Although the term "Voyeurism" is generally used to describe a mode of spectatorship associated with sexual pleasure, there is another form that also carries connotations of perversity and taboo. This is the fascination with watching scenarios of violence and death, particularly the subjection of the body to visually spectacular forms of gruesome disintegration. Throughout history, various cultures have set up spectacles which appealed to this desire on the part of the populace, while also reinforcing the ideology of existing relationships of power. Human sacrifice, tournaments to the death, public executions, and public tortures all played a part in the typical popular entertainments of ages past. The attraction of this is described by Sigmund Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as the dynamic tension between the opposing instinctual drives of life and death. In theorizing what became known as "The Death Drive," Freud states that "the death instincts strive toward the reduction of tensions to a zero point, which is the return of the living being to an inorganic state." In addition to working within the organism and inducing anxiety about disintegration and annihilation, this force is diverted outward toward the external world, where it becomes the destructive drive for mastery and power. Thus, this aspect of instinctual attraction, which pulls people like a magnet to the scene of accidents secretly hoping for a glimpse of bodily injury or death, is an aspect of our being with an impulsive urgency equal in power to our sexuality and instincts of self-preservation. In his scandalous epic, The l20 Days of Sodom, the Marquis de Sade describes this voyeuristic pleasure: "It is from the sight of him who does not in the least enjoy what I enjoy, and who suffers, that comes the charm of being able to say to one"s self, "I am therefore happier than he"...for the voluptuousness which I sense...is the result of this sweet comparison of their condition with mine." Although the name of the Marquis de Sade has become synonymous with perversion, few people are aware that for over 500 years, every public square in Europe offered regular spectacles of torture and murder that made the climactic "Hell Passion" in The 120 Days seem like a lighthearted romp in the park. Loftily recounting the "march of progress" and the triumph of scientific reason, our history books have somehow forgotten to chronicle the savagery of the systematic elimination of the Earth-centered spirituality once common in European cultures, which was occurring at the same time that these ideals of modern ideology were being developed. In these earlier tribal systems, the power of women was centrally honored, and it was this female power that became the target of brutal suppression by the combined forces of church and state. The jocular references to "the witch hunts" which have entered our vernacular, are the only memory trace referring to a genocidal campaign of political repression in which the lives of 9 million people, 85% of them women, were brutally extinguished in carnevalesque public spectacles of blood and fire. At this historical flash point of power, sex, and death, the fear and loathing of women and the repression of sexuality endemic in the church, along with the political drive for power and profit, fed on this fascination with the destruction of the body, to produce savagely inventive techniques gauged for spectacular effect. The agonies of someone being broken on the wheel, for example, are described by Robert Held in Inquisition: "The victim was transformed ...into a sort of huge screaming puppet writhing in rivulets of blood, a puppet with four tentacles, like a sea monster, of raw, slimy, and shapeless flesh mixed with splinters of smashed bones...together with burning at the stake and drawing and quartering, this was one of the most popular spectacles among the many similar ones that took place in all the squares of Europe more or less every day. (Practices also exported to enforce political expediencies of Colonialism). Hundreds of depictions from the span l450 - l750 show throngs of plebeians and the well-born lost in rapt delight around a good wheeling, best if a woman, better if several women in a row." Through cultural repression, sexuality, the primal force of life, becomes sublimated, and its force channeled into torture and violence, and the opposing drive toward death. Today, although we no longer have spectacles of violent death in every public square, this form of entertainment is still the dominant type of culturally produced spectacle, in the mediated and sanitized form of violent television shows and movies. It is often quoted that "the average American child sees 8,000 murders and l0,000 acts of violence on television before getting out of grade school" (as well as any real violence the child may experience in life). This form of entertainment is clearly more culturally encouraged than spectacles involving loving sexuality, though it is still charged with a whiff of titillation and taboo. Indeed, though we all still love to watch the glorious sights of spurting blood, dismemberment, and murder, these days the invention of "special effects" has allowed our moral consciences to remain safely aloof as we indulge this fascination. The ideology of our "reason" and "progress" has also wiped the slate of history clean of any acknowledgement of the vicious pleasures at its core.
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