How novel, and how ancient, the world's first techno-massacre looked. Blacksburg, inspired by Hollywood and packaged for YouTubers, was as modern as MySpace and as old as wrath. As the religious ranting in the script Cho Seung-hui sent to NBC implied, there is nothing very new in the iconography of butchery.
Unsurprisingly, the Old Masters did not spend their time depicting the hell of a grumbling appendix. From Ghirlandaio's Slaughter of the Innocents to Goya's Disasters of War, the history of art is littered with spree-killing.
Add the psychopathy and remove the genius and Cho's home movie is Titian in QuickTime video clips. The only question is what response violence provokes in the viewer. When conflict was first photographed, it was assumed that brutal images would hasten peace. Now the opposite is true.
The Korean revenge movie Oldboy, which Cho appeared to have copied in his film, is being linked to the shooting dead of 32 people, just as Child's Play 3 was cited in the murder in 1993 of the English toddler James Bulger. While any hint of causal connection seems tenuous, sometimes a film does have something relevant to say about mass murder.
The newly released film Reign Over Me is an odd example of this genre. It is the story of a former dentist, Charlie Fineman, played by Adam Sandler as a shambling and incoherent oddball. Addicted to Shadow of the Colossus, a computer shoot-'em-up, Fineman has no job, no future and no past. His hollowed eggshell of a life stopped with vinyl records and Mel Brooks movies and his only nod to modernity is the room he is always remodeling, musing over tap catalogues and paint charts.
It turns out eventually that his wife longed for this new kitchen. She last mentioned it in a phone call from Boston airport, and he snapped at her. The date was Sept. 11, 2001, and they never spoke again. She died with the couple's three small daughters, as her husband, waiting, watched the footage of the inferno that engulfed his family. Fineman, choosing oblivion over pain, did not mention them again.
And so, in a century in which killing and public mourning are equally supersized, he became an invisible cipher beyond reach or pity. When he does allow his anguish to surface and drunkenly brandishes a gun, he is beaten up by the New York police.
The film has uncomfortable messages for the US and the UK. Both are graduates of the Interflora school of grief, lavish with carnations and stuffed toys whenever a terror cell or a campus killer strikes or a teenager gets knifed on a London street. Bunches of flowers hang from lamp-posts, dry as a serial griever's eye, while, across two continents, true mourners like Fineman evolve from tragic icon to social burden.
We are not good at death and worse at easing its aftermath. Citizens flaunt their public sorrow less because they want to showcase their goodness than through awkward denial. In an age that tilts at immortality, even dying naturally seems an aberration. Allegations over British nuclear workers missing body parts is a row for a secular age, in which we shuffle our relatives off, uneasily, into nothingness. When the dying lack an immortal soul, it becomes imperative at least to send them down the crematorium conveyor belt with the correct complement of vital organs.
A good death now means a tidy one. The endless delving into Cho's crazed mind is not purely an exercise in psycho-pornography or a legitimate attempt to see if warning signs should have been acted on. It is also a bid to rationalize the inexplicable and so secure some peace in the beholder. Online condolence sites are full of heartfelt kindnesses from strangers, but they lack the messy passion of real loss.
Meanwhile, last week's emphasis was all on Cho, made, as he had wished, the poster boy of carnage, surrounded by thumbnail shots of the lovely young students and the lecturers he wiped out. Two hundred people died also in Iraq, but the flesh strewn across the road and women screaming for those they loved got covered in a line or two of print.
There has never been a democracy of death. Murderers, more exotic than their victims, have always belonged to the glamor industry. Even Dr Crippen was transformed from the Pooter of Hilldrop Crescent into a legend by poisoning and carving up his wife.
But now, in an age of random threat, violent death has become a circus and the US and UK its Barnum and Bailey. When a princess dies, or a terrorist or madman strikes, there is always a president or prime minister to emote, a state send-off to attend, a Mozart requiem or something by Elton John to hum. In this necro-culture, death has never been more intimately chronicled or, paradoxically, seemed more distant.
Giving airtime to Cho's histrionics does serve a public interest, though not the one that the media imagine. In the 21st century, mass slaughter is a glue that binds global societies in shared outrage. It is also the force that blows the world apart. Cho's screams of loathing for "rich kids" and Western decadence were an eerie echo of al-Qaeda speak, adapted for the non-ideologue geek.
Perhaps there was no stopping Cho, but the US and Britain have other questions to answer. The fixation with killers rather than victims is a theme of Reign Over Me. Had its unlovely hero's wife and children been slaughtered at the terrorist attack at Enniskillen in northern Ireland, his community would have helped absorb his torture.
But in New York, the epicenter of the medicalized, compassion-saturated West, with its compensation packages and grief counselors on tap, he became just one more public nuisance in the kind of atomized society that throws up disenchanted killers of all kinds. His block on remembering his children is also the collective amnesia of the West.
When a mass tragedy strikes, be it July 7 or Blacksburg, the questions are similar. How could it have been stopped and what drove the perpetrator? In the search for imperfect, and sometimes non-existent, answers, the spotlight stays on the killer, while his living victims are soon forgotten as the grief machine, propelled by state and media, moves on to some horrific novelty.
What is lacking, amid the furor over the Blacksburg images, is compassion. More feeling and less clamor just might lead to increased repugnance over preventable horrors, such as Iraq, and fewer attempts to dress up, in flower mountains and the publicity packs of madmen, the enduring ugliness of grief.
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