The video of Neda Soltan’s death

Even though I’ve been writing about Arash Hejazi (here and here), the doctor seen in the video of Neda Agha-Soltan’s death in Iran, I have to admit I still haven’t seen the video. I realized early on that I didn’t want to watch someone die a tragic and violent death. I didn’t want to see her alive and then see her dead. Every second in real time. I don’t need to watch the video to understand why Soltan’s death is so symbolic or why the widespread viewing of it is significant.

It could have been 20 years ago that I watched a PBS broadcast about a women who prepared to kill herself. She filmed the entire sequence: Her thoughts, the elaborate preparations, and the actual death. What struck me was not that I watched someone die, but that the event was filmed and presented for public consumption. I believe assisted suicide can be a rational decision when there is incurable, intolerable pain. I don’t find witnessing an actual death in a documentary helpful in thinking about this issue.

The filming and viewing of an actual death

I came across a thoughtful blog post on this subject. It’s by Minette Marrin, a UK journalist, documentary filmmaker, and writer who’s currently a columnist for the Sunday Times. She discusses a documentary in which a filmmaker followed the lives of a couple after the husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. It portrays the heartbreak of this difficult disease, as well as many tender moments between the couple. And it includes footage of the husband’s actual death. Here are some of her comments.

Death is one of the most solemn and most intimate moments of life, and there are good reasons for the traditional feeling that strangers have no business there, least of all millions of total strangers who are simply whiling away an idle evening. … That doesn’t mean that nobody should be present at the hour of death or that it should be shrouded in mystery, or that we should be shielded from it. …

There are many traditions surrounding death beds, often including many people, and they all exist to mark the solemnity of death and to give comfort to the dying and to those who are about to be bereaved. None of them exists to allow the curiosity of strangers, still less to excite it. Death is not a moment for rubbernecking; there is something of the snuff movie about even the most delicately filmed death rattle.

The film-maker has said that he doesn’t want people to be frightened of death. … All the same we cannot possibly know what kind of death is waiting for each of us. The idea that one can domesticate and demystify death by broadcasting one particular good death – seems to me absurd.

Besides, we should be frightened by death. Death is a fearful thing. The fear of it defines our lives, as we lead them, and its enormity gives us plenty of reasons to examine our lives before the appointed hour arrives. … It’s not necessary to invade the privacy of a total stranger to reflect seriously on death.

The Soltan video: Does it serve an important purpose?

Of course the death of Neda Soltan is not a “good death” on a deathbed surrounded by the soon-to-be bereaved. There’s definitely an argument to be made that the widespread viewing of Soltan’s death serves a purpose much greater than the significance of this one individual’s life. If the video hadn’t been made and widely viewed, Soltan’s death would not have had the impact it has had.

I’m not saying the video shouldn’t be broadcast or that people shouldn’t watch it. Just that I’m sufficiently disturbed by the very idea of the video that I don’t feel a need to watch it.

Newsweek has an article that quotes Peter Davis, the director of the Vietnam War documentary, Hearts and Minds. That film included footage of a naked young girl, her body burned by napalm, running down a street. Also a Vietnamese man in a plaid shirt, his hands behind his back, at the moment he is shot in the head by a pistol at the end of an outstretched arm.

“As painful as it is, I think it’s good for the world to see what the Iranian regime is doing.” … Davis says he included the footage [of the girl and the man] because he wanted to convey the experience of war as fully as possible, and thinks the film of Agha-Soltan being shot accomplishes the same goal. “It’s not as though I was in favor of the ayatollahs before I saw that image, but seeing it makes me realize how vicious they are willing to be against their own people, and how much objection there is to their regime.”

The Newsweek story, by Jennie Yabroff, cites the reasons in favor of viewing the Soltan video:

[A] single image can bring home the realities of war in a way no sets of statistics or analyses can. … The video gives a face to other, less-public beatings and killings of opposition supporters, and makes the conflict inescapably real.

Does it deepen our understanding?

But Yabroff goes on to wonder about the danger of confusing horror with understanding.

Images can be as deceptive as words – in some ways, even more so, in the ease with which a part can come to stand for a not entirely related whole. … Who dropped the napalm that burned the little girl? Who is the soldier holding the gun to the Vietnamese man’s head, and why is he being shot? The man in front of the tanks [in Tiananmen Square] eventually climbs up and talks to the tank’s driver. What does he say? What is the driver’s response? The answers to these questions don’t matter if the images are only meant to convey the human cost of political conflict in the broadest terms. But if they are meant to give insight into the specific conflicts they represent, the answers do matter, and the answers can only be found beyond the edges of the frames.

If, then, the video of Agha-Soltan’s death doesn’t actually help us understand the protests in Iran, why do the networks continue playing it, and why do we watch? … Today, we are inundated with images of simulated death – in movies, on TV hospital and crime dramas, in video games. Still, depictions of actual deaths haven’t lost their power to shock and, at the same time, attract. More than one person I talked to about the Agha-Soltan video compared it to a snuff film. “I think there can be a pornographic side to it when you are vicariously experiencing another person’s suffering and cruelty,” Davis says. Certainly, there is something prurient in the TV stations airing the video repeatedly, daring us to look away. …

[H]istory is made up of more than decontextualized images. … If we want to make sense of our past, and understand our present, we have to do more than just watch.