„Naujienos bet kokia kaina.“ Lithuanian torture porn

Is the news worth this? If so, what value news?

I read today on Café Blogas that MTV News has started a new ad campaign featuring popstars getting, for lack of a better word, tortured by faceless individuals. During the torture, a microphone looms, in order to record whatever comes from the person’s mouth. Accompanying these staggeringly graphic photos is the slogan, “naujienos bet kokia kaina.”

Mostly, I’m inclined to write this off as wide cultural difference, because imagining a US ad campaign like this (other than, of course, one for 24) would be offensive to the extreme. As in, beyond edgy, which is what I suspect the ad firm behind these considers itself as being.

But it’s not edgy, even granting for cultural difference, as it relies on the extremely dangerous and reactionary fiction that torture works. In one video, Mantas promises to reveal everything, bound and bloodied with his shirt torn. Reinforcing that myth is bad news, as it opens the space of possibility for bad politics and undermines its own message.

The bad politics part is obvious. Lithuania currently isn’t mired in a scandal regarding torture (though has so much time elapsed since the collapse of the Soviet Union that torture is now something to be celebrated or parodied? These people would probably disagree). I’m trying to avoid making a lazy slippery slope argument, but I’m not sure it’s possible. Either torture is something terrible that you would not aspire to, or it’s not. If it is, then recreating it in the space of an advertising campaign serves to blunt the outrage of actual governmental (or other) torture.

On the other hand, one could argue that it’s satire: the idea that news about pop stars is so important that one should torture to get it is on its face laughable, right? The satirical angle doesn’t work, however, since by trivializing torture, the very value of the information becomes also trivial. That is, considering that, in torturing as widely as it has, the US has debased the very idea of “we only torture to get ticking time bomb information,” the very information that is gleaned via torture is already useless. Torturing to get information begs the question of valuable information. Hence, since no good information comes from torture, if you keep torturing, that means that “good information” is no longer the goal of torture.

MTV is undoing itself here, then, by saying that they will torture pop stars in order not to get useful information (hence the lie that is the marketing slogan), but, rather, to pursue a different, more sinister end. They are using the pose of seeking information to achieve a different end, just as the US uses the ruse of getting “actionable intelligence” to achieve an end I don’t care to put into words.

But what could MTV’s subtextual motive be? Perhaps, it’s a crass materialization/corporealization of the very idea of a pop star: no longer are they ethereal icons floating in some kind of realm of fantasy, but, rather, they are “if you prick us” garden variety human beings. Torturing, that is, reminding them that they have a body (you can compare this, to a degree, with fascination over celebrity dieting and body image), is a means of bringing the pop star back to earth, at least, for the spectator. Mantas isn’t as special I am, because he, too, has a pain threshhold. In fact, his might even be lower than mine.

In this way, torturing an icon is a very literal action of iconoclasm which reverberates downward. If not even the icon is safe from destruction, what does that say about those who look up to it? If Mantas can be tortured, well, so can I!

Furthermore, if the iconoclasm is meant as a levelling effect, then the value of the icon, and, hence, of his information, is also washed away. If Alanas Chošnau can also be tortured–as in, if he’s a regular guy like all of us–then his knowledge is, by definition, also regular, and, hence, not interesting or worth the ethical cost of torture. Alano desirability to a news microphone (and to spectators) depends on his being special. But torture destroys that specialness–Naomi Klein has demonstrated how destroying that kind of ego unity is precisely a goal (if not the goal) of shock torture. So MTV’s ad campaign becomes circular. “We will torture to get the news,” it says, “even though the news is useless and reduces the people we torture.”

So what is the point? Is this just torture porn? Is it a means of feeling, in fact, superior to the pop stars? Ežiukassukedais, who posted the Mantas video to YouTube, asks if the video is a demonstration of the degree to which people who hate pop icons in Lithuania will go to–a sentiment that stretches back many years, with the opening of Skamp’s “You Can not Fuck with This” as a sort of epochal moment in the strained tension between pop stars and fans. So if the ad campaign is trying to tap into that desire–the desire to see the pop star you think is shite get cut to ribbons–then why would the person who reacts to that be watching MTV in the first place? Isn’t one of the first rules of someone who takes music seriously, “Thou Shalt Not Read NME“?

Given all this incoherence in the message, is torture really the right way to go? Is it worth it?

I’ll close in saying that the only redeeming value of this campaign is that, if it had ever been green-lighted in the US, every pop star being tortured would have been a young woman. Guaranteed. So the Lithuanians have a leg up on us there.

Technorati Tags: advertising, America, cafe.blogas.lt, materiality, pop music, pornography, sexual assault, torture, white slavery

Tags: advertising, America, cafe.blogas.lt, materiality, pop music, pornography, sexual assault, torture, white slavery