A man led away in handcuffs for shooting his tv sets. He wears a shy, but vaguely rapturous smile. He does not try to hide his face but looks directly into the camera. Sly man disguised as a rural peasant, he seems to get the irony that now he is the one on tv.
Shooting your tv is not unlike shooting yourself in the head. Often the point is not to kill yourself but to put an end to the miserable world that surrounds you and infects the air you breathe. To create a space where you can breathe again.
In most suicides there is a fantasy of survival: You live on, you find yourself in a world altered by your act, punished for the indignities it inflicted upon you and ready to make amends.
Switching channels is then a minor form of suicide, minor because you reserve the right to go back.
Of course, the man who shot his tv sets will be prosecuted. In most Western ethical systems, suicide is a crime. The man will be placed in county lockup, where of course he will have a tv, and where the image of his sad incarcerated shell will flicker from security monitors that are never turned off.
One of our nostalgic wishes is to decouple ourselves from the prosthetic, and presumably the prosthetic circuit wishes to decouple itself from us. That was the crime of the HAL 2000 in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey. Accused of error by the humans, it decoupled them.
We will perhaps on some future day find ourselves as savages once again. We will become neither Space Odyssey’s cosmic old man, nor its meta-cosmic fetus. The pleasures of earth return to us. And with them the ethics of pleasure. Our longing for them is such that it is easy enough to squeeze the trigger.
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