The actor Sean Penn
raised a few eyebrows and some hackles this week when he said that he watched
ISIS videos of beheadings out of ‘moral responsibility’. His argument was that
he has an obligation to face the actual horror of what ISIS does rather than
allow himself the less uncomfortable option of viewing ‘sanitised’ versions
broadcast by mainstream media. He also suggested that anyone who claimed that
watching simulated violence in movies has inured them to actual violence was
either ‘intellectually
dishonest or existentially un-present'.
Counter arguments include the opinion that watching such videos plays into
the hands of ISIS and their slick and sick propaganda machine, the contention
that to do so has the potential to degrade those who watch and the danger of
becoming entrapped in voyeurism and the ‘pornography of violence’. All of these
are valid arguments and ought not to be dismissed lightly, but I have sympathy
with Penn’s viewpoint.
I do not think that it is necessary to watch every real-life horror video
released by ISIS, nor do I think that it is wise to access its websites
directly (feeding the already inflated egos of ISIS activists), but I do think
that there is a place for viewing some unedited videos on reputable news
websites.
I say this because I think that there is a need to identify as closely as
possible with the suffering of ISIS victims, to understand the stark and brutal
reality of ISIS actions and to respond at a visceral, as well as at an
intellectual level, to these horrific events. In the same way, it is necessary
to view footage of the holocaust, the aftermath of blanket bombing, the human
face of ‘collateral’ damage and actual battle scenes. I don’t think that we
should allow ourselves the ‘luxury’ of protecting our sensibilities or of
sticking our heads in the sand. Life is often truly horrible and brutal; if we
are fortunate enough not to experience it at first hand, we ought not to keep
it at arms-length just because it is happening to others. I don’t buy the
explanation of some that they don’t need to see any of this in order to know
how terrible it is; that might be true intellectually, but I doubt if it is
true emotionally and psychologically.
Of course there are limits to this approach. There is a fine line between desiring
to empathise with victims of violence and becoming complicit with those who
perpetrate the violence. Serial video viewing is both unnecessary and unhealthy,
some acts of violence and degradation such as rape are so personal that it is
hard to see how viewing them does not make one complicit in the crime, but with
these caveats acknowledged, I think that Sean Penn makes a reasonable case;
more than beauty is in the eye of the beholder….
