Essay - Watching Big Brother

Watching Big Brother
by William I. Lengeman III
(previously unpublished)

George Orwell may still be vindicated, but let's hope that he's not. Those of us who remember 1984 may recall that the year came and went and things didn't much resemble the fictional world of Orwell's seminal novel of a nightmarish totalitarian future.

Nowadays, more than two decades later, it's starting to look like Orwell might have gotten at least one thing right. Cameras of all shapes and sizes have become virtually ubiquitous and Big Brother is watching, albeit on a small scale and mostly in public places and certainly not through our television sets - though there are a few cranks who might argue this last point.

One thing Orwell didn't get around to theorizing was that the cameras might be used to watch Big Brother as well. We saw this in the footage recorded in the execution chamber of Saddam Hussein, a totalitarian who was surely the equal of Orwell's fictional construct.

My knowledge of science fiction is not as encyclopedic as I'd like, but I'm sure this latter concept - televised executions - has turned up more than a few times in such works. The few I can name off the top of my head - Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Passion Play, a 1996 novel by Sean Stewart. Non-SF material included a 1977 Saturday Night Live sketch, which found TV director Bill Murray rehearsing for an execution, and Citizen Verdict, a 2003 film which treated the issue in lurid form and which starred (appropriately) Jerry Springer.

SF predictions don't always come to pass - obviously, or we'd be zipping around with personal jetpacks or jaunting off with our picnic baskets to assorted and sundry points in time. But the televised execution is here now. Precedents were actually set 10 days before Saddam's death, when 13 Iraqi prisoners were executed on TV there, and as far back as 1996, in Guatemala, when two prisoners met their end in front of TV cameras.

The Saddam execution video made quite a splash on the Web. There were actually two versions, one officially sanctioned, with better production values and less graphic content, and a cell phone video that left little to the imagination.

That these videos became an instant "hit" should come as no surprise, given the human animal's penchant for morbid curiosity and the rapid rise of the YouTube/viral video medium of so-called entertainment. And let's not forget the 2004 Harris poll which found that 2/3 of Americans polled would support televised executions. Eleven percent of these respondents said they'd pay to see Saddam done in, by the way, but when it came down to it they got what they wanted and didn't have to fork over any bucks.

Regardless of our politics, we can probably agree that Saddam Hussein was quite a vile human being. I lost no sleep bemoaning his fate and even Amnesty International, who condemned the execution, didn't have anything nice to say about him. But I can't help feeling unsettled by the digitized images from that gloomy execution chamber. In fact, I chose not to seek out the bits that national news organizations took the high road - imagine that - and chose not to broadcast.

Remarking on the Saddam execution video, one commentator speculated that we've become "desensitized" to images of violence, in this the age of the omnipresent camera. I should point out that I was once a rabid aficionado of the most violent images horror movies could offer up. I'm no shrinking violet about that sort of thing, but I don't feel that I've become desensitized at all. If anything, I think I've become more sensitive to violent images over the years - especially when they're real.

After all, movies are movies but execution videos are clearly not fiction and there's something deeply disturbing and perversely voyeuristic about watching this sort of thing. There are those who would beg to differ and I'm not advocating censorship in any form - only good judgment. Maybe there are some things we shouldn't watch - even if we do have the opportunity.

Maybe our fascination with viral video and reality TV isn't such a healthy trait and perhaps it's not the best use to which we could put this branch of technology. Stepping back and taking the long view of things, one can't help being reminded of some other great works of dystopian fiction.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, doesn't quite ring the bell, since protagonist Alex was actually "cured" of his violent tendencies by the Ludovico Technique, which involved forcing him to watch nasty, violent images. This doesn't exactly resemble today's viral video mania, where viewers seem afflicted with an insatiable hunger for ever more sensation, though it should also be noted that part of the Ludovico Technique was administering drugs.

Perhaps Aldous Huxley's Brave New World would be a more apt analogue to today's situation. The supercondensed summary, for those who haven't read it, is a dystopia whose denizens essentially gorge themselves with sensation. Among their many frivolous entertainments are the feelies, Huxley's version of a lowbrow cinematic experience that involved other sensory inputs in addition to sight and sound.

While the technology may be a little more advanced than what's readily available today, the basic premise of the latter work is starting to seem naggingly familiar.

Copyright 2007, William I. Lengeman III