Why are we drawn to images of dystopia and disaster? (A College Essay from Around this Time Last Year)

 This is not just a question that asks one to think about the contents of the images themselves but also our deeper psychological response to them. Whether an audience is drawn to them because of its anxiety over what the images ask of them (because of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls an image’s “desires” in his text What do pictures want? the lives and loves of images), or because of one’s own desires being projected onto the image as I will discuss through Sigmund Freud’s theory of the death drive and George Bataille’s writings on the psychological link between eroticism and death. Essentially, in this essay I will be discussing if it is the wants and aims of such images or our own projected human urges which makes the themes of death, disaster, and dystopia so captivating as subjects in visual art. As well as how whether an image is of real life, versus, if it is an imagined image can influence whether it is us or the image demanding something from the other in terms of images of disaster and dystopia. Since I believe this to be a question whose answer is largely based in psychology, I will be referencing more psychological theories than the thoughts of writers in the field of visual culture in an attempt to find an answer, for myself, that feels authentic.

In W.J.T. Mitchell’s book, What Do Pictures Want? he argues that “images are like living organisms; living organisms are best described as things that have desires”, and that these desires aren’t necessarily realised “in the same way, nor under conditions of their own choosing” (Mitchell, 2005, p.11). Here the point is that the spectator is the one being asked of something. In the case of what do images of disaster want, it is argued that they demand from us our anxieties and feelings of dread. The image has the need for attention which it intends to gain by grabbing us and drawing us in, feeding off responses of existential dread and fear that the audience has apparently little control or desire in giving. In this text images of Dolly the sheep and 9/11 are used as examples of real world, moving objects whose images achieve this effect. Another example that I think is relevant to this idea, the idea that what draws us to these images of disaster and dystopia is the wants of the images themselves, are the “Little Electric Chair” silkscreen prints produced by Andy Warhol as part of his Death and Disaster series ( fig.1).

This image is similar to those referenced by Mitchell as it shows a real life object that is itself an object of death and disaster, whose image has been co-opted by, in this case, an artist to make a picture which draws us in by its sinister subject matter and its want for our reaction.

 

“Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death” (Sonntag, 2004, p.24)

The electric chair shown in the series, repetitively printed in Warhol’s signature lurid style, is like his other compelling images of car crashes, suicides and canned food poisonings in the fact that a viewer’s transfixion to the image comes from the knowledge that these pictures are of real things that are indexes of death and that Warhol collected from newspapers and was compelled to recreate and repeat. It seems that there is not just an obsession with pop-culture but an obsession with pop-tragedy. Something fitting that the acclaimed inventor of reality-tv would be obsessed with images of reality-tragedy. The repurposing of the images of real events through artistic medium, whether that be photograph or screen printing, draws us into the tragedy as it asks the viewer of something. It grabs at the soul and humanity of the audience, demanding attention from the stagnant, passive viewer.

 The existence of these images juxtaposed with the pop art movement also asks the viewer to see them as consumable, throw away commodities. I tend to think that as soon as an image asks the viewer to go against their natural inkling to moralise and empathise with it, the viewer is more and more drawn to it. In the sense that the viewer wants to be shocked and feel sad about images of death because they want to feel like a well-adjusted human, but instead they are confronted with mass produced reproductions of a baby pink car crash (fig.2).

However, I do not believe this dynamic is true for all images of death, disaster and dystopia. It does not feel intuitive to me that when it comes to visual horror that it is always the image that asks and the viewer that gives in. I know from my own experience in being unable to look away from horror movie gore and the glorification of dead bodies and violence in cinema that that certain draw feels different. It is a perverted projection of the darker needs of man and the image is merely a receiver of this fascination.

“The gruesome either invites us to be spectators or cowards” (Sontag, 2004, p.42). 

Freud’s theory of “The Death Drive” or the “Death Instinct” states that humans have the same compulsion towards death and self-destruction as we do for the chase toward pleasure. In his text “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” he argues that the goal of pleasure cannot be the sole thing that drives humans as there is evidence that people do things intentionally that cause them mental distress, to relive traumatic moments and so on. I think this theory can be applied to society’s obsession with stories of dystopia and consumption of disaster media.

 These dual theories of Thanatos and Eros, the drive for both life and death create such a contrast and contradiction in their supposed duality and ability to simultaneously exist within the human psyche. This makes me believe that they could not live alongside each other in each of us without bursting out in a confused mess in the art we create and consume in response. Another Freudian theory which runs parallel to these and attempts to explain why people return to suffering is the idea of the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud, S. 1914). Here he describes how a person being studied may attempt to recreate/ relive negative emotions that caused their current (traumatised) mental state by repeating it.  This compulsion to repeat is contrary to the Pleasure Principle and feels to me to fall in line with the “death drive”.

I think the most obvious examples in visual art when thinking of images of disaster that portray the human aversion and longing for death are in film. The film that I will be using as an example is Elephant (1989) directed by Alan Clarke. This film consists of only three lines of dialogue and no background music, only diegetic ambient noise, making the visuals the sole object for audience attention. The plot is more a repetitive string of the same event enacted by different characters in different settings over and over again; someone walking, walking which is then punctuated by gunshots, person walks away with a cut to a lingering shot on the dead body (fig.3). This makes me think that the visual goal of the film is for us to vicariously indulge in the experience of murder and death on repeat, the draw coming from the Freudian need for us to chase death and the human mind’s compulsion to repeat this until the conclusion of the film. The ending shot lingers on the image of the resulting gunshot splatter of the final murder, the aesthetics of which create a sort of perverse symbol of orgasm (fig.4) which brings me on to my final discussion of Georges Bataille’s links between death and eroticism.

“It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost as the desire for ones that show bodies naked” (Sontag, 2004, p.41)

Taking a step further than the idea that people are drawn to images of death because of our own perverse need to live vicariously through on screen, I want to discuss Georges Bataille’s idea that it is in these images of death that we find the continuity we crave as well as an attraction to them created by our subconscious eroticisation of them (Bataille, G. (1987) Eroticism). Most people don’t want to die, yet want the feeling of the ultimate continuity that only death can bring. Bataille argues that sex is a substitute for death in this context. From my own experience there is this abstract feeling when a character is bloodily sacrificed in film or TV, that there is a certain sensuality and eroticism to it. It isn’t something I can rationalise in a way that makes me sound well-balanced but this argument that sex is a so called “mini death” that can be reverse engineered in the semiotics of images so that death could now mean “mini sex” does makes intuitive sense to me. “In human consciousness eroticism is that within man which calls his being into question” (Bataille, 1987, p29).

When thinking on violent and distressing film that could be viewed as erotic, David Lynch’s Twin Peaks came immediately to mind. I and others I have spoken to about this (in conversation and online) find the way Lynch shoots violence to be undoubtedly seductive. I distinctly remember cooing with my mates over how hot Agent Cooper looked after being shot, lying on the floor. I then made a Tumblr post about it and had people agree with me there too. It might have been just my niche local echo chamber agreeing with me that there was nothing more subversively erotic than Kyle MacLachlan bleeding out on the floor of The Great Northern( fig.5) but I really do think this is a phenomenon shared by what I believe is most people, even if they are not willing to admit it.

In conclusion I do not think it is any one of the three arguments proposed that gives an image of death or disaster its allure to an individual, but I think it could be any one of them depending on the nature of the image’s creation. Linking back to the first concept I introduced in this essay, that the draw to some images comes from the images themselves asking us to react to the horrors of their reality, I don’t think that the idea that images of violence can be erotic in those cases there is something uncomfortably seductive about the way Lynch shows the victims of horrible crimes (fig.6 and fig.7) which is sinisterly alluring but if the same images were made with real victims of real disasters the pull would be different as it would be one inspired by feelings of disgust and nausea. In the same vein I believe it is harder for us to indulge the Freudian need to explore and live our own deaths through real images of death and disaster because it shatters the illusion that it could be something abstract and romanticizable, it would hit too close to home.

Bibliography 

Bataille, G. (1987) Eroticism. London: Boyars (Marion Boyars modern classics).

Elephant,1989, Alan Clarke, BBC Northern Ireland 

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Dover Publications, 2015. Chicago, 17th ed.

Freud, S. (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of 

Psycho-Analysis II)

Halley, P. (2002) Andy Warhol : little electric chair paintings. Stellan Holm Gallery.

MacLachlan, K., Boyle, L. F. and Fenn, S. (2010) Twin peaks: definitive gold box edition. Universal/Playback.

Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005) What do pictures want? : the lives and loves of images. London: University of Chicago Press.

Sontag, S. (2004) Regarding the pain of others. 1St Picador edn. New York: Picador.