Two months ago a colleague stormed into my office to complain about my supervision of a graduate student. The student was working on a paper on the aesthetics of Madonna’s video for “Cherish,” and had written about the use of editing, lighting, and visual framing to create meaning and, yes, beauty in the clip. My colleague’s complaint was that I had taken this aesthetic level too seriously, that what I should have done was steer the student toward what really mattered–the clip’s “sexism.”
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Even before the verdict came in, this attitude made me feel nervous. White folks like me were astonished by the reasoning of the Simi Valley jury. Many black people were, however, less than amazed to discover that a white-bread suburban jury identified with the thin blue line rather than the large black man. As a white person I plead guilty to stupidity for being taken aback by the decision. But as a media critic I’m innocent of all charges: I never bought the argument that the camcorder clip of Rodney King’s beating was sufficient proof of the police officers’ guilt.
The King video clip placed left and radical critics of the media in a strange dilemma: having argued for over a decade that critical media analysis shows the partial and manipulated nature of media representations, some now took the contrary position–that the clip was essentially “true.” Think about this for a moment. It is a preposterous and impossible position. The anesthetized images of smart bombing during the gulf war were in some literal sense “true”; yet we know they also lied by omission. The wallpapering of images of commuter strife in Germany during the recent transportation strikes captured something that actually happened; and yet, in focusing exclusively on the consequences of the strike, without showing us anything of its causes, television once again performed its time-honored role of delegitimizing industrial action.
The most revealing postverdict comment came from a juror who told a radio reporter that the jurors were amazed by the response of the protesters and the looters and might have reconsidered their verdict if they had had any clue that this would be its outcome. Now, that the jury could be surprised by the response is the clue to the whole bizarre reading of the videotape. If you were already so out of touch with urban reality that cathartic anger and violence strikes you as an unusual way to react to injustice, then clearly your frameworks of interpretation are quite well attuned to what we might call the LAPD POV. As the defending counsel pointed out, the trick was to get the jury to view the events from the point of view of the police officers, and not Rodney King.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Kurt Mitchell.
