I’ve never seen an interview where Reznor talks about it, but what I think was going on was an attempt on his part to bypass our mediated experience of horror. Highly produced, stylized, and always at a remove thanks to the glass screen between us and the physical experience of sitting in your own living room or a theater surrounded by people. All these things have engendered an unreal relationship with horror – and this goes even for news reporting. Reznor eschewed professional looking production in favor of what looks like bad hand-held low-fi techniques, so the terror of what’s happening in the basement comes off looking like something that might actually be real.

I used this video in an undergrad media studies class when I was teaching at the University of Colorado. As we came to section on censorship I told my class that if we were going to discuss the topic we were going to get past the safety of the purely philosophical. The visceral impact turned even hardcore NIN fans green and incoming freshmen two years later were still hearing the stories about that class.

Maybe this was Reznor’s twisted comment on the same thing that troubles Fierro. I don’t know. But one thing is for sure – our nation’s media audiences have an appetite for sanitized depictions of things that they have no real awareness about at all. I suspect this is a bad thing.

If you’d like to see the NIN video, click here. Just be forewarned.

This is a fascinating essay–one of the best you’ve posted.

One of the interesting things about the modern horror craze is how different nations and cultures interpret the desire to be shocked out of numbness. Whereas America seems to exhort gore, violence, and brutality, the Japanese horror wave emphasizes psychological terror and sheer “mindfuckery” as metaphor for a particular issue (i.e. “Dark Water” explored parental abandonment and child neglect through the spirit of a murderous preteen, for example). French directors have put out films that mix elements of the American and Japanese approaches, such as “High Tension,” which starts out like a typical slasher flick but ends up being more of a higher-level audience double cross.

The media blackout on images of the war is no coincidence, of course–it’s a calculated plan by the Pentagon and a complicit media to maintain support for a failed plan by denying people the ability to see what they need to see. They learned their lessons from Vietnam and even the first Gulf War, after all. But because people sense and are acutely aware of that void, they will look for anything to fill that gap–and torture porn is the result.

The odd and depressing need for humans to have catharsis through violence is as old as the Roman gladiatorial games–and just like the “bread and circuses” signaled the decline of that empire, so too may our love for extreme violence signify ours. Of course, I’d rather have people get that rush from watching an action film than going out and shooting someone.

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Dr. Fierro’s compassion shines like a beacon. Especially at a time when we Americans expend a huge amount of psychic BTUs fueling the firewall between our psyches and the havoc our government is wreaking in our names….