Post by Rebecca Adelman, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

The day after the photos of Aylan Kurdi appeared online (and everywhere), I typed a “d” into my Google search bar and its first auto-complete suggestion was “drowned syrian boy.”  Coincidentally, or by the eerie prescience of the algorithm, that is actually what I was looking for.  The speed with which the search engine guessed my intention and the minimal effort subsequently required to access these photos—I didn’t even have to finish typing, just hit “Enter”—is representative of the simple spectatorial task that they set up.

I am not suggesting that the story the photographs tell isn’t wrenching (it is); but the difficulty of the image is the very thing that makes spectatorship of it easy.  Certainly, spectators far removed from the Kurdi family’s suffering might genuinely experience the photos as painful.  But the experience of feeling bad about the photos is accompanied by a range of sentimental rewards that ameliorate this discomfort.  In part, the hyper-visibility of Aylan Kurdi is a function of the vacuous efficacy of social media, but the clicktivism it inspired is more a symptom than a cause.

Compared to other images begotten by the ongoing war in Syria, the photos of Aylan Kurdi demand relatively little of their viewers, cognitively or emotionally.

This war has been illustrated by photos of dead and dying children from the outset.  In the autumn of 2013, activists uploaded scores of photos and videos documenting the casualties of the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attacks against Syrian civilians.  Many of the victims were children, and many of them died in the presence of desperate parents and watchful cameras.  The resultant pictures, however, did not provide unequivocal evidence of atrocity to viewers expecting to see the bloodier forms of injury and dismemberment that dominate familiar depictions of wartime casualties.  Instead, the photos captured large-scale mortality caused by invisible trauma.  This is, of course, the signature of a chemical weapons attack, but in order to fulfill their documentary function, the photos required expert interpretation and credulous spectators.

Seeking to galvanize popular and legislative support for his plan to intervene militarily in Syria, President Obama implored Americans to view the images  and the Senate Intelligence Committee compiled 13 of the most explicit  for review by its members and, presumably, the public.  These images failed to persuade lawmakers or their constituents that the situation warranted U.S. involvement.  Of course, there were many reasons for this reluctance and we cannot know if different pictures would have garnered different results, but it remains significant that these photos never achieved the iconic status that Aylan Kurdi’s already have.

Two years later, the more abstract photos of the truck abandoned on an Austrian highway with the bodies of 71 refugees, Syrians among them, decomposing inside, pose a different spectatorial problem.  The photos do not show the corpses, so spectators can only peer at the truck and imagine its contents.  News coverage of the story has been largely forensic in its orientation; this perspective risks objectifying the victims, a temptation grimly heightened by the advertisements decorating the sides of the vehicle.  While European officials are compelled to infer the identities of the deceased from travel documents, mobile phones, and meager personal effects, curious spectators get only a hypothetical composite of anonymous dead.

The photographs of Aylan Kurdi, full of pathos and without gore, set up a more straightforward spectatorial project.  Unlike the photos from the chemical weapons attacks, these do not require speculation about the mechanics of his dying – there is no mystery to drowning.  And unlike the photos of the truck, these present a victim and a sanitized vision of death. Claims about the singular potency of the Aylan Kurdi photos rest on an implied comparison to the images that preceded them.  An article in the New York Times made an explicit distinction between these and those of the truck, asserting that the photo “personalized” the migrant crisis for a public that had merely been “shocked” by the previous story.

That comparison hinges on the presumed power of the Aylan Kurdi photos to disturb or inspire viewers, as does the editorial debate about whether or not to reprint them.  Framing the issue in this binary way, however, obscures the complexities—the emotional contradictions, the ethical instabilities—inherent in any act of looking at casualty photos.  Ultimately, the argument collapses a range of spectatorial positions down to two, apparently mutually exclusive, possibilities: ‘good’ spectators who look at the photos and feel outraged or sad, versus ‘bad’ spectators who look at the photos and do not.

Such ‘bad’ spectatorship is often attributed to emotional laziness, an inability or unwillingness to be moved.  But ‘good’ spectatorship here requires only minimal emotional ambition; it is largely a matter of channeling the cultural, historical, and political forces that instruct and condition our sentiments, predisposing us to grieve for deaths that look like this.  Adhering to those codes by feeling appropriately bad might feel automatic or right, but it can also feel good.

I am not suggesting that those feelings of sadness are untrue or unreal, only that ethical spectatorship of these photos requires candor about the costs, benefits, and gratifications of looking at them.  Aylan Kurdi’s small, carefully dressed body is poignant but also intelligible.  Less decipherable pictures might leave spectators confused or adrift.  His photos are frank documents of mortality, but characterizing them as ‘graphic’ overstates the difficulty of the spectatorial task they set up, and overshadows the extent to which the act of looking at them is facilitated and softened by its emotional rewards.  An affective auto-complete.

While the criticisms of CNN’s approach to Malaysia Airlines 370 are by now familiar, I want to explore the possibility that CNN’s coverage is actually—albeit unintentionally—meaningful. With its reliance on speculation, dependence on simulation, and occasional swerves into absurdity, it indexes the incomprehensibility of this disaster, marked by the failures of so many systems that seemed to promise safety, visibility, and order. To be clear, I do not mean to exonerate CNN, which is rather unabashedly utilizing this as a ratings grab. Nonetheless, their coverage vividly captures the essence of this disaster.

Some measure of qualified guessing is expected, even necessary, in any coverage of an unfolding disaster; CNN’s coverage is distinguished by its continued recourse to hypothesizing, but also the amount of latitude it gives to conjecture, as when it reported, in a way that many found insufficiently incredulous, that some people believed zombies had hijacked the plane. Criticizing such reportage is important, surely, but also eclipses its significance, as CNN’s speculation starkly illuminates the enormous epistemological gap created by the plane. It also reflects the failure of the rational and technologized systems designed to track aircraft during flight or locate them afterward. The imagined world governed by those devices (organized into grids of latitudes and longitudes, synchronized time zones, and orderly networks of predictable flight paths) cannot countenance the possibility of something like this.  But CNN’s coverage shows us how far we have strayed from that map.

This departure is amplified by the visual elements of its coverage. The now-infamous use of a toy plane as a prop surely risked trivializing the disaster; likewise its reliance on flight simulator cockpits and computer-generated images that hover around its “virtual studio.” Even as it spectacularizes the disaster, however, simulation also resonates uncannily with it. All the visual modes of searching have failed to locate the plane: satellite images, aerial surveillance, maps of ocean topography. The utterly perplexing and apparently absolute disappearance of the plane, whereby all that is solid does not melt into air but vanishes into the sea, is the sort of thing that we, with expectations that our most advanced machines will function perfectly and our acculturation to being monitored at all times, can scarcely imagine. In that context, a holographic plane is only marginally more unreal.

The only signature element of CNN’s coverage that has not yet been widely lampooned is its attention to the stories of bereaved families and friends, many of whom give interviews in which they profess hope that their loved one will be found alive. Stories like that of the daughter who has been devotedly tweeting her crew-member father, steeped in poignant absurdity, would not find much purchase in a more staid outlet. One man, Pralhad Shirsath, in an April 23 interview, asserted that the paucity and poor quality of the information from the Malaysian government indicates that they do not have enough “data” about what happened, and, by extension, to convince him that his wife is truly lost. Necessarily, the journalist pressed him, citing conclusive evidence about the fate of the plane, but the potential widower remains undaunted. CNN, by creating this universe that defies the conventions of journalism (and the sometimes cruel boundaries of common sense), has provided these mourners with a space where their bewildering grief might be articulated. Given the likelihood that it will be months, or years, or longer before the plane is found (if it is found at all), CNN’s lingering on the story mimics the looping returns of sadness in the perseverating endlessness of grief.

Although CNN’s vigil is often self-interested and carnivalesque, the clamor against it is problematic, too. It endeavors to sanitize our visual field by expunging the traces of the logically unknowable, the empirically invisible, and the affectively unpalatable in defense of all that they threaten to destabilize. To partake of CNN’s vision of the disaster is to acknowledge that it was, and remains, both tragic and incomprehensible, and to allow those two dimensions of the event to dictate the disorderly and unpredictable terms by which it appears.

Oprah ventriloquizes the sentiments of the American nation (“we”) toward its military personnel (“you”).  A gauzy montage of domestic scenes that begins during deployment and ends with homecoming, “Whole Again” represents absence through family rituals that are conspicuously incomplete.  One parent seated beside an unoccupied seat watches a school basketball game, dinner is served over an empty chair, a father struggles to button his daughter’s sweater, a mother strokes her sleeping child’s hair while gazing across the bedroom at her husband’s framed photograph.  Everyone seems to be staring sidelong into the distance, beneath Oprah’s voiceover and orchestral music.  Jeeps appear only at the end, as the vehicles military personnel drive home to where ‘we’ wait.

On our behalf, Oprah promises a list of pleasantly quotidian experiences that await the soldier upon returning, like a family dinner and a warm bed.  She vows, “there will be walks to take.”  At this, a golden retriever, who had been looking expectantly off-screen drops his head to the floor dejectedly, but determinedly.  Rather than getting up and walking away, the dog enacts a faithful version of citizenship, maintaining a vigil despite being lonely or impatient.  This is a calm, durable loyalty, rather than a frenetic form of grief that might verge on something messy or unwieldy.   The commercial maps the shortest route to our fondest, dogged desire as the deferral of gratification.  Like the dog, we are bereft, but the appropriate expression is not a sadness that might devolve into anger at the state or its foreign policy, but quiet and steady forbearance.

But if lying around on the carpet seems too passive, Oprah also makes clear that other things happened during the soldier’s absence.  The happy familial future is guaranteed simply “because in your home, in our hearts, you’ve been missed, you’ve been needed, you’ve been cried for …”  Now, we are a pretty young mother ignoring our toddler in a sunlit kitchen, wiping away our tears while reading a letter.  Contextually, the most obvious explanation for her sadness would be that her husband had been killed in action, but the commercial does not even acknowledge such a possibility.  It promises a safe and happy return, but on the condition that we all do our parts (including crying) at home to ensure it.

While we are crying as her, we are also praying as a red-headed boy kneeling beside his bed, doing his part to confirm that you’ve been “prayed for,” too.  We are fervent in close-mouthed prayer, and the next time a soldier appears after that, he is looking down at a picture of a pretty woman on his dogtags, sighing; then the door of a Jeep closes, presumably around someone homeward-bound.  The arc of the montage suggests a causal connection between missing / needing / crying / praying and this outcome.  The narrative posits that it would be impossible to do anything more, dangerously tempting of fate to do anything less.  The childish praying that ‘we’ are doing is, presumably, simply for a safe return of the people that we love, but this, of course, is not a remedy for circumstances that require their absence in the first place, or that might take them away again for another deployment.  Instead, this is citizenship as superstition.   “Whole Again” oscillates wildly between visions of unbounded agency (we, alone, can prayerfully facilitate the return of our loved ones – no mention even of the God to whom we might direct our entreaties) and acknowledgments of radical constraint (all we can do is sit at the table and cry).

Finally, as Jeep-encased service members speed down flag-lined streets to their loving families, Oprah makes a cryptic claim.  “Half the battle,” she professes, “is just knowing this is half the battle.”  But there is no clear visual referent for what this is; the quick cuts between a Jeep driving along a rural road, uniformed soldiers disembarking a plane, a woman overcome with emotion amount to nothing.  I’m perplexed by this ending, and no one else among the dozens I’ve shown this to has been able to decipher it either.  Perhaps half of “half the battle” is figuring out what this is.  That inscrutability might explain the failure of “Whole Again” as an advertisement, but it also, if quite accidentally, captures the uncertainty that characterizes this form of wartime citizenship, where so much is nonsensical but also, apparently, necessary.