Agent Orange Cooper » Mon Aug 22, 2016 12:58 pm wrote:But this is why I don't want to argue about whether it is real or not. It's an argument that goes nowhere and the question of its 'reality' is not even the interesting part of this story.
No, but the question of how & why some people are arguing that it is obviously fake (even while claiming it doesn't matter), while others are saying it's not so obvious at all, is central to the artifact's interest, IMO.
So far, the arguments for and against have been similar to arguments about whether a movie rocked or sucked: entirely subjective.
Aesthetic criteria are learned; we are trained to apply them. The same is true of our criteria for discerning actual from fake.
Mac's comparison of the video to an ISIS beheading is a good one, I think. Or to the Hebdoe cop-shooting, I saw that & it was
obviously fake to me, I could even see the bullet hitting the pavement (or thought I could). Other people denied that & said it wasn't obvious at all. The context for that was this: to admit the Hebdoe footage looked fake was to admit that the event was staged and/or that the mass media was deceiving us. People heavily invested in a worldview that doesn't allow for manipulations on that level saw what they saw because of the criteria which they were trained in and brought to the viewing (basically: trust the narrative). Now those who are saying the video looks fake are bringing
their criteria, which is harder to define but I think it has to do with the opposite, being trained to
distrust the narrative, distrust the evidence of the senses, & feeling sated by so much disinformation, conspiratainment, & the like. At bottom though is the conviction that
we can trust our ability to know what's real. But can we? It's like when we argue that a movie is a good one, we trust our ability to discern a good movie from a bad movie and anyone who disagrees is wrong. But deep down we know we are just going with our preferences. In the case of the movie, it's a lot more obviously subjective, so there's at least some room for two points of view. In the case of the video, not so much.
Either it is a real murder or it's not.On the other hand, there
is an area of nuance here too, because
it could have been a real murder surrounded by fake or anomalous elements, even including an overacting cameraman (if he was). So part of the challenge of this is recognizing the many moving parts in the interface between our perception of an event and the media that shows it to us. Learning to separate the parts and examine them
as parts, not as the whole that has been constructed to trick us via a subtle manipulation of our perception
by the media. Hitchcock knew all about this (think of
Psycho and the shower scene).
Essentially, I think Mac is right that this video is not a fake, but paradoxically in the sense that it
is a fake, just not the kind of fake people are taking it for. I don't think it's a prank or an amateur bang-up job. It think the whole thing was very artfully done and that part of that art, maybe the main part, was to disguise that fact so we would be unaware of being manipulated by the media, and talk about it as if we were actually discussing found footage, rather than
Cloverfield (or
Blair Witch).
It is a lot easier to fool people than show them how they have been fooled.
