Massacre at Virginia Tech, Part 2 [revised 4/20]
Here's a revision of my analysis of The Massacre at Virginia Tech.
Media Spectacle and the “Massacre at Virginia Tech”
Douglas Kellner
The mainstream corporate media today process events, news, and information in the form of media spectacle. In an arena of intense competition with 24/7 cable TV networks, talk radio, Internet sites and blogs, and ever proliferating new media like Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube, competition for attention is ever more intense leading the media to go to sensationalistic tabloidized stories which they construct in the forms of media spectacle that attempt to attract maximum audiences for as much time as possible.
The 1990s saw the emergence and proliferation of cable news networks, talk radio, and the Internet, and megaspectacles of the era included the Clinton Sex scandals and impeachment, the O.J. Simpson murder trials, and on a global level the life and death of princess Diana. The era also saw an intensification of celebrity news and scandals, with Michael Jackson perhaps the most sensational case (see Kellner 2003a).
The new millennium opened with a hung presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and a 36 Battle for the White House and intense media spectacle, resulting in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision for Bush that blocked the counting of votes in Florida, resulting in one of the most momentous political crimes in history that I describe in my book Grand Theft 2000 (Kellner 2001). This spectacle was soon followed by the 9/11 terror attacks on New York and Washington, the deadliest attack on US soil in its history, and perhaps the most extensive global media spectacle ever, inaugurating an era of Terror War (Kellner 2003b).
Following the model of his father’s 1991 war with Iraq, the second Bush administration’s Iraq war was also orchestrated as a media spectacle, although after declaring victory in May 2003, events flipped out of control and the spectacle in Iraq has often been a negative and highly contested one (Kellner 2005). The Bush years have been a series of spectacles including its failure during Hurricane Katrina, scandals involving criminal trials of its highest officials and Republican congressional supporters, and now intense focus on its Attorney General in what appears to be one of the most systematically political partisanizing of the Justice system in US history.
In addition to making a spectacle out of major political events, the media produce spectacles around events and controversies of social and everyday life, often providing forums through which major political issues and social struggles are negotiated and debated. In April 2007 alone, revelations that three Duke Lacrosse players accused of gang rape were innocent raised issues of a rogue prosecutor and prosecutorial media flying out of control. During the same week, racist and sexist comments by Don Imus against the Rutgers university women’s basketball team generated a media firestorm and debate over proper language in regard to race and gender, the limits of free speech, and corporate media responsibility that led to the end of Imus’s long radio career and a subsequent heated debate over the incident.
The shooting rampage at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007 generated a media spectacle with local, national, and even global media following every twist of a shooting that produced the highest death toll of any gun-related mass murder in US history. The event has generated debates over gun control, school safety, and what causes teen and young student killers to act destructively. There was also a racial dimension to the shooting as the assassin was revealed to be a Korean-American Cho Seung-Hui.
Often initial racialized attributions of the killer in a mass murder spectacle plays on deeply-rooted racism. In the Oklahoma City bombings of 1994, initial allegations targeted an Arab, Middle Eastern perpetrator, setting off a paroxysm of racism. Soon after, when it was discovered that the villain was a white American Timothy McVeigh, who had fought in the Gulf War, there was shock and disbelief.
Likewise, on the day of the shooting, as Media Matters reports:
right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel ‘speculat[ed]’ in an April 16 weblog post that the shooter, who had been identified at that point only as a man of Asian descent, might be a "Paki" Muslim and part of "a coordinated terrorist attack." "Paki" is a disparaging term for a person of Pakistani descent.
Schlussel wrote, "The murderer has been identified by law enforcement and media reports as a young Asian male," adding, "The Virginia Tech campus has a very large Muslim community, many of which are from Pakistan." Schlussel continued: "Pakis are considered 'Asian,' " and asked, "Were there two [shooters] and was this a coordinated terrorist attack?" Schlussel asserted that the reason she was "speculating that the 'Asian' gunman is a Pakistani Muslim" was "[b]ecause law enforcement and the media strangely won't tell us more specifically who the gunman is." Schlussel claimed that "[e]ven if it does not turn out that the shooter is Muslim, this is a demonstration to Muslim jihadists all over that it is extremely easy to shoot and kill multiple American college students." (quoted from http://mediamatters.org/items/200704170006.)
Soon after, the media began reporting that the murderer was “a Chinese national here on a student visa," which led Schlussel to find "[y]et another reason to stop letting in so many foreign students." Other conservative bloggers talked of how young Chinese receive military training and that this could account for the mayhem.
When the killer was identified as a "South Korean national,” Cho Seung-Hui, and "a South Korean who was a resident alien in the United States," racist comments emerged about the violent authoritarianism of Koreans. Frightened Korean students began leaving the Virginia Tech campus, Korean communities everywhere grieved, and the president of South Korea made a formal apology.[i]
There was, initially at least, little or no analysis of how the prevalence and ubiquity of media spectacle itself is contributing to the production of mass killings like the 9/11 attacks or what the media has widely labeled “The Massacre at Virginia Tech.”
Early revelations about the shooter profiled Cho Seung-Hui as a loner who seemed to have few if any friends and who generally avoided contact with other students and teachers. There were reports that he had left a rambling note directed against the rich, the spoiled, and the world in general, which police found in his dorm room, which narrativized the event as revenge killings.
There were also reports that Cho had written violent screenplays and other texts, a couple of which were posted on the Internet, that deeply disturbed other students in his writing classes, and which led one of his teachers, Lucinda Roy, an English professor, to advise him to seek campus counseling.
Yet, at first, no one suggested that the shootings could be seen as an attempt to act out some of his violent fantasies and create a media spectacle in which Cho appears as the director and star. Just as Al Qaeda has been orchestrating terror events to promote their Jihadist agenda, and the Bush administration orchestrated a war in Iraq to promote its geopolitical agenda, so too may individuals carry through spectacles of terror to seek revenge, attention, or to realize violent fantasies.
In 1994, Timothy McVeigh participated in the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing hundreds and unleashing a major media spectacle of the era -– linked to the deadly US government attack on a religious compound in Waco a year before.
Almost exactly eight years ago, two teenage middle-class white boys, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, went on a shooting rampage in Columbine, Colorado before taking their own lives.
A multimedia package that Cho mailed to NBC News on April 17, apparently after the first murder in the dorms, and widely shown on April 18, reveal that Cho indeed was planning a media spectacle in the tradition of the Columbine shooters who he celebrated as “martyrs.”
A picture and video gallery in the multi-media dossier sent to NBC made it clear that Cho was planning to carry out himself a plan that he had constructed as “Massacre at Virginia Tech.” One of the photos in which Cho posed with a hammer in his hand reprises the Korean Asian Extreme film “Oldboy,” which itself is a revenge fantasy in which a young Korean inexplicably imprisoned in a room goes out a rampage of revenge against his captors. Another pose of Cho’s photo gallery show Cho pointing a gun at his own head quoting Robert de Niro’s famous scene in “Taxi Driver,” in which he follows a slaughter of perceived villains with a suicidal blowing of his head apart, just as Cho did. Further, as Stephen Hunter argues, much of the iconography in the photo gallery quotes poses in films by Hong Kong action director John Woo, as in the imaged where Cho holds two guns in his hands, points a gun at a camera, and the brandishing of Beretta and Glock guns featured in Woo’s movies, that include The Killer where a professional assassin goes down a corridor, enters a room, and systematically mows down its occupants.[ii]
Earlier reports indicated that Cho had written in ink “Ishmael Ax” on his arm, and NBC reports that the package with the multimedia dossier was addressed as sent from “A. Ishmael.” This could refer to the opening of Herman Melville’s classic “Moby Dick” which would position the shooter both as on a revenge quest, as was Captain Ahab against the White Whale, Moby Dick. But it also positions Cho himself within the great tradition of American literature, as Ishmael is the narrator of one of the US’s great novels. Perhaps the Ishmael Ax moniker positions Cho as well in the tradition of Hollywood gore films featuring Ax(e) murderers, as other photos in his dossier show him with knives and hammer in hand, iconography familiar from horror films.
Cho’s references in his text thus span high and low culture in a postmodern pastiche. The references to Christ in his rambling “manifesto” posit him as sacrificial and redemptive, although he also blames Jesus for his rampage, writing:
“You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.” But then: “Jesus loved crucifying me. He loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul all this time."
Another excerpt from his text positions Cho as a domestic terrorist carrying out a revenge fantasy when he writes:
"you had a hundred billion chances and ways to have avoided today…. But you decided to spill my blood. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option. The decision was yours. Now you have blood on your hands that will never wash off."
The “you” in the message seems to refer to all the fellow students and teachers who failed to grasp his creative genius and who ridiculed his writings and behavior. “You” also could refer to you and I more generally as part of a culture that Cho has could come to violently and psychotically reject, although “You” could also refer to the media itself as his inspiration, for his sick murder rampage was clearly based on media culture and its vehicle was media spectacle.
Cho thus positions himself as a domestic terrorist assassin in the tradition of Timothy McVeigh and the two Columbine shooters, the latter of whom he mentions in the text. As an MCNBC commentator noted, Cho’s “testimony” videos were also grimly reminiscent of suicide bombers who left vides explaining their actions and trying to justify themselves with grievances and higher purposes. But Cho also positions himself as a vehicle of class revenge:
You had everything you wanted. Your Mercedes wasn’t enough, you brats. Your golden necklaces weren’t enough, you snobs. Your trust fund wasn’t enough. Your vodka and Cognac weren’t enough. All your debaucheries weren’t enough. Those weren’t enough to fulfill your hedonistic needs. You had everything.
The ensuing media spectacle apparently achieved what the crazed Cho had in mind, a spectacle of terror on the level of the 9/11 terror attacks which attracted scores of media from all over the world to Blacksburg in saturation coverage of the event. His carefully assembled multi-media package revealed to the world who Cho was, and won for him a kind of sick and perverted immortality, or at least tremendous notoriety.
Hence, in a society of media spectacle, individuals and groups are producing spectacular media events to act out various agendas and the media reproduce and circulate the spectacles, creating in some case like The Virginia Tech Massacre megaspectacles that colonize the media and everyday life. These events in turn become sites of struggle over key issues of class, race, gender, and politics. The media themselves are complicit in these spectacles which in an era of highly competitive and multiple media sensationalize and dramatize the events of the moment.
The proliferation of media spectacle requires renewed calls for critical media literacy as that people can critically analyze the media and see how they are vehicles for representations of race, class, gender, sexuality, power, and violence. There is no question but that media nurture fantasies, sometimes sick and vile ones, and to survive in our culture requires that we are able to critically analyze and dissect media culture and not let it gain power over us.
Notes:
The first struggle was over gun control
To illustrate my thesis, I will set up my analysis of media spectacle by discussing the OJ Simpson trial in the mid-1990s and will then turn to the Duke lacrosse rape case, the Imus comments and his resultant firings to indicate what specific interests and agendas played out in these spectacles.
It is clear that Cho put himself in a tradition of shooters who create media spectacle,
Notes
[i] See
[ii] Stephen Hunter, “Cinematic Clues To Understand The Slaughter Did Asian Thrillers Like 'Oldboy' Influence the Va. Tech Shooter?,” Washington Post, April 20, 2007; Page C01 at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/19/AR2007041901817.html?hpid=topnews.
