One Real Thing
on snuff films, broadly speaking
Morning album: June has been waking up at 5:30 am. Desperate times call for ABBA Gold.
A note regarding the most recent politically incoherent assassination, not the first, not the last: I am most struck by it as another mediated death, something seen through a phone screen, something we’ve seen so much of since — I want to say since October 7, 2023, but this gradual desensitization has gone on longer than that. It is since that date, though, that I started having to dodge snuff films every time I logged on to social media.
Think of the word, desensitization — the numbing of sensation, the removal of yourself from a body, from your eyes and limbs and neck, from the blood rushing to and from your heart. A similar concept to depersonalization, or derealization, and in my experience, all of them seem to creep up on you when you’re on social media. Media — mediated reality — media meaning “middle layer,” the fog standing between you and your body. Your body, meaning a thing that grows and dies. Words are also a kind of middle layer between us and the real.
To quote Phil Elverum: death is real.
I don’t believe that anyone who murders anyone, self-defense aside, believes that death is real. In the series His Dark Materials, people exist in a world where souls live outside their bodies and take the form of animals. These souls, called daemons, can’t travel far from their bodies. But some mysterious evil is severing the connection between daemons and bodies, with horrifying results. In our world, I believe that severance happens when one person kills another. And that connection between our souls and bodies is strained, too, when we watch one person kill another.
Because what does that mean? How can we understand death as real, as existing, when it is such an easy thing to do to someone? It’s easier to kill someone than it is to rob a bank, or hold someone for ransom, or steal someone’s identity, or do any other number of crimes. Murder is the easiest one, if you can get past the taboo, and where does that taboo live besides our own bodies, our own beating hearts, our own fear of death?
What can I say — without drawing equivalencies between the killing of one person and the killing of hundreds and the killing of thousands — except all murder is murder? I suppose just this: remember you live in body. Run and swim and jump and have sex and laugh and cry and listen to music and look another person in the eye. Someday you will be dead. Life must be sacred. It must.