The Trouble With Televised Executions

Recently, Howard Rosenberg cited the film “Dead Man Walking” to argue for televising actual executions (“ ‘Walking’ Fuels the Case for Live Executions,” Calendar, Jan. 24). He wrote in a similar vein in discussing the execution of serial killer William G. Bonin (“In the End, All Buildup, No Execution,” Feb. 26). Rosenberg, in the first column, asks, “Just how would cameras in the execution chamber distort or pervert anything?”

Rosenberg apparently doesn’t see that television’s great deception is its ability to convince viewers that they’re seeing the “real” thing while simultaneously protecting them from having to deal with what they see. Television convinces us that “seeing” is enough.

Art does something that television “news” never manages to do--tell the truth, the deeper truth, the complex, resonant truth. If “Dead Man Walking” succeeds as art, it does so because it draws viewers in, transforms them into participants who engage the lives being portrayed on the screen and imaginatively create a connection with them. The audience for “Dead Man Walking” understands the execution not as an isolated, singular “event”--a piece of “news”--but as the end of a life. The truth of art is in the life, not the death, in the relationships, not the event.

Shakespeare often has his deaths take place offstage. When Macbeth kills Duncan, the audience only hears about it, first from Macbeth and then from other characters who speak of their horror. Shakespeare’s wisdom is in his understanding that the truth lies not in seeing the actual murder--in “viewing” it--but in understanding the devastation it brings to those who loved the king, to those who murdered him and to the kingdom as a whole. Thus Shakespeare, in not showing us a murder, gives us the truth of murder in a way that a thousand television newsreels of actual murders can’t.

During the Vietnam War, most of us witnessed a televised execution: a pistol put to a man’s head, the trigger pulled, the head jerking, the facial expression distorting. It’s a famous film clip, and many of us thought, perhaps, that we now knew what an execution was like: this shock and horror and ugliness.

Of course, we were wrong. The truth of any execution is a resonant truth that echoes through the dead man’s family and community as well as the executioner’s, that runs backward and forward in time, that binds and tears apart, a truth of grief and anger and loss and revenge and need, a truth of participation.

Shakespeare, staging that Vietnamese execution, would not have shown it. Yet he would have forced us to participate in it and so understand it and our own connections to it.

Television’s primary deception, that “viewing” is “knowing,” leads to another deception, that the right to know is the right to see.

In this country people used to go to public hangings. I don’t wish to argue for their return, but they were certainly far more honest than televised executions would be. People had to show up. They had to make an effort to get there and had to show their faces, greet their neighbors and deal with the reasons, individual or communal, that they were there. They had to put the execution and their presences at it into context. If they were there as voyeurs, they had to be public voyeurs. If they were there to taste revenge, they tasted it in public. Families of the condemned, also there perhaps, grieved in public, and everyone watching had to deal with that aspect of the execution also, and had to consider how to go on relating to each other.

Public, televised executions would not be public. They would be a million private showings for individuals huddled in their living rooms for small and private reasons, having neither to admit that they watched nor to notice that their neighbors watched, and so never having to deal with the reasons they watched.

Televised executions would allow people to “view” an “event” rather than participate in a passing. Rather than help us deal with and understand executions, and our own public and private responsibility for them, television from the execution chamber would allow us to distance the event even further from our lives. How could this not be a perversion? Anything that allows and encourages a population to cower, hide, refuse to face what is before them, is unhealthy. Let’s not confuse good art with bad public policy, and let’s not pretend that letting a camera run during an execution can tell us as much about that execution or ourselves, as “Macbeth” or “King Lear” or “Dead Man Walking.”