It shows a man driving a car. It is the simplest sort of family video. You see
a man at the wheel of a medium Dodge.
It is just a kid aiming her camera through the rear window of the family
car at the windshield of the car behind her.
You know about families and their video cameras. You know how kids
get involved, how the camera shows them that every subject is potentially
charged, a million things they never see with the unaided eye. They investigate
the meaning of inert objects and dumb pets and they poke at family privacy.
They learn to see things twice.
It is the kid's own privacy that is being protected here. She is twelve years
old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor
the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it.
It shows a man in a sport shirt at the wheel of his car. There is nothing else
to see. The car approaches briefly, then falls back.
You know how children with cameras learn to work the exposed moments
that define the family cluster. They break every trust, spy out the undefended
space, catching Mom coming out of the bathroom in her cumbrous robe and
turbaned towel, looking bloodless and plucked. It is not a joke. They will
shoot you sitting on the pot if they can manage a suitable vantage.
The tape has the jostled sort of noneventness that marks the family
product. Of course the man in this case is not a member of the family but a
stranger in a car, a random figure, someone who has happened along in the
slow lane.
It shows a man in his forties wearing a pale shirt open at the throat, the
image washed by reflections and sunglint, with many jostled moments.
It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child
who thought she was doing something simple and maybe halfway clever,
shooting some tape of a man in a car.
He sees the girl and waves briefly, wagging a hand without taking it off the
wheel — an underplayed reaction that makes you like him.
It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless determination,
a persistence that lives outside the subject matter. You are looking into
the mind of home video. It is innocent, it is aimless, it is determined, it is real.
He is bald up the middle of his head, a nice guy in his forties whose whole
life seems open to the hand-held camera.
But there is also an element of suspense. You keep on looking not because
you know something is going to happen — of course you do know something
is going to happen and you do look for that reason but you might also keep on
looking if you came across this footage for the first time without knowing the
outcome. There is a crude power operating here. You keep on looking because
things combine to hold you fast — a sense of the random, the amateurish, the
accidental, the impending. You don't think of the tape as boring or interesting.
It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the
film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you're
thinking.
The world is lurking in the camera, already framed, waiting for the boy or
girl who will come along and take up the device, learn the instrument, shooting
old Granddad at breakfast, all stroked out so his nostrils gape, the cereal
spoon baby-gripped in his pale fist.
It shows a man alone in a medium Dodge. It seems to go on forever.
There's something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image,
the sputtering black-and-white tones, the starkness — you think this is more
real, truer-to-life, than anything around you. The things around you have a
rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe
underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of
all the layers you have added. And this is another reason why you keep on
looking. The tape has a searing realness.
It shows him giving an abbreviated wave, stiff-palmed, like a signal flag at
a siding.
You know how families make up games. This is just another game in
which the child invents the rules as she goes along. She likes the idea of
videotaping a man in his car. She has probably never done it before and she
sees no reason to vary the format or terminate early or pan to another car. This
is her game and she is learning it and playing it at the same time. She feels
halfway clever and inventive and maybe slightly intrusive as well, a little bit
of brazenness that spices any game.
And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the
footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a
destiny.
Of course if she had panned to another car, the right car at the precise
time, she would have caught the gunman as he fired.
The chance quality of the encounter. The victim, the k**er, and the child
with a camera. Random energies that approach a common point. There's
something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things about forces
beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic
and every reasonable layer of human expectation.
She wandered into it. The girl got lost and wandered clear-eyed into horror.
This is a children's story about straying too far from home. But it isn't the
family car that serves as the instrument of the child's curiosity, her inclination
to explore. It is the camera that puts her in the tale.
You know about holidays and family celebrations and how somebody
shows up with a camcorder and the relatives stand around and barely react
because they're numbingly accustomed to the process of being taped and
decked and shown on the VCR with the coffee and cake.
He is hit soon after. If you've seen the tape many times you know from the
handwave exactly when he will be hit. It is something, naturally, that you wait
for. You say to your wife, if you're at home and she is there, Now here is where
he gets it. You say, Janet, hurry up, this is where it happens.
Now here is where he gets it. You see him jolted, sort of wire-shocked —
then he seizes up and falls toward the door or maybe leans or slides into the
door is the proper way to put it. It is awful and unremarkable at the same time.
The car stays in the slow lane. It approaches briefly, then falls back.
You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs,
you have yours. But there's a certain urgency here. You want her to see how it
looks. The tape has been running forever and now the thing is finally going to
happen and you want her to be here when he's shot.
Here it comes, all right. He is shot, head-shot, and the camera reacts, the
child reacts — there is a jolting movement but she keeps on taping, there is a
sympathetic response, a nerve response, her heart is beating faster but she
keeps the camera trained on the subject as he slides into the door and even
as you see him die you're thinking of the girl. At some level the girl has to be
present here, watching what you're watching, unprepared — the girl is seeing
this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that she keeps the tape rolling.
It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see
it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence — the realness beneath
the layers of cosmetic perception. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. He dies so
fast. There is no accompaniment of any kind. It is very stripped. You want to
tell her it is realer than real but then she will ask what that means.
The way the camera reacts to the gunshot — a startled reaction that
brings pity and terror into the frame, the girl's own shock, the girl's identification
with the victim.
You don't see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and
down the back of his neck. The way his head is twisted away from the door,
the twist of the head gives you only a partial profile and it's the wrong side, it's
not the side where he was hit.
And maybe you're being a little aggressive here, practically forcing your
wife to watch. Why? What are you telling her? Are you making a little statement?
Like I'm going to ruin your day out of ordinary spite. Or a big statement?
Like this is the risk of existing. Either way you're rubbing her face in
this tape and you don't know why.
It shows the car drifting toward the guardrail and then there's a jostling
sense of two other lanes and part of another car, a split-second blur, and the
tape ends here, either because the girl stopped shooting or because some central
authority, the police or the district attorney or the TV station, decided
there was nothing else you had to see.
This is either the tenth or eleventh homicide committed by the Texas
Highway k**er. The number is uncertain because the police believe that one
of the shootings may have been a copycat crime.
And there is something about videotape, isn't there, and this particular
kind of serial crime? This is a crime designed for random taping and immediate
playing. You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible
when the means of taping and playing an event — playing it immediately
after the taping — became part of the culture. The principal doesn't necessarily
commit the sequence of crimes in order to see them taped and played. He
commits the crimes as if they were a form of taped-and-played event. The
crimes are inseparable from the idea of taping and playing. You sit there thinking
that this is a crime that has found its medium, or vice versa — cheap ma**
production, the sequence of repeated images and victims, stark and glary and
more or less unremarkable.
It shows very little in the end. It is a famous murder because it is on tape
and because the murderer has done it many times and because the crime was
recorded by a child. So the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimes
called because they have to call her something. The tape is famous and
so is she. She is famous in the modern manner of people whose names are
strategically withheld. They are famous without names or faces, spirits living
apart from their bodies, the victims and witnesses, the underage criminals, out
there somewhere at the edges of perception.
Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason
alone to stay fixed to the screen. It is instructional, watching a man shot
dead as he drives along on a sunny day. It demonstrates an elemental truth,
that every breath you take has two possible endings. And that's another thing.
There's a joke locked away here, a note of cruel slapstick that you are completely
willing to appreciate. Maybe the victim's a chump, a dope, cla**ically
unlucky. He had it coming, in a way, like an innocent fool in a silent movie.
You don't want Janet to give you any crap about it's on all the time, they
show it a thousand times a day. They show it because it exists, because they
have to show it, because this is why they're out there. The horror freezes your
soul but this doesn't mean that you want them to stop.