One of the greatest cruelties of these times is to refuse confirmation of what has been experienced.
By Marcelo Percia*
(for La Tecl@ Eñe)
In the 1990s, before social media, the spy cam was used as entertainment or a spectacle of cruelty.
Let us recall an episode. The setting: a diving training course. Several people dressed in diving suits wait at the edge of an indoor pool to dive with their instructors. It is the participants’ baptism day; but the situation is planned as a deception or simulation in which only the unwary are excluded. The camera takes a close-up of a boy chosen as the victim. The host of the program tells what is happening and notes that the chosen one is afraid. When it is his turn, he dives with the instructors. The underwater camera shows three figures holding hands. But suddenly, a prop shark is submerged. The instructors pretend to flee in terror. They abandon the disciple, plunged into despair and panic. In the sequence that follows, the boy is seen emerging from the bottom of the pool as if from a nightmare: pale, with palpitations, anguish, a feeling of death. Still stunned and almost out of breath, he begins to react with hatred and violence to what he interprets as a sinister trap, as he deduces from the laughter and mockery of all those present, which are joined by unexpected cameramen and lighting technicians who come out of their hiding places. In the midst of his anger, someone warns him that he is being filmed for the famous program. What happens at that moment is surprising: the victim goes from justified indignation to complicity with his executioners. His grimace of pain turns into a gesture of amusement, his obfuscation turns into complacency. He abandons his feelings to participate in a look that takes him as an object of cruelty. He denies his sensations to give himself over to the euphoria of mockery. He participates in his torture with joy. He deserts himself, renounces his indignation, makes his nervous fury into a silent knot. The excessive cruelty of the experience lies in the way in which the participant’s consent is torn away: in a state of panic, the victim joins the executioners. We are witnessing the denial of oneself.
In the last scene, the unsuspecting man is seen in the studio, now dressed in a suit given to him by the production, next to the admired host, enjoying his own helplessness.
One of the greatest cruelties of our times is refusing to acknowledge what we have experienced: you are not seeing what you are experiencing, what happened did not happen, you are not feeling what you are feeling. Smile, you are being filmed.
Buenos Aires, June 28, 2024.
*The author is a psychoanalyst, essayist and Professor of Psychology at the UBA. Author of Deliberating psychoses ( 2004); Alejandra Pizarnik, teacher (2008): Disagreement (2010). His last published work is “Sessions in the shipwreck, a clinic of weaknesses.” La Zebra Editions.
