Imagery take 2

Inter­est­ing. Watched Chan­nel 9’s pack­age of tsunami mourn­ing in order to test theory that visual foot­age tweaks emo­tional trig­gers in a way that writ­ten stor­ies did not. Admit­tedly, anyone who knows Chan­nel 9’s brand of emo­tional manip­u­la­tion would know that this is not exactly a sci­entific, neut­ral exper­i­ment. How­ever, I have to say that having now watched more extens­ive foot­age than the three-second wave grab the ABC was using repeatedly once I’d returned, I have had a more emo­tional reac­tion to the situ­ation than I did before I saw the footage. 

Key images that affected me: one of people near a build­ing trying to hold onto each other and then some of them are simply swept away from each other and dis­ap­pear under the water; the man talk­ing about think­ing he had the baby in his hands and find­ing he only had baby clothes; the woman who had to choose which child to hold onto and asking a stranger to hold onto her five-year-old so she could hold the baby (both, mira­cu­lously, sur­vived); the guy who got off the plane having been on hol­i­days in Aceh and took the Chan­nel 9 camera crew to where his house had been. This last is chal­len­ging: it is clas­sic manip­u­la­tion, and to some extent breaches the AJA code of ethics (not to intrude on grief) as the crew clearly staked out the air­port, offer­ing a lift back to a per­son’s house in exchange for film­ing the (oth­er­wise private and tragic) moment when they see the dev­ast­a­tion that their house has become. (Of course, this is nowhere near as bad as the time a TV crew asked a lost bush­walker they’d found after weeks to stag­ger around in a circle again for the camera *before* giving him water.)

Non­ethe­less, it is com­pel­ling tele­vi­sion. The man con­fronts the wreck­age in shock. He is dis­be­liev­ing at first and then doubles over in anguish. The reporter puts his hand on the man’s back, com­fort­ing him. So soon after our own hol­i­days, I can’t help but put myself in his shoes. I think about what I packed. I ima­gine those are now the only things I own in the world.

Now, I’ve read sim­ilar stor­ies to these and seen the fig­ures over and over recently. I def­in­itely think the moving image has affected me more on this issue, although in other cases I think writ­ten stor­ies have had more impact. I think it’s partly this time that the print stor­ies I read quickly lent them­selves to cul­tural ana­lysis, con­cen­trat­ing as they often did on ‘tour­ists’ and ‘Aus­trali­ans’ rather than the people whose homes were destroyed.