COMMENTARY
Of images that shock
- By: Kong Rithdee
- Published: 28/03/2009 at 12:00 AM
- Newspaper section: News
When Puea Thai MP Chao-warin Latthasaksiri (aka the sak kra bua MP, aka the Cave Lijia prospector) proudly presented the grisly footage of the decapitation of soldiers in the South during the censure debate last week the image struck the honourable gentlemen of parliament, as Baudelaire said, like "an oasis of horror in the desert of boredom". Nasty bickering ensued on the floor, along with questions: Has the guy been watching torture video? Saw I, II, III, IV and V? Or: has he subscribed to the al-Qaeda tactic - no, not the bit about the beheading, but the exploitation of shocking images as a political weapon?
Earlier this week, there was another clamour regarding the display of unsavoury images. Filmmaker Toranong Srichua is plugging his new movie, a disaster epic Tsunami 2022, by plastering the wall of a five-storey building near Hua Lamphong with pictures of dead people, presumably the victims of the jumbo waves. The film's tag line is: "Men have hurt Nature for too long, now Nature will have its revenge." The image is that of a sensationalised tragedy. Some of the dead do not have their clothes on.
Defying the bad press, outspoken MP Chaowarin said what he showed in parliament was "reality", and he'd apologise only when "somebody has a heart attack from watching it".
Chaowarin is a Ratchaburi party-list MP who once claimed he possessed a treasure map of buried gold in Cave Lijia; so rich was the secret trove that Thailand would instantly join the ranks of the world's richest. So he dug, and dug, and dug...
Defying the criticism, outspoken Toranong said the image he has shown is that of actual victims of the 2004 tsunami, and that his intention for making the film was to "relate the information to the public... so that lives can be saved if things like this happen again".
Toranong has a cultish reputation as a filmmaker who likes to strip bare all human pretence and stares, unblinking, at the naked truth of brutality and filth. He is also known as a devout Buddhist.
Tsunami 2022, he said, cost him 160 million baht (I'd say it's a little exaggerated if not a lot), an amount he knows he'll never recoup.
Both men have gotten flak, as they should, for their insensitivity, even selfishness. Yet it is worth noting how both men's claim of the need to present "reality" through shocking images is not entirely irrelevant.
I do not agree with their decision to show those images in those places, since Chaowarin and Toranong stepped across the line, a fine line, that separates realism from exploitation, the inconvenient truth from the scandalous PR trick. Still, their decision to show those images serves to remind us that we are living in a time when images are so powerful that they can stir us into action - to condemn, to praise, to buy stuff, to reflect, to change, to side with the govenmernt, to oppose the government. And since "reality" has become such a tricky concept - we have so many versions of the same reality these days - it means we, the audience, have to exert more power of judgement and be ready, in the right context and space, to expose ourselves to shocking images that our prejudices are not familiar with.
Our judgement concludes that Chaowarin went too far with the decapitation video, which was shown, as reported, with a kind of cynical exhibitionism.
The act of showing real dead people on screen (or in other media, like, ironically, the sensational newspaper that broke Toranong's story) has long ignited controversy, especially when you gain something from showing those images - political leverage in the case of the MP, or marketing buzz in the case of the movie director, or pure profit in other instances. We deplored when the terrorists broadcast the decapitations of their hostages.
But then, what about when all news networks broadcast the hanging of Saddam Hussein? Once or twice, okay; but repeatedly, why? And what about other events that we've never seen in their entire reality, because if we had, maybe the images would have shocked us into changing our minds, like, say, the Tak Bai massacre?
In the right context, disturbing image provides information, reality-check, or perhaps wisdom. In the wrong context, it's a violation of human rights - of the dead as well as the living. We can't deny that most of the time the line is fuzzy, the motive obscure. Censorship won't help, because it cannot just erase that line. Intelligence, caution and consciousness can.
- Kong Rithdee writes about movies and popular culture in the Bangkok Post real.time section.
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