Page 71 - Courting the Media Contemporary Perspectives on Media and Law

62 Christina Spiesel

To review: Tasercam video is made by a ―security‖ device that is a kind of
weapon that claims to be non-lethal. While the picture is being recorded an
electrical current is being deployed against a living subject, so the making of
the picture and the infliction of pain are co-incident within a point of view that
brings viewer and weapon into a tight relationship. Because there is no
outward evidence of wound or permanent damage, we viewers can perhaps
enjoy the sadism (inflicting pain on another) seemingly without being
implicated or feeling too much responsibility. What viewers see is a person
being immobilized. If there is audio, generally those on the receiving end cry
out [Taser clips].
Aside from the various recordings of enforcement activities involving
Tasers, the web is full of examples of training videos and ―home uses‖ – a
roommate tasing his friend while in the shower [BreakMedia], a wife, her
husband, while fooling around in the backyard, [NinjaWholesale], trainees
doing it to each other. [Trainees taser video] . As of 8/4/09, YouTube responds
to the search term ―tasers‘ with a possible 14,400 choices. All of this
normalizes the device, reducing any reservations we might harbor over its
deployment in law enforcement. Todd Phillips‘ summer 2009 film The
Hangover has a scene, played for broad comedy, of school children being
drafted to tase one of the heroes to punish him for bad behavior before his
release by the authorities [Phillips].
On the Taser International web site there is a category of Tasers for
consumers and it is illustrated with a picture of a woman protecting her home,
not unlike previous ad campaigns to sell women on the use of firearms
[Women and Guns]. The result of disseminating materials like these is to make
the technology everyday, like an appliance. We are invited to protect
ourselves, the Taser giving us security, and, at the same time, it justifies our
―actions‖ in identifying with the point of view if we are watching Taser video:
this can only increase our sense of psychological safety around the
gratification of our own sadistic pleasure of being on the sending end of pain
infliction.
Without resorting to Freud, we can look to our own art history for
confirmation. Stephen Eisenman argues that, in the Western cultural tradition,
that which links Classical art from the ancient world with European and
American civilization is the pathos formula replete with eroticized tortured
humans and animals (culminating in much religious art that many hold sacred)
and that it is this tradition that has paralyzed our social response to the Abu
Ghraib photographs. He suggests that our outrage has been tempered by the
deep familiarity of such imagery to us as evidenced by our own cultural