Americans capitalize on death
Tragedies seen as little more than chance for cheap public

By Jack Bullion
Skiff Editorial Staff

There’s a terrific, wordless scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” which, lately, I can’t seem to get out of my mind. After the credits roll, the opening shot is a lazy pan backwards from the open window of James Stewart’s character’s apartment.

The camera ever so slowly settles on Stewart, asleep in a wheelchair, with a massive cast on his leg. Moving a bit further back to the left, the camera finally settles on a terrifying picture of an airborne race car hurtling straight at the camera. Now we know how why the man is in a cast, and what he does.

This scene, and indeed the rest of “Rear Window” itself, go a long way in portraying our culture’s obsession with witnessing things we shouldn’t and the messes we can get in when getting a voyeuristic thrill becomes part of our life.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this movie scene when I first heard about NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt’s tragic death. For a lot of reasons, this news affected me in such a profound way that it shocked me. For one, there’s really no escaping news like this in our area of the country. Here, racing is king. This is a place where people agree that Earnhardt’s sudden death was tantamount to racing’s version of the demises of John F. Kennedy or Elvis Presley without batting an eye.

The news also hit me hard because I used to be a big fan of auto racing, especially NASCAR. I liked NASCAR before it was cool to like NASCAR. From about the age of 9 until I was 13, I planned my spring, summer and occasionally fall Sundays (when the NFL game was boring) around watching grown men with silly stickers on their cars drive around in circles for three hours. And I kind of liked Dale Earnhardt, too — as long as he didn’t win too much.

Since then, I haven’t really watched much NASCAR racing. As is generally the case with me when I realize that something I like is tremendously popular with other people, I drop it and find another obsession that I can call my own.

But what really bothered me about Earnhardt’s death and what made me realize the real, subconscious reason that I stopped watching NASCAR and so many other forms of auto racing, was the possibility of death itself. Millions of people, whether they watched the event live, watched replays of it later, or picked up the morning edition of either the Dallas or Fort Worth papers, were actually witnessing someone die. And that is a very big deal.

So big, in fact, that to me it seemed almost callous when the SportsCenter anchors came back from the commercial break after the Earnhardt story with smiling faces and catch-phrases for the latest batch of NBA highlights. A man may have just died on national television, but the sports world, like the real world, marches on blindly and irresponsibly.

Even more irresponsible were the highlights and photos of the crash that killed Earnhardt, at the top of every news broadcast and on the front page of every paper. How could anyone see those and not wonder about what was going on inside the car, whether Earnhardt was dead or dying? How could they not wonder what Earnhardt was thinking when his car veered sharply into that wall, right before the moment of death? And what about children who saw the pictures, or were, God forbid, actually watching the race? It’s one thing to not allow them to watch wrestling or “South Park,” quite another for them to actually witness a sudden and totally unfiltered scene of death.

What is even scarier, and quite possibly the reason I couldn’t get my mind off the tragedy, was that maybe we were asking for it as a culture. This is why home backyard wrestling videos are so popular — we want to see how stupid people can get, how badly they can injure themselves. This is why there are no fair catches in the XFL — we want to see someone get hit. This is why every other night of programming on Fox is “World’s Dumbest Criminals” or “World’s Wildest Police Chases.”

And the printed word isn’t much better. When Major League Baseball umpire John McSherry died on the field of a heart attack during a game, Sports Illustrated ran a chilling photo of McSherry’s face, slumped on the ground, mouth agape, eyes glazed. It wasn’t enough that thousands of people at the ballpark and millions more watching on television had to witness it.

Sports Illustrated gave its readers death in vivid color.

But the media doesn’t induce this sort of carnage on the air; they just know that, given the sad, sick way human nature works, it’s what the people want to see. I cringe whenever I overhear someone claim that they won’t watch “Survivor” because “it’s not really surviving unless they have to kill and eat each other.” If that’s what you want out of a reality show, that’s a pretty bleak reality.

So is the reality of Earnhardt’s death on the track nearly two Sundays ago. The survivors move onward and forward, as M. David Allen, a man who knew Earnhardt and once ran the driver’s media relations team, has. “Right this minute, we are front page news,” Allen said. “It’s a sad and tough way to get it … (but) let’s look at what’s there. It’s the cover of the New York Times, a People cover story on him, Connie Chung is interested, Larry King’s people calling. Right now, we have a huge worldwide audience, and maybe in some ironic twist of fate, we could really grow from this.”

That’s death in the Information Age for you. Its impact is measured by the amount of exposure and profitability. Writing about Earnhardt’s nationally televised death, Hunter S. Thompson probably said it best: “This is the American Dream run amok.

Watch it and weep.”

Jack Bullion is a junior English major from Columbia, Mo.
He can be reached at (j.w.bullion@student.tcu.edu).

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