By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
How would you describe a person who sells footage of a murder or a fatal tragedy—or even a suicide note—to Belgrade tabloids? What we can say with certainty is that such a person does not consider the vileness of their act greater—if they consider it relevant at all—than the financial compensation they receive for their depravity.
Why is it possible to sell such grotesque content? Because there’s a market for it—in fact, a high demand. This means there are many who will watch the footage. Why will they watch it? Because they enjoy the pornography of death. I know: these are otherwise good husbands, wives, respectable neighbours, accomplished and decent people—only, they get a thrill from watching someone die.
Since the era of Milosevic, the dominant current in Serbian culture has become intensely pornographic—and under Vucic, that tendency has metastasised. From the most-watched TV channels to the most-read newspapers and websites, from “Zadruga” to “Kurir”—pornography has become our everyday reality.
Why is that? Because falsehood is foundational to the Greater Serbia project, the dominant idea in that society. That lie must be concealed at all costs—among other things, through a constant pornographic spectacle, the most powerful of countless distractions. And that spectacle is itself a lie, because pornography never tells the truth; it is, let us remember, a low-mimetic genre.
Citizens of Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina consume Belgrade’s pornographic spectacle with just as much pleasure as citizens of Serbia. The pornography of death is by no means an exclusively Serbian phenomenon. Its true father is capitalism. That’s why the Serbian pornographic spectacle has become the dominant culture of the entire region—its truest indulgence. And paradoxically—though only on the surface—instead of exporting its genuinely impressive high culture, Belgrade has culturally colonized the region with the worst it had to offer.
Among other things, the problem with pornography and the pornographic spectacle of death is that it functions like a hard drug: it constantly demands more and more extreme content. To feel anything, the viewer needs something even more grotesque. Generations raised on execution videos will continue to crave increasingly brutal death porn. And no one is innocent in the spread of this kind of pornography—not even the state of Montenegro, which routinely publishes footage of arrests, that is, public humiliation; nor are the so-called reputable Montenegrin media, some of which, let’s not forget, have published videos that were nothing more than revenge porn.
Just thirty years ago, the so-called snuff film (i.e., an actual recording of a real murder) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snuff_film was practically an urban legend. Joel Schumacher made “8mm” with Nicolas Cage based on that very idea. Today, snuff is broadcast by mainstream media and casually shared across social media and Viber groups—it has become completely normalised. Thirty years ago, you had to pay a fortune to obtain such footage. A quick search will show you that the Zapruder film—recording President Kennedy’s assassination—is often cited as the proto-snuff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapruder_film.
In the meantime, snuff has become a staple of both mainstream media and so-called “art.” Take, for example, Eric Steel’s “The Bridge”, which features real suicides by people jumping off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The filmmaker did not attempt to intervene or prevent these deaths—instead, he chose to profit from them. So, what does that say about us? Are we worse than our ancestors?
To answer that, as always, Marxism offers a useful lens—specifically, Guy Debord’s 17th thesis from “The Society of the Spectacle”:
“The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into being an evident degradation of being into having — human fulfilment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present phase, in which social life has become completely dominated by the accumulated productions of the economy, is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing. All ‘having’ must now derive its prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances. At the same time, all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is directly dependent on them. It is allowed to appear only to the extent that it is not real.”
In other words, ontology is reduced to economics, and economics to appearance. Enter Instagram: where people flaunt what they have—designer items, luxury cars and homes, trips to faraway places—carefully curated and photoshopped for public consumption. Their appearance doesn’t reflect reality; instead, reality is expected to reflect their fantasy of themselves. Their identity is whatever they post as having—or pretend to have.
Hell was a long time in the making. Debord’s book opens with a quote from Feuerbach:
“In our time, when the superficial is preferred to the essential, the image to the reality, the copy to the original, representation to the truth, appearance to being… truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Indeed, the sacred grows in proportion as truth recedes, and illusion expands—so that the highest degree of illusion is considered the highest form of the sacred.”
These words were written in the second edition of “The Essence of Christianity”, in 1843.
There is no going back: especially not where shame is absent. Those who have grown used to casually watching murder videos on their phones will, without flinching, one day watch public executions in city squares. Maybe even mass ones.
What we sometimes call freedom is, in fact, the most terrifying form of slavery. Slaves trained to enjoy their own enslavement do not start revolutions.
(Columnists’ views and opinions do not necessarily reflect those of the CdM editorial team)
