“Watch: Amazon cargo plane crashes at Miami airport,” goes the BBC sub-headline, underneath a video of the Amazon Prime Boeing 767 overshooting the runway at Miami airport. “Watch people die.” That’s not the actual words used, as the plane grinds to a halt in what appears to be a car park, the BBC preferring “Warning: upsetting scenes“, but watching people die is exactly what you are doing.
Brainlessly, I clicked on the video and you don’t see people actually dying. It’s a bit like 9/11 where the planes crashing into the Twin Towers and viewers, like me, watched the action on an endless loop. At that moment, you don’t think too hard about actual human beings dying. Somehow, your brain manages to compartmentalise everything. It’s just planes, it’s just exploding and burning buildings. No actual people were killed and injured in the making of this video, except of course that they were.
I guess we become immune from the grim realities of death and suffering. Mine wasn’t the first generation to grow up watching people dying, but not really, in movies and TV shows. It’s a logical next step to see real people dying.
It’s not just 9/11, where we were also shown people leaping to their death from the burning World Trade Centre, live on TV. The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami killed nearly a quarter of a million people and many of us watched, transfixed, as live TV pictures captured it all. These were the major, catastrophic disasters. Highlights of more minor events – not, of course, minor to those killed – are on the daily news every day. Have we become desensitised? I’m not sure.
I’ve seen a few dead people in my life, close and not so close family members, a friend and, a couple of times, people I didn’t know and I must say it’s a very different feeling than watching people ‘die’ in movies and TV drama shows. When, say, someone is shot and killed while you sit in the comfort of your living room, you see the ‘death’ and quickly move on. Not for a moment do you consider the wider picture; the end of life, the post mortem, identifying the body, family grief, the funeral. When you see someone die in front of you, as I did when my stepdad shuffled off his mortal coil, life and the end of life is far more black and white. While I do not believe for a moment there is anything beyond death, it was still an incredible powerful experience, the end of life. No number of Die Hards could dilute that feeling.
When I saw a dead body being hauled onto the beach while on holiday in Corfu, that felt shocking, too. A video still plays in my mind of that moment. Put simply, and obviously, that was for real. I was able to distinguish reality from fiction. The power of television surely blurs the line between reality and fiction?
I have no criticism of the BBC, or all other media outlets, for showing the video. It’s the 24/7 world of news we now live in. The internet changed everything. Someone, somewhere is always filming and photographing something and it has become the norm for everything to be shared. The gruesome stuff usually comes with the warning that you are about to see some “disturbing scenes”, but in my experience that makes us more likely, not less, to actually watch them. It’s curiosity, it’s human nature, at least in the modern world, anyway.
I have seen far worse on the internet. I have never used the so-called “dark web” and wouldn’t even know how to find it if I wanted to but I am told it’s even worse than the regular stuff you will find. Not for me, but someone, somewhere wants to see the latest blood and gore (and, yes, much worse).
I understand that at least one media outlet was speculating on whether the deaths caused by the Amazon plane crash happened on board the aircraft or on the ground, while showing stills footage of people being pulled from the plane’s cockpit. Briefly, I saw one photograph and then moved on to something else. For all I know, it could have been a dead person, someone’s father, someone’s son, someone’s husband. My thoughts are with everyone concerned, but it’s someone else’s grief and not for me to intrude on.
Death comes to us all, of course, and when life’s gone, it’s gone. I would not wish to see anyone I know and love displayed lifeless in the media and I feel the same about those I don’t know.
Others may well say that tragedies are “news” and we have the right to know the news in a free country. Maybe we do and in that case we use our own filters to decide what we watch and what we don’t. What we do need to remember is that the people who died in Miami are real people, not the victims of Bruce Willis, and sometimes it’s better to look the other way.
