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Personal tragedy shouldn’t pass for entertainment
By Lauren | March 17, 2008
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of visiting Rome for a few days. One of the most memorable points of the trip was a visit to the Colosseum, the enormous arena where decadent ancient Romans once gathered to watch gladiators slaughter wild animals, slaves, prisoners and one another for gold and fleeting glory. The ruins were spectacular, but just thinking about the amount of innocent blood that had been spilled on the sands of the Colosseum made me queasy. It was, and is, hard for me to understand why anyone would find somebody else’s agony fun to watch.
More recently, I saw the movie Untraceable (a thriller along the lines of Along Came a Spider or Kiss the Girls, though lamentably without the extraordinary talents of actor Morgan Freeman). In Untraceable, Diane Lane plays a police investigator seeking to stop a serial killer with an unusual “signature.” The killer, played by Joseph Cross, stages his murders on the Internet, using methods that increase his victims’ suffering and accelerate their deaths as more people log in to watch. The Internet-surfing public’s lust for blood literally becomes the murder weapon. Untraceable raises troubling ethical issues about what people find entertaining.
It would be nice to think that modern Americans are more civilized than ancient Romans and that we’ve outgrown the bloodlust of the Colosseum but, increasingly, I doubt that’s true. Whether it’s the tabloids blaring about some celebrity’s most recent collapse into rehabilitation or the bloggers gleefully shredding the remnants of a politician’s reputation after an ethical lapse, Americans have proven to our media that the best way to sell advertising is to plaster it across somebody’s tragedy. The media’s treatment of Eliot Spitzer in the days following his disgrace and resignation from office has brought to mind the way the ancient Romans might have treated a particularly vicious but successful gladiator when he finally took a fatal blow. I never much liked Spitzer’s hyped-up antagonism either, and I certainly can’t admire what he’s allegedly done. Still, lining up to give his tattered reputation a self-righteous kick is plain ugly, and some of the things that have been said about his wife and the other woman involved in the scandal are downright appalling.
Twenty-first Century Americans enjoy opportunities for communication that the ancient Romans could hardly have imagined. Our entertainment and news media could be used to impart education, inspiration, praise and hope. Surely, we can do better than this.
Topics: Personal Ethics |