Catastrophist. - Free Online Library (2024)

Part I

"About suffering they were never wrong"

--W. H. Auden

If you stand before the painting the boy will be the last thingyou see.

There in the lower right hand corner. His feet poke out of theharbor, mid-splash; he's drowning. The expanse of Brueghel's16th-century Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is designed to distractus; its scale draws the eye across the landscape, to the field hands,the laborers toiling. Their backs to the doomed boy, they remainpreoccupied, indifferent. That indifference makes Brueghel'spainting feel strangely modern.

Some of us may recognize indifference as part of our contemporaryurban landscape--how we've learned to witness excruciating povertyand walk on. It even inflects our suburban environments: recall thesurprise when news broke that a Collingswood, New Jersey, family'sfoster children had been slowly starved to death. Help arrived only whena neighbor found one of the boys fishing scraps from his trashcan andcalled DYFS.

Mid-century media guru Marshall McLuhan proclaimed, "Theprice of eternal vigilance is indifference." In the twitteringtwilight of today's 24-hour news cycle, the persistence ofindifference flows through our mediascape: once, whole generationslearned to keep the TV news on while they wolfed down dinner. Bodycounts folded into baked beans and pass the corn and we practiceddistraction through second servings and the flow of news. And now: wehave grown expert in the art of interrupted communication; conversationsbecome palimpsests of texts and tweets, the virtual erupts into thephysical, a roil of immediacy, of information. It is hard to know towhat we should attend.

Twentieth-century poet W. H. Auden caught the whiff ofindifference the 16th-century Brueghel meant for us to see and used itto fuel his famous "Musee des Beaux Arts." Auden's poemis so widely anthologized that its meditation on the accuracy of the OldMasters' sense of suffering, its contemplation of theaudience's experience (and neglect) of the boy's fall, hasbeen defanged--it's the poetic equivalent of a TV dinner: it seemsprepackaged, yields easily. The poet pulls his punches as he calmlyrenders "how everything turns away / quite leisurely from disaster..."

But the poem, like Brueghel's Icarus, is creepily prescient,devastatingly modern.

Auden puts himself before the painting, gazes at the 1558masterpiece, but instead of calling the poem "The Fall ofIcarus" he calls it "Musee des Beaux Arts" (since thepainting hangs in Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). Ilinger on the poem's title because he does not refer to thepainting's title until halfway through the poem. Thus even thepoem's title distracts us, shifts our focus; it too elides theboy's fall. The poem opens by putting us in the place in which thepainting is hung, the locale in which Auden engages it, before it zoomsinto the details, before we attend to "the white legs disappearinginto the green / water," the "corner, some untidy spot"where the boy's already half gone.

Auden's gaze is perfectly disinterested. He launches anengaged description of the painting's features and attempts a kindof neutrality even as he imagines himself into the minds of the figureson the canvas. But disinterest is crucially not the same asindifference. It is, perhaps, nearly opposite. The critic's job,argued Matthew Arnold, is to be curious about what is "best knownand thought" in the world; but that curiosity, he held, should bematched by "disinterestedness," an agenda-free stance thatallows the mind to play and the critic to "see the object as itreally is."

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And Auden renders the painting "as it really is" viahis curious, disinterested gaze. He mutes his passions yet raises thevolume on what he sees, on his experience of the scene the paintingdepicts. He sees something, says something, unlike the figures on thecanvas: "the dogs go on with their doggy life and thetorturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree."The boy drowns in the margins of the day's work.

Auden is both fascinated and appalled by Brueghel's visualessay on benign indifference--the poet neutrally imagines how theboy's plunge "was not an important failure" for theploughman, the central figure who dominates the foreground of thecanvas, whose loping gait, caught mid-stride, looks nearly giddy incontrast to the boy's inverted flailing legs. Part of the genius ofthe poem is the way it makes the reader complicit in looking away; wetoo have missed "something amazing. A boy falling out of thesky." We're caught up in our doggy ways and fail to see hisfall. Auden seeks to understand indifference. The poem meditates onindifference, on the failure to grasp significant details. By adoptingthe sideway's title "Musee des Beaux Arts" the poetimplicates himself in this failure of recognition, and he means toimplicate us too.

This is a poem, then, about looking--and looking away.

 * 

But what about the way it feels to look at something when wesuspect we shouldn't? The exquisite tension of engageduncertainty?

Vince McMahon, Jr., chairman, CEO, and regularly occurringvillainous "heel" of the WWE, knows something of thecompelling power of catastrophe, especially the choreographed kind.

The WWE has made millions as a publicly traded company,specializing in "sports entertainment." They producechoreographed athletics, the kind of hyper-masculine steroidalpunch-throwing, chair-smashing spectacle that delights a particularlysought-after demographic--young men between 18 and 34.

Though often derided for being, well, stupid, fans ofprofessional wrestling seem to enact the opposite of benignindifference. They are deeply engaged in the choreography of disaster.They thrill to, as Barthes put it, "the spectacle ofsuffering." Vince McMahon's genius lies in his ability toimagine his audience's desires.

And in seeking to stoke those desires, McMahon thought he knewthe way a falling boy might amaze a crowd. He conjured "The BlueBlazer."

Owen "The Blue Blazer" Hart--youngest son of Canadianpro wrestler Stu Hart (whose 12 children all worked as wrestlers ormarried wrestlers), member of the famed Hart Foundation, brother touber-famous wrestling superstar Bret "Hitman" Hart.Owen's character had developed into a sort of goofy superhero figure, and his signature entrance demanded he swoop into the ring.Rigged with harness and cables, he regularly delighted fans with hisextravagant descent.

On May 23, 1999, the plan was to emphasize the character'sineptitude: he was to descend in a seeming tangle, a snared mess in thesafety harness, only to hit a quick release mechanism and fall splat onhis face in the middle of the ring. High buffoonery. (There was eventalk of him descending with a midget wrestler scissored between hislegs.)

But when Owen flew in from the rafters over the packed KansasCity, Missouri stadium, he hit the ring at a sickening angle. Heplummeted to his death in front of a live audience.

The fall occurred in full view of an arena crowd 16,000 strong.Not to mention the TV audience. All of whom--including the ringannouncers and the wrestlers themselves--did not, at first, know what tomake of the seeming stunt.

The fall happened during a live broadcast, one of the WWE'slucrative pay-per-views. In typical WWE fashion, the live event wasinterspersed with prerecorded "interviews": viewers at homehad just seen Owen in character as good-hearted goofball "The BlueBlazer" charging them to drink their milk and take their vitamins(a classic "babyface" monologue). But when the camera cut backto the show, Hart's body was a slumped heap at the center of asemicircle of frantic rescue workers; the camera stayed focused on thestunned crowd instead.

What were fans to make of this spectacle? How did they understandthe accidental in-ring death of Owen Hart?

Roland Barthes famously called professional wrestling a"spectacle of excess," part of the "great spectacle ofSuffering, Defeat, and Justice." Through its hyperbole, through itsreassuring depiction of Good triumphing over Evil in the end, wrestlingmatches depicted a utopia where rules were clear, roles were fixed, andthe audience knew that what it was looking at was staged. But theintelligibility of such spectacle washes away when pro wrestling'stheatricality proves false.

 * 

Boy, broken wings, deadly fall. The resonance with Icarus is hardto miss. On one hand the spiral's the same--boy plummets to earth.Wings fail. The Icaran myth promises to help folks make sense ofHart's catastrophe: too high, too fast, too pyrotechnic, toobad.

But despite the echoing images, the narratives don't match,even though I long thought they did. I've come to misremember themyth, believing that the boy disobeys the father and his disobediencecosts him. Hubris gets punished. But the analogy of the mythical fatherand the tragic boy breaks down when applied to the WWE. It's hardto map Daedalus and Icarus onto McMahon and Owen Hart. The industry,under Vince McMahon, Jr.'s inventive visionary gaze, saw itselfcompeting with Hollywood movies. The WWE aimed its might at creatingspectacle, infusing live matches with spectacular special effects. Andthose who've paid attention to the lucrative rise (though recentseeming stagnation) of professional wrestling over the last 20 years ofits near century-long history in the US might see Owen's death aspart of a larger pattern of suffering and harm, an indication of thecosts that come with the fusion of extreme sport and theatricalspectacle. False theater.

Unlike my version of a disobedient Icarus, the hubris wasn'tthe airborne wrestler's. Some said it was McMahon's. To folkslike Owen's bereaved brother Bret "Hitman" Hart, McMahonwas at fault. In order to make Owen's fall more spectacular, thejoke of a tangled superhero more comic, the back-up safety latches weredismantled. All the better for the wrestler to release himself on cue.But Owen was nervous, the height (78 feet) was new to him, and in hisnervousness, perhaps he inadvertently hit the release, the only latchholding him in place.

McMahon's Barnum-like showmanship suddenly seemed greedy,malevolent--his dedication to hype, spectacle (not to mention the"ho train," "WWE attitude," and a willingness toentertain barbed-wire matches) put his wrestlers in jeopardy.

Seen from this angle, McMahon embodied both positions, partDaedalus and part Icarus, both godlike and flawed, simultaneously--hisvision of competition (both inside the ring and among differententertainment industries) seemed to invite catastrophic downfall in itsexcess.

My half-right version of the myth lent itself to a convenientnarrative: it helps frame a story of corporate greed, of the WWEcorporation going public, the commodification of the late 20th-century"WWE attitude" and what that meant to the bodies of thewrestlers--from hypermasculinity to the "wrestler'sco*cktail": uppers, downers, and 'roids, 'roids,'roids across a 12-month hiatus-free "season."

But that framework falls short of rendering what Brueghel (andlater Auden) saw: the calamity of indifference. And it's thatindifference that contains the difference between these two obviouslysimilar, archetypically familiar falls.

Brueghel's got his figures in various positions, but theyall look away: the shepherd gazes skyward, contemplative, his back tothe boy; the ploughman and his ox furrow forward away from the sinkingboy; even the fisherman, who sits on a ledge as if in a front row seat,he's distracted (his back to us, but his gaze to the side). Theships fill the harbor, sailing away; everyone's industrious. Theboy is the last thing we see.

Not so with Owen Hart's fall. Everyone was looking--even ifthe TV cameras were looking away. (The ongoing corporate party line isthat the WWE has no footage of his death.) The WWE's audience wascaught up and confused.

The difference between these wickedly similar falls is in themanner with which they were received. Indifference's opposite isengagement. What links the painting, poem, and expectation-rupturingtelevisual event are the modes of engagement depicted, practiced, and/orto which viewers resorted.

The live arena audience could not be more different fromBrueghel's oxman--the relationship between audience and narrativeis inverted in the realm of the WWE. Not only were WWE fans trying tomake sense of the fall, they were deeply engaged--and destabilized inthat act of sense-making that typically offers them such pleasure: atfirst no one knew what had happened. Even the ring announcerscouldn't decipher if the fall was a "work," an"angle," part of the show; or if it was unchoreographed, a"shoot." It is hard to watch ring announcer Jim Ross sputterand strive to frame the fall, a seeming mistake, an unchoreographeddisaster that ruptured the evening's spectacle. His co-announcerJerry Lawler, breathless from having rushed into the ring, claims thatthe fall was real. Ross is speaking to the pay-per-view audience when heannounces Hart's death. The audience in the arena won't findout until much later. The match went on.

Viewers were helpless, not indifferent; baffled, not blind.

Part II. Smart Fans

Verbum sapientibus sat est.

(A word to the knowing ones is sufficient)--Proverb

The professional wrestling industry uses a fascinating argot tomark the boundary between industry insiders and outsiders, the linebetween wrestlers and fans. But that boundary is always in flux,constantly contested, breached, and reproduced--and such boundary playcan be traced in the language the industry uses to hail its fans, alanguage adopted by the fans themselves (check out any online fanglossary for evidence of this).

Fans who don't fully grasp that professional wrestling isnot legitimate competition, is not sport, those who fail to see that itis choreographed athletics, are referred to as "marks." A markis clearly outside of the privileged community of insiders privy to theindustry's inner machinations--they have no sense of the preplannedoutcome of the fights, the story arcs, the choreography.

The term "mark" has Carnival roots, like professionalwrestling itself. Historians have tracked the rise of professionalwrestling in the US to the late 19th century, to carnivals andfairgrounds--there collar-and-elbow fights, or "all in"wrestling, evolved into shorter, more lucrative staged events. Carnivalculture too has its own fascinating argot--Carnie--and it's fromCarnie that the term "mark" derives.

Still used in today's carnival circuit, the term"mark" is believed to refer to the practice of putting chalkmarks on the chairs or backs of a show's potential targets. As abroad-shouldered, doe-eyed, easily 6'2" female carnival workeronce put it to me over beers at a Greenwich Village pub called the FourFaced Liar, the term "comes from the old times. It's when thegypsies used to spot marks and peek their pokes at the gate. They'dpeek their pokes and see if they've got stew, then chalk theirbacks." When patrons would open their wallets to buy a ticket toenter the carnival, the worker at the gate would glance into thepatron's wallet, get a sense of how much cash the carnival-goerbrought, and if the "stew" was "thick" the patronwould be "marked." A second crucial term is"kayfabe." Loosely translated as "keep it fake," theterm kayfabe is used to describe the boundary maintenance required ofprofessional wrestlers. Prior to the era of "sportsentertainment" (McMahon's coy term that broke"kayfabe" on a mass scale), professional wrestlers andpromoters kept their industry's choreography a carefully guardedpublic secret.

 * 

Kayfabe. Kayfabery. Kayfabian.

Robert James "Gino" Marella, a.k.a. Gorilla Monsoon,raised his family in a black and white colonial in Willingboro, NJ. Thepersonalized license plate on his sky blue Cadillac read, cryptically,"KAYFABE." Famous locally, the wrestler cruised around theneighborhood giving the secret away without shedding light on a singlething.

Nestled among multiple colonials mirroring his own, Monsoon wouldinvite other wrestlers to his house.

This is true.

Two giants sit at a Formica kitchen table, knees grazing itsrough underbelly. Without saying much, they reach across to a heapingplate of t-bone steaks, a Coming Ware bowl of baked potatoes. Sloshmouthfuls of iced tea.

Monsoon's son Joey asks his pal Danny--they are both about10 years old--if he wants to meet "The Baron." The second manmunching steaks at the family table was Baron Mikel Scicluna. The boyslinger in the door frame a moment too long, catch the Baron's eye.The Baron keeps chewing while Joey says, "Hi, Mr. Scicluna, this ismy neighbor Danny. He wanted to meet you." To which the wrestlerfurrows his brow, menacingly growls, "Do. You. Know. Who. I.Am?"

And Danny says, "Yes, um, you're the bad guy."

The Baron springs from his seat, looms over the boy, pounds eachfist thickly into his palms, shouts, "How dare you call me a badguy!!"

If Danny could have folded into himself, turned himself into apocket square and tucked himself away, he would have.

The boy yelps, and just then Scicluna ruffles his hair and says,out of character, "Nice to meetcha, kid."

Turns back to his steaks.

Kayfabian.

Not long after, Danny stopped watching wrestling. He stayedfriends with Joey, but the spell was broken.

Danny's little brother had a different experience.

Michael was 6. He had been at the Monsoons' house playingwith their youngest daughter. As he left her room and made his waydownstairs, someone rang the doorbell. Gorilla answered the door toLuscious Johnny Valiant. At the time, Monsoon and Valiant were archenemies, each other's in-ring nemeses. Young Michael gasped,thought this is it: they are going to brawl right here, right now, inthis Willingboro foyer. He froze.

Monsoon invites Valliant in, sees the boy on the staircase andsays, "Hi, Michael, this is Johnny." And Johnny says,"Hey kid," as they move toward the back patio, chatting.

Michael went home to tell his brother. Danny confessed thathe'd known, that he'd been waiting for the right time to tellMichael, hoped his brother wasn't too upset, too disappointed. Butwhile Danny learned to un-love pro wrestling, Michael learned to love itmore, fascinated by its falsehoods, drawn to the boundary between theworld of the ring and what went on backstage.

True story.

Kafabian.

 * 

Near the end of the 20th century, when McMahon broke withtradition, called professional wrestling "sportsentertainment" and betrayed kayfabe to a mass audience, hereportedly received death threats from competing promoters. Whenaudiences were invited in on the way the spectacle was orchestrated,professional wrestling crystallized into the ecstatic postmodernspectacle that it has since become: it's real! it's fake!it's both! I need a t-shirt!!

In the midst of this fizzy, sweaty, spandexed, widely deridedpostmodern dreamscape, certain fan types endured. True, it was muchharder to be a "mark"--unless you were a child, or mentallydamaged and unable to do the math on the term "sportsentertainment." But one could easily remain a "smartfan"--someone fully aware of wrestling's choreography, andthus because of that awareness, keenly interested in how the chorography operates.

But when wrestler Brian Pillman stood in the middle of theExtreme Championship Wrestling ring in Philadelphia, PA, among fanswho'd been given bats, canes, and BBQ tongs at the gate and invitedto wallop the wrestlers, he challenged even that category. "Youthink you're smart?!" he bellowed. "You're notsmart. You don't know sh*t. You think you're smart butyou're marks. You're smarks! All of you!" And with that,a new term was born to describe the jouissance of a fan who knows whats/he's watching is staged, but delights in how it all seems soreal--in the thumbtacks lodged in a steroidal man's armflesh, in abloodied forehead, the bodily suffering demanded of wrestlers to"sell" a move, to make the fake look real, to make a crowd"pop."

Smarks.

Smart fans who nonetheless like to "mark out" play withthe boundaries between being an expert and being overwhelmed.

Blissed-out fans so moved by a spectacle that keeps themuncertain about the authenticity of a match, a move, the damage causedby the work of wrestling--these fans find pleasure in conflict betweentheir knowledge of the spectacle's production and the pleasure theyget when they can't tell the real from the fake.

This bliss helps me rethink the Icaran myth.

Or at least sets me up to remember it right.

Icarus wasn't disobedient. It's not like he took thekeys to his dad's hotrod and went out joy riding. No, his downfallwas born of a mistake, an error in judgment, not a character flaw likepride.

Daedalus and Icarus, imprisoned in the labyrinth (a structuredesigned by Daedalus himself) by King Minos, sought an escape fromCrete. Strategy: the master inventor designs a pair of wings, one forhimself, one for his son. Here's how we'll slip these walls,he thinks. Tells his son to be careful, to be wary and not fly too high,that the wings are made of wax: if he flies too low over the sea thewater will dislodge the feathers, if he flies too close to the sunhe'll melt.

Now here comes the part that I'd forgotten, the part mymemory turned into a narrative shortcut and called disobedience. Icarusgets so carried away, so thrilled, so giddy with flight that he forgetshimself. Forgets his father's warning.

My mistake: I've been thinking what brought Icarus down waspride.

What put him at risk was ecstasy.

Smark.

 * 

You should know that Joey Marella, Gorilla Monsoon's son,grew up to be a professional wrestling referee.

But how to tell you he was killed in a car crash? Drove head longinto a tree at an off ramp in Jersey. His seat-belt wearing passenger(known inring as Harvey Wippleman) was critically injured butsurvived.

 They were driving late, hoping to make it home after a match; it was the 4th of July. They never made it off the Beverly-Rancocas Road. They were not drunk but tired. They say Joey died instantly. The false theater of false theater. * 

I keep coming back to Owen's televised death and thefin-de-siecle/momentary experience of not-knowing--the traumaticexperience of trying to put the narrative together, trying to make senseof un-choreographed catastrophe that disrupts choreographedspectacles.

As poet Carley Moore recently pointed out to me, part of thepower of the Icaran myth is in the utter helplessness our knowledge ofthe outcome of the boy's risk forces us to confront. She remindedme that indifference is built into the myth itself: there's noaction for us to take; it's only possible to watch, to imaginewatching him fall.

But that doesn't feel like indifference to me. It feels likea kind of terror.

I don't necessarily mean "terror" in the post-9/11Office of Homeland Security sense. I mean it in the classic Aristoteliansense of the term--as a feature of theatrical spectacle. Aristotletheorized that theater-goers thrived when confronted by tragic storiesthat wound them up into a vicarious experience of a character'ssuffering--they identified with the character's predicament,reversal, and recognition of his plight (and hand in the outcome).

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Central to this theory is the concept of catharsis--the idea thatan audience could be emotionally cleansed and purged via theirexperience of tragedy. The idea holds that the audience might be soengaged in the character's plight--this audience who likely knewthe plot before it even entered the great amphitheater at Epidaurus,say--would be wholly caught up in the hope that Oedipus won't killhis father and marry his mother, twisted with the knowledge and fearthat he will, and that he'll go on to poke his eyes out. Pity andfear are sutured to knowledge--the more the viewer knows the story, themore well-constructed the spectacle, the more intense the experience ofhope against hope; the ironic drama of knowing more than the characterson stage do themselves. Yes, we know he'll poke out his eyes andyet we still hope he won't have to.

It's that kind of fear, that kind of terror I find in theIcaran myth. We know the outcome.

But both Auden and Brueghel make us feel a more solid dread: thatthe spectator might be indifferent to the spectacle of suffering.

Part III

"I see dead people." --The Sixth Sense OR "Bruce Willis is dead at the end of The Sixth Sense ... and I ji*zzed in my pants."--Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island 

Knowing fans.

I try to pin that word down, "knowing," but it keepsslipping from me.

I mean that word "knowing" in at least two ways: itsduality functions as a hinge. Swings us back and forth. Take itsadjectival form--it can be used as a participle, "knowing fans makegreat spectators." Here it refers to a fan's status asknowledgeable, as an insider, someone aware of the system orindustry's mechanisms, Dorothy with her head behind theWizard's curtain, certain.

But imagine Dorothy willing to ask that wizard to trick her again(and again, and, yes, again). As I'll explain below, there's along history of consumers who like to be tricked--and to then understandhow the trick worked. This is where the word "knowing"flexes--I also mean to invoke the verb form--the fan in the act ofknowing. Knowing, to know; knowledge as a form of participation in themediated spectacle. If a gerund is a verb that's been noun-ified,then you can see how "knowing" gets slippery.

With these two meanings in mind, meanings that shade based on theword's stance in a sentence, I'm reminded of entertainmentforms that simultaneously render knowing as a spectacle and yet invitethe viewer to participate in a form of knowing at the same time. What amI talking about? The pleasure in being made to experience sense-makingby an artfully constructed text: consider The Sixth Sense.

A pal worked as an extra on the film. Director M. Night Shyamalan shot in Philly, and made use of local actors in a number of scenes. Inthe post-funeral scene near the end of the film, where Cole Seer solvesthe riddle of the dead girl's death (Munchausen by proxy!), myfriend Bryson (who happens to be the "Michael" in the storyabove), loads his Hefty plastic plate with faux potato salad, coleslaw,some lunch meat, then makes his way across the crowded living room fullof griefy extras acting as the girl's forlorn family. The cameralingers on him, tracks the room by following his movements. And while itdoes, Cole and Willis appear in the center of the crowd. No one paysthem much attention, these unknown guests.

What I like most about this nearly negligible moment in anotherwise fascinating ghost story is what I found out about thescene's construction. Shyamalan insisted that none of the actorsshould look at or make eye contact with Willis. They were told to lookaway, or look through him.

Shyamalan's famous ending flips the script. A-story becomesB-story and vice versa. What you thought you were seeing flips, slips,becomes something else. This is not some deus ex machina "thebutler did it" ending: it's more of a dipsydoodle: there-presentation of evidence, the juxtaposition of previous images in adecidedly focused montage, we re-see what we thought we saw, and yowza,we're seeing something new in something we thought we'd seen.In this way Shyamalan's making us feel like we've got Proteusby the tail (when we hadn't necessarily realized we were wrestlingthat god in the first place). Shapeshifter. Trickster. And therecognition, realization, the act of understanding we experience--evenas Willis's character puts the pieces together--is at the core ofthe pleasure of consuming this narrative.

Granted, not everyone had this reaction. Many viewers complainedthat they knew from the start, that the secret was in evidence from thefirst, that the payoff of the revelation at the film's end was highcheese. Some viewers were smarter than others, true; but the film itselfaddressed even the thickest marks as capable of understanding how thetrick worked. One can almost hear Shyamalan's breathless"ta-da" as the film falls into the same structure as athree-part magic trick--the pledge (look, dear audience, at thisordinary thing), the turn (but wait, see? Extraordinary!), and theprestige (and this is something you've never seen before!!). (Nowwould be a good time to check out Christopher Nolan's film, ThePrestige.) Shyamalan's reflexivity felt like the sweep of amagician's cape; the flourish was to make the techniques ofnarrative storytelling visible.

These two points--the feeling of knowing and thestructures/devices/craft that create that feeling in the reader or theviewer, coalesce to become a way of reading the success ofShyamalan's film (a success he has not achieved in any of the filmsthat came after The Sixth Sense). He crafts an ending in which here-presents evidence that had been there all along--there's nothingnew what is new is the way we see the evidence. We make sense of theevidence in a new way. The way we make sense is what has changed. TheSixth Sense is more than a ghost story, it's also a film aboutsense-making. Even those who found the film tedious would agree--infact, because they knew what to expect, the deception and its revelationfelt staged.

In his book-length study of P. T. Barnum, historian Neil Harrisdescribes 19th-century spectators and audiences who delight indeception. Whether they paid a penny to see Thom Thumb or were seducedinto buying a ferry ride from Manhattan to New Jersey to see a so-calledflock of buffalo (Barnum painted a herd of sheep brown), such audiencesrelished the spectacle, and delighted in figuring out how the trickworked. The audience he describes was not made up of passive folk, dupedand gullible; no, these people were interested in the operation of thehoax, the mechanism of the spectacle.

Harris coins the useful term "operational aesthetic" todescribe the delight Barnum's crowds took in deciphering how, forexample, a mystery story was constructed (no accident Poe'sdetective stories gain popularity in this era), or a hoax wasperpetrated. For them, knowledge of a spectacle's operation waspart of the delight they experienced. Knowing was a form ofparticipation; such spectacles demanded it.

Perhaps the difference between what Barnum was doing (with hisFiji Mermaid and American Museum) and what Shyamalan does is in the waythat the film renders the character's recognition of his position,renders his misrecognition. In Willis' case, we didn't see itat first as a misrecognition, but now, here, at the end of the film,with the revelatory montage unfurling for us, his error has the power toflip the narrative threads--the primary story becomes secondary and viceversa, and the director wants us to see this hinge, wants us to clockthe skill with which he has just executed his sleight of hand.

With this reflexive legerdemain, in this move to render thecharacter's misunderstanding, The Sixth Sense invites the viewer toparticipate in the experience of knowing by making us knowing viewers.Watching Willis enact someone coming to an understanding, his(mis)recognition is the spectacle.

This chimes in a strange way with "Musee des BeauxArts" and Brueghel's back-turned peasants--but echo reveals adifference: the poem recounts the way the ploughman failed to giveweight to or make sense of evidence: "the ploughman may / Haveheard the splash, the forsaken cry, / But for him it was not animportant failure." But when Bruce Willis' character begins tore-see his own predicament, we're deeply engaged in his engagement,amazed by his fall into knowledge, watching him make sense of himself asthe pieces fall together. What he realizes (spoiler alert) is thathe's dead. He is one of the "dead people" Cole Seerconfessed to seeing all along. And as the ending unfolds, we feelsmart--smart for having been tricked, (1) smart for seeing how the waythe story was subtly told kept us in the dark, and smarter still nowknowing how all the pieces had been pointing in this direction from thestart.

And maybe that's what makes Hart's death still smolder in my imagination. What I thought then was (making jazz hands here):holy crap: the real is fake, the fake is real; it's choreographedathletics but that guy's dead, and those folks keep watching! In aneffort to make the inauthentic seem authentic the industry just blew adeadly postmodern gasket! Are smarts marks? Kayfabe! Kayfabe!

But what I'm thinking about now has to do with the spectacleof (mis)recognition.

How hard it was back then to watch folks try to make sense ofwhat they could not process. It's still hard to watch. But nowit's got the traces of the tragic, in the classical sense: we hopethat he's not dead, know he is, pity those folks who are findingout in front of us. We are secure in our knowledge, the unfoldingnarrative cannot traumatize us as it did when new, as it happened live;now that the event is long behind us, our backs to it; but there'ssomething under the surface that needs to be re-seen. It is hard towatch the fans' dismay and confusion--and immediate sense-makingstrategies kick in: it's a shoot, it's an angle. It'shard, too, to watch the ring announcers and the wrestlers themselveschoking on the facts of the event, grappling with the directive to stayin character. The conventions of the industry clamped down around thismoment of rupture and within days folded Hart's death into theindustrial logic: it became a product. The WWE repackaged thecatastrophe, turned the next evening's show into a tribute toOwen's life and career.

Fans kept watching even when they might have wanted to lookaway.

Part IV. The End, Cupcake

Auden highlights the benign indifference Brueghel's paintingillustrates. But Brueghel's painting is designed to make usparticipate in the late recognition of the drowning boy, and thus alsobe aware of the indifference of others. We see what they don't.

There's a deep irony inherent in the image--we know morethan the figures do, we recognize the catastrophe. Auden wants us tounderstand (and perhaps experience) indifference, because he wants tocritique it--he wants us to experience a kind of "oh!" (as in,ah, I see). But Brueghel wants us to experience an "O!" (anexclamation of surprise and helplessness). The first "oh!"signals knowledge--it is embodied recognition. The second "O!"implies a "no"--I can't help but hear "O, no!"(2)

And for those few seconds when Willis is making sense of what hethought he'd understood, as he realizes his mistake, we arecomplicit, we experience a deep sense of powerlessness bound up with thepleasure of recognition.

An awful knowledge unfolds.

 * 

Some news makes me queasy.

Consider the recent suicide of chef Joseph Cerniglia. The latechef was once a participant on the chef and reality TV star GordonRamsay's Kitchen Nightmares--a reality show spinoff ofRamsay's wildly popular competitive cook-off Hell's Kitchen.Built around seductive redemption narratives, Kitchen Nightmaresfeatures restaurants and restaurateurs careening toward failure who are"saved" via the harsh largesse of the barking chef Ramsay. Notthe first suicide among Ramsay's celeb-reality stars, Cerniglia wasnonetheless an object of news-fascination. As the New York Post put it:"A New Jersey restaurateur once featured on Gordon Ramsay'sKitchen Nightmares--and told by the TV chef that his debt-ridden eaterywas "about to swim down the Hudson"--was eerily found floatingin the river after jumping off the George Washington Bridge."(3)

The online coverage received comments from readers who pointedout Cerniglia's "co*ke eyes" on the show; comments pointedto the obvious evidence of the chef's psychological spiral, despitethe show's counter-narrative that a renewed vision and revisedculinary approach would save him from economic catastrophe. Paperssought to link Ramsay's show to the chef's fall; the need forcausality drove headlines, revealed our need: we should have seen thiscoming. Or, maybe we did.

I wonder what Auden would make of reality TV. What Brueghel wouldsee in our 21st-century media landscape. A landscape dominated by themega-genre of reality TV, a genre whose conventions heavily inflect social networking sites like YouTube.

I'll end this essay with an image from a Comedy Central showwhich might never lodge itself in the national consciousness but whichnonetheless registers our preoccupation with digital spectacle, citizencatastrophists, the false theater of Web 2.0 culture.

Tosh.0, hosted by stand-up comedian Daniel Tosh--witty,exuberant, popular-on-the-college-circuit metro-sexual Tosh. Tosh helmsthis hour-long snarkfest featuring "the best the Internet has tooffer." In short, the show vets user-generated videos and showcasesthem in a quasi-stand-up formula that's part Access Hollywood, partCandid Camera.

Posted as a "fan favorite" on the show's website,Tosh showcases a grainy video of an informal cupcake-eating contest. Thevideo footage opens on a dorm room filled with teens, smiling in thatawkward way most have when they know a video camera is running, but theydon't really have anything to do except watch what's about tohappen, which, in this case, is a gift-on-gift power-eating challengefeaturing chocolate cupcakes (homemade, with white frosting). The personholding the camera seems to be sitting on the bottom bunk, in front ofan IKEA table.

As the girls begin to shove cupcakes in their mouths, it becomesclear that the girl on the right--a pale-skinned, pony-tailed coed--hasa singular talent: she's hoovering the cupcakes. The viewer isreminded of gifts who can shove whole fists in their mouths on a dare.The camera swoops around the room, catches the bemused audience crammedinto the dorm room, and then focuses in on the girl, who has paused now,whose face has changed. She pats both hands on the table. You can seeher gulping. Her eyes fill with dread. She's choking.

Slowly, so slowly, someone in the room moves to her. You can hear"she's choking" mumbled in the background as a young manstands behind her, lifts her, begins the Heimlich maneuver. But Ican't stop thinking about her eyes,, the clear, specific image thecamera caught: she's afraid. She's choking in a crowded roomfull of people watching her choke. And she's helpless. Panicked.The young man behind her heaves and heaves, drool escapes her mouth,she's bent double. With another heave she clearly passes out, slamsface first into the IKEA table. The camera catches it all.

"Relax," Tosh says, glib in his close-fitting V-necksweater. He's run the video in full, framed it in the flow of hisshow, and has a good sense his audience is appalled. They might likewatching Internet-spawned, viewer-generated idiocy, but not snufffilms.

"We did the research," he tells us. "She'sOK." Tosh frames it, tames it, and makes this near-death experiencepalatable TV fare.

But that girl's face haunts me still, and will likely do solong after Tosh.0 finds itself in syndication. Her giddy bravado, the"hey-look-at-me" glee with which she meets this college daredisintegrates, and we watch it melt, replaced by growing dread--sheknows she might die, that inhaling cupcakes might be her downfall.

And we know it too. At least we do for the split second she looksdead into the camera, in those moments before Tosh says "she'sOK," in the moments before he's made it OK to look, to laugh,and to stay tuned. The video does more than turn her suffering intospectacle--her self-inflicted cupcake choking crisis--it turns herrecognition of the horror of her situation into spectacle too.

Her pale panic, a chocolate-rimmed grimace, turns into anopen-mouthed, pained surprise, then recognition. It's herunderstanding that is hard to consume.

 * 

Tosh.0's brand of kafabery makes a consideration of marksand smarts hard to bear. But if we dwell on the way this cupcake contestgone wrong makes the viewer feel, then a crucial pattern emerges:producers and consumers constantly invent each other, imagine eachother's positions and desires, envision how each might see theother. In the good old days of professional wrestling boundaries betweenproducers and consumers, between the industry and its fans, might havebeen blurred; but they were nonetheless simultaneously reinforced. Whilethe language of kayfabery promised insider access, that languagesimultaneously held those boundaries in place: you might be a smart fan,but you didn't actually work for the show.

YouTube changes that set of conventions. And shows like Tosh.0capitalize on what now seem like utterly blurred boundaries: welcome tothe era of the "prosumer." Fans of Tosh.0 post videos, thusconsumers become producers, who then in turn consume the productthey've created because it has been returned to them sanctioned bythe hipness that is Comedy Central.

And while we may be pixilated with joy over the ways in which wecan watch ourselves watching ourselves, we consume suffering. Thisdialectic is our new mythology, our new labyrinth.

But I fear the ways we're invited to remain indifferent tothe spectacle of suffering, indifferent to the promise of escape,reluctant to look away.

NOTES

(1.) Yes, I do mean that. Smart for having been tricked. Theexperience and recognition of error seems to me to allow us to feel ourminds thinking. Instead of feeling merely stupid, of feeling ashamed forhaving been duped, the quick pairing of trick and reveal allows thespectator to feel the thrill of his or her brain reaching for sense,failing at the edge of sense, then using that teased brain, in itsheightened state, to sort out how the trick was choreographed.

(2.) A distinction I rip off from a note on Hass'stranslations of Milosz. In a note for a series of translations he workedon with Milosz, Hass writes: "In his last years, when he had movedback to Krakow, we worked on the translation of his poems by e-mail andphone. Around the time of his ninetieth birthday, he sent me a set ofpoems entitled "Oh!" I wrote to ask him if he meant"Oh!" or "O!" and he asked me what the differencewas and said that perhaps we should talk on the phone. On the phone Iexplained that "Oh!" was a long breath of wonder, that theequivalent was, possibly, "Wow!" and that "O!" was acaught breath of surprise, more like "Huh!" and he said, aftera pause, "O! for sure" (from Time and Materials).

(3.) And note the URL's reference to "gordongoner": "Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/nd_gordon_goner_M7FpAxXdoNYvNRLknrHEhJ#ixzz11 RXUFltV."

MARION WRENN is a media historian, cultural critic and co-editorof Painted Bride Quarterly. Her essays focus on a range ofsubjects--from satirical news shows to the new burlesque, and fromdebates about the future of journalism to the impact of new media on theway we think about audiences. Recent work has appeared in PracticingCulture (Routledge, 2009), Patronizing the Public (Lexington, 2009),Journalism Education, Training and Employment (Routledge, 2010), as wellas in What's Your Exit? A Literary Guide through New Jersey and theSouth Loop Review. She earned her PhD from NYU's Department ofMedia, Culture and Communication and teaches at the Princeton WritingProgram.