FWIW, Crosbie's most provocative work is a book called Paul's Case, about the Bernardo/Homolka murders.
Unleashing our inner demons, site by sickening site
LYNN CROSBIE
From Tuesday's Globe and Mail
March 10, 2008 at 10:16 PM EDT
In this month's Esquire, an unusually affable George Clooney is asked to look closely at the Internet. Generally he comments on sites devoted to him, but at one point he is asked to watch the “viral” (or cult) video, Two Girls One Cup, the now-censored work of Brazilian fetishist and auteur Marco Fiorito.
Clooney had been raving to his interviewer about a raunchy video called Monkey Smells Butt, and is game, but several seconds into watching Fiorito's video, he almost vomits, and leaves the room.
And he is not alone: YouTube is loaded with videos of reactions to Two Girls One Cup, which is thought to be one of Fiorito's many illegal, coprophagist masterpieces that the U.S. Department of Justice has seized. In Two Girls, a pair of women in startling makeup, and to a bleak piano score, eliminate into a cup. They then ingest the contents.
Merely recounting the video's content can trigger a gag reflex. The YouTube reactions are identical to Clooney's, and involve a great deal of hurling. “It's like the rodeo,” Clooney observes later in Esquire. “See how long you can last.”
All of this grotesque fun does lead one to wonder how far we intend to go with our insatiable interest in the kind of images once found only on Faces of Death videos, or in hard-core porn, fetish publications and performance art.
Even if an exception can be made for performance art, uninformed observers still collect it for purely prurient reasons: Self-styled “supermasochist” Bob Flanagan drove nails through his penis as a means of demonstrating his complex struggle with the cystic fibrosis that would kill him in 1996, yet his actions likely are pay dirt to collectors of hypersickness. ( Sick is the name of the documentary about Flanagan made by Kirby Dick.) As technology becomes more and more accessible, an opportunity is created for those whose deepest desires, previously, were not able to see the light of day.
Arguably, Paul Bernardo's ability to acquire a video camera accelerated, among his many paraphilias, including voyeurism, his narcissistic and sadistic tendencies.
Before reading of Two Girls One Cup, I came across another website that was the only one showing the execrable video of a U.S. marine throwing a puppy off of a cliff. This site's only virtue may be its willingness to expose any criminal act; to force us to examine the sickness of the world, frame by frame.
On this site is featured images of “baby tossed in the garbage” and “woman beaten to death with wood.” Its other highlights are sexual: “Find out how easy it is to get laid on the Internet,” its home page declares. “Even if you're fat and ugly, you can still find someone hot to have sex with you.”
The sex-and-murder nexus is disquieting because it implies that these images (which include torture, teen-sex and death videos, all in a row, as well as close-ups of deformities and injuries) are erotic – as erotic as vomit (and worse) are to Marco Fioroto.
Disgusting Internet sites are not news, but where is the scholarship surrounding the phenomenon? Our right to freedom of expression is one obstacle to contrarian discourse about the effects of viewing these images. But, more significantly, the kind of images available (to say nothing of the rancid filth that squats below the Internet's surface) act in direct opposition to now-banal, once-radical ideas about porn and violence.
Among the intelligentsia, porn radicals have always ferociously guarded the idea that snuff films do not exist. (These people remind me of Betty Friedan in Iran, years ago, yelling that “The women don't wear the veil!” to Germaine Greer as veiled women moiled around their limo). Snuff films, argue theorists like Laura Kipnis, are an invention of the right, to scare people away from pornography. Porn and violence? The link does not exist! Never mind that Ted Bundy spent his last hours on Earth trying to warn us that his addiction to pornography led him directly to his first rape.
Popular artists, too, have a vested interest in erasing the line between art and action. It is common these days to hear someone say, as Eminem did years ago in The Way I Am, that Marilyn Manson is wrongly blamed for inciting teenage killers, because “Where were the parents at?”
Well, the parents are not corresponding with Charles Manson about sampling his music, for one. Even Courtney Love, long suspected as a terrifying influence on all of us, left the Marilyn Manson tour because of his Bible-burning.
It may be time to rethink our artistic posturing, and concede that people are influenced by what they see, and, occasionally, like monkeys, do.
When crazed teens were burning homeless men in the 1970s after the release of Fuzz (which features the same crime); after still other youths copycatted A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers, we all still said that art was distinct from life. (As for the controversial video game Bullying: Scholarship Edition, we have yet to see the effects of an animated boy sexually assaulting and torturing his classmates).
While access to technology is a gift and guardian in many ways (beginning with the Rodney King footage), its limitless potential is frightening.
The two girls and their cup aren't so worrisome – merely ladies with the worst job ever. What does give one pause is the thought of the world in darkness, red-lit with the cameras of amateur directors too sickening to contemplate as they push us farther across the line between the boundless imagination and the simple, sordid truth.
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