A wink eventually becomes a twitch, a twitch the sign of some inner disturbance. - Frederick Exley Brett Easton Ellis' tragedy of manners, Less Than Zero, climaxes - that is to say, ends as the protagonist sits through an anonymous snuff movie in some vague bedroom at an indistinct LA party. While pretty much indistinguishable from the lame, trashy interactions he's had throughout the novel, his distant complicity in murder is a signal to us that this is too much. Too much? Too extreme? Too cool. After all, it's hard to know how to take this in a racy work of fiction wrapped in a chintzy paperback cover. You could put the book down in disgust, then pick it up an hour later to see what happens next. Riding a literary trend, the novel was scarfed down as brat-pack popcorn; its lame, trashy, and distant quality was mostly what stuck with readers.

As for the cinema of snuff: the protests of police, FBI, and Cecil Adams haven't convinced the plain folks who stubbornly insist that something must be done about it. Thus do "Snuff Movies" take their place with "Political-Correctness," "Sex Addiction," and "Postmodernism" as Godzillas of bogus moral panic, always threatening to crush the nation in their jaws, but never quite willing to take the final step Crocker of biting down. And yet. And yet. Maybe this shadow, Chills, Thrills, this whiff of a concept, is in fact and Frills not so ghostly - maybe in fact it's really capable of crushing people. In the experimentally pornographic Crash, J. G. Ballard developed an erotics of voyeurism, masochism, and speed. David Cronenberg's adaptation met with audiences' prim dismissal that they didn't find traffic accidents sexy, but scary and painful. Perhaps in its haste to inject "palatable" elements of 9 1/2 Weeks-style heterosexual character development, the film Crash leaves out one crucial component of Ballard's vision: celebrity photos.

So let's cut to the chase.

As usual, the faceless Greek chorus of Usenet provides some context for Diana's death:

"Huh. So, for five looooooong minutes before the ambulance and the Jaws o' Life, or whatever they call it in France, arrived, and realizing that her one true love at last was literally crushed, trying with every morsel of strength she could muster to keep herself alive, for her sake but more so for her children's, she heard, click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr click-whirr.

And then, eventually, the sirens. Evidently she was pried forth conscious."

But most commentators stuck to a familiar script: ain't-it-a-shame-let's-see-that-again. It's a scenario that goes further back than Bronco chases.

Among the first motion pictures ever made was an hour-long documentary of people picking through the rubble of a subway disaster, looking for victims. More quaintly, maybe worse, another early exercise depicted a captive elephant who had gone bad and killed people: Dumbo is made to wade into a pool of water with electrical cables sunk into it. The goofy moral nightmare of snuff flicks has always been just a dream about the news.

In this suspended animation of moral horror and itchy boredom, rationalization is the first choice: Princess Diana wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Not only that, her driver was drunk. Not only that, she was going out at midnight for illicit fun with a rich Arab. Not only that, the speedometer was stuck at 121 mph. The narrative begins to racket apart at this velocity; hungry for even more detailed details, we speed up. A quick jump-cut to bootlegged, spy-camera footage of her engaging in some humiliating sex, but we don't even need that anymore. A safe state of moral ambiguity has been restored.

Because it wouldn't matter if they were driving with shotguns strapped into their open mouths. No matter how or why Diana died, you'd have been able, somehow, to enjoy it. No matter how you slice it, or them, the moral quality of celebrity is best understood as porn, and newspaper reporting was always our underlying psychological model for snuff. The circularity of reporting on her death makes this sense even more acute: The death provides a final orgy for tabloids with more reporting than even during her life. The only qualitative difference is that the reporting now pops up a couple of levels to become metareporting, thus filling space in the parts of a newspaper that stuff like this normally does not penetrate. As event gets more perverse, more holes are filled - and it doesn't even cost extra.

Following Foucault or something a lot like him and always anxiously looking over his shoulder, the crackerbarrel philosophers might scramble for neutral ground. Anything that looks like a moral stand, a gesture more fixed than a shrug, isn't too smart, they think, because it isn't self-conscious. After all, they're writing about it ... reading about it ... complicity ... fodder for another piece ... the need for new meat. Yes. We're pinned down, pegged, sized up, doomed. Fuck you. Next paragraph.

In an elaborately illustrated New York Times Magazine retrospective piece some time back, one reporter who overran the small town where the Jessica-in-a-well story took place mused on how unexpected fame had provoked the lone heroic rescuer to destroy his own life a few years later. Exquisitely self-aware of (if not very thoughtful or articulate about) how she had participated in ripping apart an average individual's moorings, the reporter reflected: "If I took responsibility for the results of my stories, I wouldn't be able to do my job."

Remember that morality is ambivalent, complex - a question of what you can get away with. You're definitely too smart to be told anything else; there's no time for it. Telephoto lenses are delicate. When people follow their outrage and rejection, throwing rocks at reporters and photographers, they should be informed by a responsible and sympathetic media commentator (who could perhaps speak to them from behind some sort of amplification system) that their sticks and stones are useless. The reporters, who are (like bureaucrats, secret police, or your mom) delicate people just trying to get by in the same market economy you are, will come right back. A futile outburst will not change the market - it is not delicate but bigger and wiser than people and will thrive, reporting and selling the people's rage back to them. It's a market that will, in the end, fuck the people's corpses too, if they're lucky. The people need someone to remind them that outrage and rejection are weak and will fade. As will love, and hope.

This article appeared originally in Suck.