To review: Tasercam video is made by a “security” device that is a kind of weapon that claims to be non-lethal. While the picture is being recorded an electrical current is being deployed against a living subject, so the making of the picture and the infliction of pain are co-incident within a point of view that brings viewer and weapon into a tight relationship. Because there is no outward evidence of wound or permanent damage, we viewers can perhaps enjoy the sadism (inflicting pain on another) seemingly without being implicated or feeling too much responsibility. What viewers see is a person being immobilized. If there is audio, generally those on the receiving end cry out [Taser clips].
Aside from the various recordings of enforcement activities involving Tasers, the web is full of examples of training videos and “home uses” – a roommate tasing his friend while in the shower [BreakMedia], a wife, her husband, while fooling around in the backyard, [NinjaWholesale], trainees doing it to each other. [Trainees taser video] . As of 8/4/09, YouTube responds to the search term “tasers’ with a possible 14,400 choices. All of this normalizes the device, reducing any reservations we might harbor over its deployment in law enforcement. Todd Phillips’ summer 2009 film The Hangover has a scene, played for broad comedy, of school children being drafted to tase one of the heroes to punish him for bad behavior before his release by the authorities [Phillips].
On the Taser International web site there is a category of Tasers for consumers and it is illustrated with a picture of a woman protecting her home, not unlike previous ad campaigns to sell women on the use of firearms [Women and Guns]. The result of disseminating materials like these is to make the technology everyday, like an appliance. We are invited to protect ourselves, the Taser giving us security, and, at the same time, it justifies our “actions” in identifying with the point of view if we are watching Taser video: this can only increase our sense of psychological safety around the gratification of our own sadistic pleasure of being on the sending end of pain infliction.
Without resorting to Freud, we can look to our own art history for confirmation. Stephen Eisenman argues that, in the Western cultural tradition, that which links Classical art from the ancient world with European and American civilization is the pathos formula replete with eroticized tortured humans and animals (culminating in much religious art that many hold sacred) and that it is this tradition that has paralyzed our social response to the Abu Ghraib photographs. He suggests that our outrage has been tempered by the deep familiarity of such imagery to us as evidenced by our own cultural history [Eisenman]. This, too, is the cultural ground that tasercam images will evoke. But unlike art in museums, tasercam in courtrooms will be part of the administration of justice and its truth, like all forms of evidence, must be actively tested. So, I argue, we need to be concerned about our ability to take on these compelling video records.