that disturbs me (although we're lingering longer than we did and that does disturb) than the obscene fascination with the charnel house work of the mortuary technician, the Y-incisions and the laid-bare internal organs.

Someone, somewhere, years ago noted it somewhat ironic that in pornographic movies it was necessary to deny the usual reality of the sex act by withdrawing at the moment of ejaculation to demonstrate that the act was real. No doubt someone with access to miniaturised technology or CGI has attempted to overcome this but the fact is, for the vast majority, sex loses its allure once the observation of it is more than skin deep.

However, the new pornography of death is all internal, all the time, the point of view cutting rapidly from the orgasmic agony of the object's face to slow-mo replays of blades and bullets penetrating.

It's an oft-used excuse for porn that watching the sex act is life-affirming, it's natural; so what is watching death with the same degree of avidity? It would be natural if we were to be intrigued by the passing of a person after a complete life - after all, when we are able however briefly to stop denying that death awaits us too, it is the death we hope for - but a fascination with unnatural death is, well, unnatural, not to mention obscene.

Snuff movies are, quite rightly, regarded as amongst the worse of perversions yet shows like CSI are virtual snuff movies that top the ratings.

What will be their impact in years to come?

-- Nick

*Michael Gorer or Geoffrey Gorer? The author is identified as the former in the book of Pip's documentary Bodywork - Confessions of the Funeral Trade but as Geoffrey Gorer in this UCLA sourced essay.