Nights of the Living Dread

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THE BAFFLER
http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/nights-living-dread/

Nights of the Living Dread
Niela Orr May 01, 2015

This week, the luridly misleading media coverage of
the Baltimore uprisings called to mind a fittingly
grim narrative template from the entertainment world:
shlocky action-horror fare. The strange alchemy
by which reportage of Freddie Gray’s murder at
the hands of six Baltimore police officers and the
protest-borne rebellion that commenced after his
funeral migrated back and forth between fact and
fiction is perhaps best summed up by media theorist
George Gerbner’s “cultivation theory.”

Cultivation theory holds, in Gerber’s formulation,
that “the more time people spend ‘living’ in
the television world, the more likely they are to
believe social reality portrayed on television.”
While this process may sound complicated, it operates
with stunning efficiency in the news narrative that
seeks to transform black police-brutality victims
into super-predators—and the actions of black
protestors into irrational and blindly destructive
assaults on our social order. To see how such potent
imagery plays out in the real world for actual African
American citizens, see the photos assembled in the
“If They Gunned Me Down” movement.

Via the warped and didactic accounts of the Baltimore
protests promulgated mainly (though by no means
exclusively) on cable news, these toxic news memes
achieved something close to escape velocity—and
their tonal register has verged increasingly on
dystopian science fiction or horrorcore. It’s a
bit as though Philip K. Dick had been hired on as
the executive producer of CNN’s The Situation Room.

Some of these misrepresentations were darkly
comic. CNN misidentified the blue-and-white-wearing
sorority Zeta Phi Beta as gang members, and thereby
summarily transformed the town hall meeting these
civic-minded college graduates were attending
into a furtive den of criminal activity. And that
image opened, in turn, onto a gang fable that the
Baltimore Police Department had likely planted in
the obliging cable news cycle earlier in the week. A
department memo claimed, without any sourcing, that
there was a “credible threat” that the city’s
leading gangs—the Crips, the Bloods, and the Black
Guerilla Family—“have formed a partnership” to
“take-out” police officers. Eventually, of course,
more responsible news reports discredited this urban
legend—and gang leaders themselves, in one of the
protest’s many surreal flourishes, convened a news
conference of their own to deny the report.

But any narrative frame powerful enough to turn
sorority pledges into gang members won’t stop
at mere empirical disproof. Indeed, the more the
press had to deal with the days-long spectacle of
unrest in the streets, the more the people charged
with rendering it intelligible to a news audience
gravitated into the orbit of dystopian fantasy. Prior
to the demonstrations planned to follow on Gray’s
funeral ceremony, the Baltimore Sun and other papers
falsely reported that area high school students were
circulating sinister plans of their own under the
Twitter hashtag #Purge—and that this cabal (as
opposed to say, a generation’s worth of economic
neglect and a decade-plus of unchecked police
brutality in black Baltimore) was the ultimate source
of the so-called riots.

In the terms of cultivation theory, it didn’t matter
if these accounts were true or not—they had all
the necessary elements of scare-driven entertainment
vérité: footage of a phalanx of state police;
roving groups of young people, some protesting,
others looting; business looted and aflame; and the
sensational on-the-ground coverage of seemingly
unhinged and scary protestors. And the crowning
irony in all this is that it was our tabloid media,
and not the anonymous hordes of Twitter-empowered
high school students, that was following the script
of the 2013 horror morality play The Purge.

The Purge‘s imaginary scenario—in which the
American populace embarks on one state-sanctioned
night of carnage and destruction a year, to quell
crime rates and to provide cathartic release of
other social and economic tensions—had plenty of
resonances for Baltimore. The neighborhoods of Charm
City, like those in The Purge are rigidly segmented
by race and class. The movie’s central premise,
that a black man was the scapegoat for unmitigated
middle-class white rage, was also true—and continues
to be so—for Baltimore. Most of all, though, it
was a privileged white overclass that was wreaking
the mayhem (and controlling all the rumors of mayhem)
in The Purge, in the name of preserving stability and
proper patterns of social deference. In other words,
encoded in the lurid pop-horror fable sparking so much
of the breathless cable coverage of the disturbances
in Baltimore was a version of the business model
for cable news: keep viewers afraid, distrustful,
and oblivious to elemental claims of justice, and
we will deliver the officially sanctioned model of
social peace unto you. (In truth, this is the subtext
of many innovative horror films, dating back to George
Romero’s taut racial allegory Night of the Living
Dead, released in that landmark year of assassination
and rioting, 1968.)

Despite the discomfiting similarities between
these films and what’s happened in Baltimore,
there’s another reason Night of the Living Dead
and The Purge‘s B-movie plots are relevant:
they both take seriously the danger facing blacks
in America. For many American blacks, the specter
of violence and the possibility of unjustified
assault on our bodies create an everyday of ambient
terror. The days and nights of living dread, the
abiding existential anguish that permeates the psyche
of black Americans who live in places like Ferguson,
Staten Island, and West Baltimore, make the blighted
landscapes in impoverished neighborhoods a hellish
nightmarescape. The coverage of the uprisings is
reminiscent of the first true American horror film,
D.W. Griffith’s 1915 opus Birth of a Nation:
with its black bogeyman on a mission to debauch the
country with sexual, moral, and physical excess.
Films like The Purge and Romero’s zombie franchise
flipped this script, by locating the real menace in
the heart of the American white majority. It’s no
wonder that Michael Eric Dyson’s recent New York
Times op-ed, “Racial Terror, Fast and Slow”
evoked the twin cinematic bogeys of fast and slow
zombies: no matter the speed, the angst—like the
terror that fuels it—has the capacity to destroy.
Flesh-eating zombies ain’t got nothing on randomized
state violence.


Along with The Purge and Night of the Living
Dead, the 1995 Blaxploitation horror film Tales
from the Hood—which features a vignette about
a vengeful black ghost who had been the victim
of police brutality—supplies another cinematic
echo of the media’s representation of black rage.
The tales and dispatches from various hoods around
the United States—Ferguson, Oakland, Los Angeles,
and now Baltimore—are merely sequels in a series of
unceasing real-life terrors for black Americans. They
trace a singularly grim, and singularly American
declension. On the same day of Freddie Gray’s
funeral, another black man, Terrence Kellum, was
killed by police in Detroit. Joseph Kent, a Baltimore
protestor, was kidnapped by the National Guard on
live TV, and cops besieged a group of protestors in
Denver under cover of night. To the media, and to
the police forces involved in these incidents, black
people are Terminators, to change up the entertainment
metaphor yet again. Our eye contact, like Freddie
Gray’s in other rumored Baltimore police accounts,
is either a confrontational invitation to violence
or a chillingly blank gaze. We are indomitable
monsters with superhuman strength, as Darren Wilson
suggested when he referred to the slain Michael Brown
as something like a “demon.” We are superhuman
creatures with otherworldly powers. We are also
stock villains who must, as simple movie justice
dictates, be riddled with bullets or paralyzed even
when restrained—because, as with the Terminator,
our steely constitution means we don’t die. Except,
of course, when we do.

© 2015 The Baffler