Gwyneth Paltrow's Head
Final scene from Se7en
I’m not much of a horror movie fan. You can have your Nightmare on Elm Street and all of its many grisly derivatives. My threshold for being creeped out is so low that to this day just the thought of Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in that box in Se7en is more than enough to turn my blood to frappaccino. That of course was back in the day when Gwyneth’s adorableness was at its zenith--her Emma and Shakespeare in Love stage--before she said and did enough silly things to help the Heathers of the Internet turn her into the Marie Antoinette of celebrities—“Let them eat gluten free!”
I did not need to actually see Kevin Spacey’s character behead her character in Se7en…and the movie didn’t need to show that gruesome scene in order to succeed as art rather than cheap thrill. My imagination is lively enough so subtlety still works for me. Not so for everyone, I realize. Surely not so for the powers of the National Football League who claimed that they couldn’t fully achieve an appropriate state of horror at the beating star player Ray Rice administered to “his woman” until they actually saw the blow that rendered her unconscious. Then, they say, they got it.
Many in the media properly called out the NFL on this bit of brain-damaged special pleading, pointedly asking, “What the hell did the NFL think happened on that elevator to so flatten a woman to the floor that 'her man' could then drag her seemingly lifeless body around like a rolled carpet?”
As I say, the question is all together proper, but it’s also elitist, asked as it is by people, like me, who don’t always need to have a picture drawn for them. As is the fate of elitists, we’re a minority in that we can imagine how she got there, as we can imagine how Gwyneth Paltrow’s head got into that box. But this world is not ours to rule. This world belongs to the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words crowd. They respond more readily and viscerally to graphic depictions of violence, thus it is and ever has been since the days of primitive paintings of the hunt on the walls of our forefathers’ caves. So it’s really not as unbelievable as some suggest that there are people who require that someone literally paint them a picture of a woman being crushed by a blow to the face to get what brought that woman down.
By the same token, it’s also not that unbelievable that our Congress--which has spent six years playing chicken with our economy, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure, rubbing the faces of our most vulnerable in the grit of their misfortune, and generally conducting the nation’s business like kids on a grade school playground—suddenly rises as one to grant the president a rare unified front to combat the threat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It’s the beheadings, stupid. Can there be any doubt that the public airing of “Jihadi John” cutting off the heads of two captive Americans is directly responsible for Congress’s unusual show of bipartisanship?
The beheadings alone, though, would not have been enough. Producing them as a graphic video was the key to baiting the US into yet another Mideast misadventure…and credit ISIS’s director of caliphate communications for knowing just how to push our national buttons. Without the visual aids, the beheadings would’ve blended right into our historical accommodation to willful decapitation. Neither ISIS specifically nor Islam generally have exclusive claim on beheadings for the dual purposes of punishing and terrorizing. In the Bible, John the Baptist is beheaded by Herod, who makes a gift of the severed head to Salome. In ancient Rome, alleged criminals against the state were eager to prove their citizenship so as to be spared the indignity of crucifixion for the far more honorable penalty of beheading. That renown Renaissance man Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded with such detachment as to make Ray Rice seem like an absolute prince by comparison. Queen Elizabeth I, who gave her name to one of the most glorious periods in English history, ordered the beheading of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots (and thus in their no vote on independence this week, the Scots once again failed to have Mary’s back). Elizabeth in our time, rather than being portrayed as an evil butcher, has been memorialized on screen by an array of movie queens from Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett to Judi Dench (who, in Shakespeare in Love, has the good grace not to have Gwyneth Paltrow beheaded for the crime of being a girl playing a boy playing a girl on the English stage).
Japanese beheading of an Australian POW
during World War II
The French Revolution was built on the severed heads of aristocrats; Germans were beheading spies in 1935; and as the picture at left shows, the Japanese—purveyors of our electronic devices and hybrid cars—were beheading “good guys” as recently as 1943. With this history, it is not impossible to imagine a future in which “Jihadi John”, the executioner of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, might one day be portrayed in the movies by some up-and-coming Charles Laughton or Richard Burton. But that’s the lesser issue.
The greater issue is that we’ve entered a distinct and disturbing period of policy by video…not only for private enterprises such as the NFL but for ostensibly public ones like the US Congress as well. For 50 years of Cold War, the Soviets expanded their territorial reach, persecuted their citizens and the citizens of other countries, and aimed certifiable weapons of mass destruction at our major population centers, but only a mad man would’ve suggested that we put “boots on the ground” in Russia to fix things. At any moment, the continent of Africa is teeming with as many dangers, cruelties and butchers with bloody blades as the Middle East, yet Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, quaking under his bed over ISIS, loses not a wink of sleep over that.
It seems quite likely that we have now entered a stage where foreign policy, jurisprudence, corporate behavior and common decency will be governed by the presence or absence of video. Human witness, intelligence, and intuition will no longer matter in the halls of Congress, jury rooms, boardrooms, and bedrooms as much as what’s visually available. Seeing is believing will be less a cliché and more an article of faith and a cause for action. If there is no visual evidence of the smackdown in the elevator, that’s a call for leniency; if there is visual evidence of the enemy’s brutality, that’s a call for war. There is no reason to trust in any of our other senses, including our common sense. The eyes have it.
I’m not much of a horror movie fan. You can have your Nightmare on Elm Street and all of its many grisly derivatives. My threshold for being creeped out is so low that to this day just the thought of Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head in that box in Se7en is more than enough to turn my blood to frappaccino. That of course was back in the day when Gwyneth’s adorableness was at its zenith--her Emma and Shakespeare in Love stage--before she said and did enough silly things to help the Heathers of the Internet turn her into the Marie Antoinette of celebrities—“Let them eat gluten free!”
I did not need to actually see Kevin Spacey’s character behead her character in Se7en…and the movie didn’t need to show that gruesome scene in order to succeed as art rather than cheap thrill. My imagination is lively enough so subtlety still works for me. Not so for everyone, I realize. Surely not so for the powers of the National Football League who claimed that they couldn’t fully achieve an appropriate state of horror at the beating star player Ray Rice administered to “his woman” until they actually saw the blow that rendered her unconscious. Then, they say, they got it.
Many in the media properly called out the NFL on this bit of brain-damaged special pleading, pointedly asking, “What the hell did the NFL think happened on that elevator to so flatten a woman to the floor that 'her man' could then drag her seemingly lifeless body around like a rolled carpet?”
As I say, the question is all together proper, but it’s also elitist, asked as it is by people, like me, who don’t always need to have a picture drawn for them. As is the fate of elitists, we’re a minority in that we can imagine how she got there, as we can imagine how Gwyneth Paltrow’s head got into that box. But this world is not ours to rule. This world belongs to the picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words crowd. They respond more readily and viscerally to graphic depictions of violence, thus it is and ever has been since the days of primitive paintings of the hunt on the walls of our forefathers’ caves. So it’s really not as unbelievable as some suggest that there are people who require that someone literally paint them a picture of a woman being crushed by a blow to the face to get what brought that woman down.
By the same token, it’s also not that unbelievable that our Congress--which has spent six years playing chicken with our economy, ignoring our crumbling infrastructure, rubbing the faces of our most vulnerable in the grit of their misfortune, and generally conducting the nation’s business like kids on a grade school playground—suddenly rises as one to grant the president a rare unified front to combat the threat of ISIS in Iraq and Syria. It’s the beheadings, stupid. Can there be any doubt that the public airing of “Jihadi John” cutting off the heads of two captive Americans is directly responsible for Congress’s unusual show of bipartisanship?
The beheadings alone, though, would not have been enough. Producing them as a graphic video was the key to baiting the US into yet another Mideast misadventure…and credit ISIS’s director of caliphate communications for knowing just how to push our national buttons. Without the visual aids, the beheadings would’ve blended right into our historical accommodation to willful decapitation. Neither ISIS specifically nor Islam generally have exclusive claim on beheadings for the dual purposes of punishing and terrorizing. In the Bible, John the Baptist is beheaded by Herod, who makes a gift of the severed head to Salome. In ancient Rome, alleged criminals against the state were eager to prove their citizenship so as to be spared the indignity of crucifixion for the far more honorable penalty of beheading. That renown Renaissance man Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded with such detachment as to make Ray Rice seem like an absolute prince by comparison. Queen Elizabeth I, who gave her name to one of the most glorious periods in English history, ordered the beheading of her cousin and rival Mary Queen of Scots (and thus in their no vote on independence this week, the Scots once again failed to have Mary’s back). Elizabeth in our time, rather than being portrayed as an evil butcher, has been memorialized on screen by an array of movie queens from Bette Davis to Cate Blanchett to Judi Dench (who, in Shakespeare in Love, has the good grace not to have Gwyneth Paltrow beheaded for the crime of being a girl playing a boy playing a girl on the English stage).
Japanese beheading of an Australian POW during World War II
The French Revolution was built on the severed heads of aristocrats; Germans were beheading spies in 1935; and as the picture at left shows, the Japanese—purveyors of our electronic devices and hybrid cars—were beheading “good guys” as recently as 1943. With this history, it is not impossible to imagine a future in which “Jihadi John”, the executioner of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, might one day be portrayed in the movies by some up-and-coming Charles Laughton or Richard Burton. But that’s the lesser issue.
The greater issue is that we’ve entered a distinct and disturbing period of policy by video…not only for private enterprises such as the NFL but for ostensibly public ones like the US Congress as well. For 50 years of Cold War, the Soviets expanded their territorial reach, persecuted their citizens and the citizens of other countries, and aimed certifiable weapons of mass destruction at our major population centers, but only a mad man would’ve suggested that we put “boots on the ground” in Russia to fix things. At any moment, the continent of Africa is teeming with as many dangers, cruelties and butchers with bloody blades as the Middle East, yet Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, quaking under his bed over ISIS, loses not a wink of sleep over that.
It seems quite likely that we have now entered a stage where foreign policy, jurisprudence, corporate behavior and common decency will be governed by the presence or absence of video. Human witness, intelligence, and intuition will no longer matter in the halls of Congress, jury rooms, boardrooms, and bedrooms as much as what’s visually available. Seeing is believing will be less a cliché and more an article of faith and a cause for action. If there is no visual evidence of the smackdown in the elevator, that’s a call for leniency; if there is visual evidence of the enemy’s brutality, that’s a call for war. There is no reason to trust in any of our other senses, including our common sense. The eyes have it.
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