Media Mindfulness

Yet another example of how the spectacularization of violence normalizes it:

Group: TV torture influencing real life - Yahoo! News:

Tell me where the bomb is, Bauer orders, or we’ll kill your family. Silence. The prisoner watches as a thug kicks down the chair his son is tied to and fires a gun at point-blank range. He screams but still doesn’t relent — until the gun is pointed at his second son. Having gotten what he needed, Bauer whispers that the execution was staged.

The scene from Fox’s “24″ is haunting, but hardly unusual. The advocacy group Human Rights First says there’s been a startling increase in the number of torture scenes depicted on prime-time television in the post-2001 world.

Even more chilling, there are indications that real-life American interrogators in
Iraq are taking cues from what they see on television, said Jill Savitt, the group’s director of public programs.

Human Rights First recently brought a West Point commander and retired military interrogators to Hollywood for meetings with producers of “24″ and ABC’s “Lost” to talk about their concerns about life imitating art.

But sometimes art imitates torture. Artist Coco Fusco is exploring the role of female interrogators in the war on terror. A few summers ago she and a group of female artists participated in a “torture camp,” which was lead by interrogation trainers. They were put into simulated POW camps, receiving the same kind of treatment that interrogators go through to understand the process of the kind of work they are embarking upon. The resulting experience became a performance piece, A Room of One’s Own: Women and Power in the New America.

Coco Fusco in A Room of One’s Own

PS: Also worth a read, Fox Show “24″: Torture on TV from Jan wiener of The Nation.

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