Topic
Death by Taser, Pickton's evil and severed feet. That's our brand now.
Everyone loves a horror story.
The "faux paw" has been one of the top stories in world headlines this week. International media consumed local reports that a sixth disembodied foot had washed up on B.C.'s shores. Even the bizarre revelation that it was an animal paw didn't dampen the media or public interest. And around Vancouver, gossip about celebrities, real estate and the U.S. election have been temporarily shoved to the back of the line at the water cooler.
Ask any Vancouverite what we're known for internationally and he or she will probably tell you it's our status as the world's most livable city, the fact that we're hosting the Olympics, or maybe that the X-Files was shot here eons ago. But though the dozen or so well-read friends I asked in the U.S., U.K., Europe and Australia said Vancouver was pretty and green (and a bit of a backwater when it comes to business), neither they nor international media knew much else. CNN for example, only ran one short piece about the livable city rankings, four years ago, which included all the other winners too. And only one person I asked could list a 2010 or 2012 Olympic host city. "Toronto?" asked one U.K. friend.
CNN's horror show
Instead, CNN, strangely a good barometer of international media interest in Vancouver, has only focused its most intense spotlight on three B.C. stories in as many years: the disembodied feet, the Pickton trial and, the Tasering tragedy, of which the disembodied feet saga has so far got at least as much attention as Pickton.
"Mystery deepens as fifth human foot lands," wrote the Melbourne Herald Sun last week. "Whodunnit: community baffled by severed feet washed up on shore" ran the headline for one long story in the Guardian, followed by "The strange case of the severed feet" for another. The Manchester Guardian poked fun with its headline, "Six Feet Under." And even David Letterman questioned two Canadian audience members about the mystery.
It's not just internationally that the story got legs (sorry). "The mystery of the feet," was front-page news in the Vancouver Sun, and the Province proclaimed, "Sixth foot raises hopes" before the hoax was discovered. One 31-year-old friend, a new mother short on reading time, told me it was the only story she followed last week. Another, a 40-year-old, said her aunt actually phoned her, and breathlessly asked if she knew about the story. She rolled her eyes, then went straight to her computer to read about it.
Exploring Savage Road
Perhaps this means Vancouverites have the image equivalent of body dysmorphia (having the wrong idea about what we actually look like to others). But that would mean global media is in fact an accurate mirror reflecting who we are. Let's pause and reflect upon which topics are media magnets and why. Horror, crime and mystery, are key elements. And they create a perfect storm of tension when the setting is otherwise tranquil and idyllic:
"Even on a bright, breezy summer's day, there is something uninviting about Savage Road," writes Dan Glaister in the Guardian. "Its single lane track runs straight as an arrow before stopping at the water's edge on Westham Island, 15 miles from downtown Vancouver.
"At one end, a farm shop offers honey, fresh eggs and, incongruously, prawns. Nearby is a rod and gun club. Beyond the flattened delta landscape, mountains shimmer on the horizon.
"At the far end of Savage Road stands a boatyard. Hulking pieces of rusted machinery lie close to a concrete ramp leading to the water. It was here on Monday that the couple that owns the yard found something not entirely unexpected in the water: a severed human foot."
Cue shivers and music.
"When you look at the history of crime reporting, horror is a significant piece of it," says Mary Lynn Young, a professor of journalism at UBC. Young points to Karen Haltunnen's well-known book on the subject, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination, published by Harvard University Press in 1999, which looks at the public's fascination with horror stories.
A few centuries ago, crime stories focused on spiritual redemption: whether or not the sinner repented before being sent to the gallows, explains Young. But then crime stories inspired the gothic literary machine, and elaborate narratives, full of mystery, suspense, rich detail and horror became popular. Then, with the rise of sociology and obsession with forensic and scientific details (the 18th century equivalent of CSI), people started to be interested in crime stories because of the specific scientific and psychological details of the case.
'Boys covering boys'
Several friends who read the Guardian story on the mystery feet said they had specifically been drawn to the macabre, the gore, the grisly detail.
But Young, who focused on the Pickton trial in her PhD thesis, says media overestimates the degree to which people are interested in crime, and "misreads the public's appetite for these stories." She says the norm of making 20 to 25 per cent of news sections' content crime -- and violence-related in the U.S, Canada and Europe (with more in TV than print) -- is partly due to a gender component: police reporting tends to be "boys covering boys."
People like stories full of tension, but covering, say, day-care issues, if done with suspense and narrative would generate the same interest as stories full of "crime, violence, mystery and horror," asserts Young.
While narrative, suspenseful day-care stories do appeal more to me, I tried that on a few (male) friends who disagreed. One 42 year old who works in film, said he likes stories that focus on the bizarre, the absurd and even the horrific -- because it makes him feel more normal and sane in comparison. He also likes a lot of tension and suspense because the bigger the terror, the bigger the satisfaction of the resolution (it was Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick).
Gallows humour
The established scientific views about why people love horror movies and novels echo his. But last year, two scientists released a study showing that people actually experience both negative and positive emotions simultaneously. Much like in extreme sports, people may actually enjoy being scared, not just feel relief when the threat is removed.
It may be why comment rooms lit up with puns (after the discovery that the discovery was a hoax), despite the obvious violence and pain of this story -- and despite scoldings for deep insensitivity by other commenters: "I think the police got off on the wrong foot; their case didn't have a leg to stand on; the irresponsible heel should step up and take his kicks; they'd better hop to and get this sorted out; it should be a shoe-in, assuming they've done their legwork properly; it's obvious it was the work of their Arch Enemies."
Groans aside, how would you resolve the mystery of how Vancouver has become horror capital in the global media imagination?
Perhaps the reason is our pristine nature. The tales of the severed feet, Tasered passenger, the pig farming serial killer, gain their mass appeal locally and internationally because they so contradict the pleasant way of life we enjoy here.
Or not. "It seems like a beautiful city but it has an ugly heart," said one friend. "It has mountains and shiny sky scrapers, but doesn't take care of its own people. It's about looking good not being good."
The suspense builds.
Related Tyee stories:
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Jeffrey J.
4 years ago
Never a Truer Word Spoken
Is it irony or happenstance? The recent world coverage of "horrific" BC coincides with the most angry, nasty, small minded government we've ever seen. Indeed, BC seems beautiful "but it has an ugly heart,"
"It has mountains and shiny sky scrapers, but doesn't take care of its own people. It's about looking good not being good."
Well said. It is time everyone began to spend more time trying to oust the current neocon regime and take back control of our society.
Great article!
davidex
4 years ago
A Vacuum of Alternatives
I agree, but what will we put in the ousted regime's place.. First you have to have an opposition party or two to choose from. (Politics 101.) Oh yeah, you also have to have a moderately literate and motivated electorate and a media that reports issues with more conviction than they do the sports scores. Apparently none of the above is available in this province.
Until this happens, I think I'll just go down to the beach and wait for more feet to float by.
Stump
4 years ago
Linda Cullen's editorial
In 24 yesterday was quite possibly one of the most tasteless bits of writing I've half-read and put down in disgust in some time.
I have an appetite for gallows humour too, but I find it easy to put myself in the position of someone with a missing person in the family with regard to the found feet story... and can only imagine the distress they'd feel at both the discoveries and our callous attempts at jokes.
Further, I wonder how hearty the laughs would be if it were high-heeled shoes with women's feet inside.
Frank
4 years ago
Stump
Agree completely. It would stand to reason these people were the victims of foul play and I don't see any way to find a chuckle in it.
avandoc
4 years ago
Two-tier society
Maclean's magazine recently had a front-page story on organized crime in BC. That's the other menace we face. Drug trafficking, increased port traffic, guns from the US are converging with poverty and clueless governance to turn livable to unlivable. Of course, the elites are shielded from it in their high rises with private security. For them, the views onto the water and mountains are never marred by such gruesome sights.
Skookum1
4 years ago
Old News....
Before I go on, just let me note that lines like "the pleasant way of life we enjoy here" make me wretch. Of the "gee, how could it happen here?" variety of noxious cupidity. And reeks of the "best place on earth" zombie-mantra that confuses a place that looks like paradise but is actually paradise destroyed. Including our pleasant way of life. Life in the green bubble of beauty-as-safety, which is the BC "pleasant way of life", was never realistic; but it's gone for other reasons than Willie Pickton and feet-as-flotsam (actually the oceanographer they interviewed on the national boob the other night said hundreds of body parts wash up in BC every year - the feet are only unusual because they still had their shoes on...).
Maybe the issue isn't that BC is psycho - after all, we know it is, and if we don't, we're part of the psycho-numbness of the place. Maybe it's just that we're hurt they don't talk about our liveability our 2010 or how beautiful it is (when it's not raining) and we don't like it when someone bitches about the rain (or mentions his wife not liking it....). Instead, the outside world has focussed on our particular flair for grand guignol. Maybe they should have tuned in earlier; we could have had a boom in horror-tourism.
Clifford Olson and Brother Twelve for starters, and check out Boone Helm or consider the drunken insanity of the Wild McLean Boys. Not to pass over the maricides in the East Indian community or the babies abandoned in the Burnaby woods on a regular basis, or the series of East Asian family men who couldn't handle the cultural and financial pressures and locked the household down for murder-suicide. Remember the circumstances of the house fire in Holberg, or the guy from McConnell Creek who went nuts in Mission Hospital? Bruce Blackman? The early '90s gang known as the Russians?
The scary news item was the number of disappeeared people annually in BC - and it's rising. 293 I think they said on the newscast, a lot of them men. It's not just the Missing Women and the Highway of Tears; there's something much larger underfoot here; whether it's an endemic culture of sociopathic madness giving thte place an atmosphere "helping people over the edge", or the work of a few dedicated serial killers. Almost three hundred people a year unaccounted for, and hundreds of body parts washing up on shore each year. That's a lot scarier than six disembodied feet. Not as colourful, and maybe not that mysterious; but shocking, surely.
Bailey
4 years ago
Bailey
I wonder how people outside view the political situation here.
-The privatization and looting of billions of dollars worth of public assets at pennies on the dollar, with the reduction of regulations protecting the ones who built and paid for the assets from predation by the lucky buyers.
-The reopening of a closed jail in Burnaby, renaming it a "mental health facility" in preparation for clearing the homeless from view during the Olympics. Poverty defined as a mental disorder reminds me of the Soviet view of political disagreements as evidence of insanity.
-The police raids on the Legislature and investigations of political parties in power for organized crime connections. Coupled with political corruption trials fiddled with by the Crown in ways that appear obstructive.
This stuff is just as "horrific" as mad murderers and floating feet.
Skookum1
4 years ago
what it's gonna take
Most likeliy to happen first is some enterprising and curious US or British or other producer starts to dig around in BC's "quirks and queasiness" files and do a whole series - here I mean the gore and twisted stuff, whether any one of a series of gold rush-era murders all the way up through the Filippone thing and Dorothy Stratten down to Pig Farm Willie and the shoes. BC's very own X-Files, though the supernatural is only involved if David Icke's right and guys like Campbell really are aliens, or when one of the perpetrators says it is (Bruce Blackman from madness on the one hand, Brother XII from megalomaniac scheming on the other). This maybe after digging around in "American history in BC", which has huge potential for a mini-series for American audiences, but the story-trove here is very rich and American audiences are looking for "new stuff", including the gore-n-grisly stuff (especially that stuff).
But once all the shtick is done, a lot of reporters and broadcasters who've never heard of BC before are going to wind up exploring the place and finding out about its politics. The hope lies there - our own media is either coopted or, if not working for the Empire, without the resources or, in fact, the communcations-slick that makes an American-made doc a whole lot more penetrating; "political derring-do".
Might be fun if somebody could persuade Lewis Lapham to do an article on Ledgegate or Land Claims in Harper's. Not that he couldn't at any time in the last so many decades, but having something to snipe at BC with during the GOP-ified Olympics (which is what they are, and are gonna look like too) is right down his alley; jaded cynicism written up in an erudite fashion is the core of his subscriber-base, pretty much. Either that or those ads cost more than they look like.
Someone like him anyway, or if we could get Roger Moore to snap out of his pollyannaish sucker-for-Canada routine and start smelling the poop around the coffee shops.
Skookum1
4 years ago
Bailey
The reality of the news business, or of the business of owning the news, is that the feet and Pickton are presented as "horrific" to the public to keep them more worried/obsessed about that than caring to stay away from the noxious bath of politics that nowadays is a social taboo in conversation. Tabloidism is all about giving people something meaningless to love/hate, so as to keep them from considering the truly meaningful, which most of them are aware of but can't stand to think about, because of the frustration of eelling that there's nothing you can do about it. That it's the way the world is. The way the system works, as one of the excuse-makers for Basi-Virk/Bornmann-Kieran and also the Sponsorship Scandal claims.
All stinkum. But "even the Tyee panders to the game, by running this article instead of truly relevant copy. It may read like cultural/media analysis, really it's just riding the news-wave around the feet. But at least this rag covers Ledgegate, sometimes, and other scandalous matters, unlike the main papers and stations and the don't-rock-the-boat CBC......
Ideally, Railgate will break wide open in the same week as the opening ceremonies.....well, that's assuming the NeoGrits win the next election - not a long shot by the way things sound - but that's the same deal with people who prefer to read Metro and The Province and only want "news lite" - the NeoGrits offer them "politics lite" (lite only if you believe it's a good thing and that they can be trusted, or that no one else can rather).
ME2
4 years ago
Skookum1
Re your statement :
"The scary news item was the number of disappeeared people annually in BC - and it's rising. 293 I thik tnhey said on the newscast,...."
Some years ago, I heard a Dutch criminologist state that less than one in 100 murders is ever discovered, and of those, only a similar proportion of murderers.
The reason for this is that murders are usually premeditated, and therefore well-planned, which includes hiding the body.
Those that come to light are usually those committed mindlessly - while in a state of emotion - or by those who want the body found.
His point was that by far the larger portion of us automatically obey the laws without even thinking about it, usually because most of us agree with them. That point was in support of his core one - that contrary to the thinking of authoritarians, more and/or harsher laws do not create a more law-abiding citizenry.
This is directed at all those Lefties who seem to have bought into all the varieties of "zero-tolerance" enforcements we are seeing under the edict of the Harper and Campbell neocon gov'ts, being directed at ordinary people while ignoring the law-breaking by their businessmen friends.
"It’s a lousy law that requires force to make it work"……(Dalton Camp on the Peter Gzowski Radio show)
The War Against Drugs is a perfect example of such failed policy.
Skookum1
4 years ago
Quote:This is directed at
That has me wondering - what were the relative growth rates in crime/types of crime during the years of Mulroney's regime, federally, vs Trudeau's and Chretien's regime, and then now Harper's? Ditto with the relative eras of Socred/NDP/Liberal rule in BC. I realize laws didn't change much in those periods, but enforcement policies and priorites must have been influenced by the respective solictor-generals and overall political ethic of the govenrment in question. Is there any correlation do you think?
My thinking is that it was during the Bill Bennett/Mulroney heyday that crime - certain kinds of crime anyway - started to skyrocket. A combination of rich-poor economic factors no doubt explains some of it, including the importation of Asian-style gang violence, explains part of it; but how much are these staistics influenced by enforcement policy?
Do conservative regimes cause escalating crime rates?
Two observations; re "soft crime" like black-market labour or grow-ops, a strong undercurrent in the accepted attitude is that, since governments are criminals and the police are known to be corrupt, why should anybody else play fair? That people vote for clearly piratical politicians (Campbell) underscores this cynicism; people who live in a climate of sleaze tend to vote for someone they can identify with, and who will retrench the sleaze at a higher level, which helps avert attention from their own...I'd venture that the whole Mexican political system has this fine-tuned....(this applies in Canada to business people even more than "soft crimers"). Monkey see, monkey do, monkey buys fancy threads and a hot car....amorality begets amorality. Such are role models....
The other observation is that there must be a correlation between the costs of the war on drugs and the rates of spending prisons and police; suppliers of the enforcement/punishment system have a vested interest in seeing a demand for their products/services. Did millions get spent on the war on drugs only so millions could be spent on increasing the size of the police force and the number or prison construction/guarding jobs?
Skookum1
4 years ago
further to that
re more enforcement and general shows of public toughness on the part of the authorities:
Everyone knows that the police crackdown on the Downtown Eastside is what spread street people and junkies out through the city. It's also a known thing that the confrontational attitudes of the police towards nightlife and/or large events have helped provoke/encourage riots and riot-style disturbanceds; assuming people will behave like children builds a culture where they're expected to; as with British and European soccer hooliganism.
Dressing up in riot gear is getting ready for a riot, and functions as a procoation to the no-minds....
On the other hand the no-mind culture was a deliberate creation of Socred education/economic policy, and also of Province-style tabloidism....
ME2
4 years ago
Skookum1
One of the things that clued me in when I first began to discover how corrupt our Canadian system is, was when I read that the reason our MSM rarely reports suspected criminality in gov't or business is a result of our extremely strict laws re libel and slander.
I suddenly realised that no, we are not less corrupt than the Yanks as I smugly believed, rather, we get that idea because their press is able to report evidence that unlike ours does have to be tested in a full-blown court trial. That their system is more corrupt than ours is a myth.
I suspect that if the CN sale and leg-gate had happened in the US it would have become front-page news throughout the US media, even though like ours it too is under Corporate domination.
The goal of a media organisation is to SELL news, and if it is of sufficient interest, they'll turn on their good buddies to make a buck. The alternative is to be like CNN and carve out an audience that prefers a slanted viewpoint, but even then, when that becomes untenable, even they will turn upon their once friends, as they've done with Bush.
Of course, a major problem with the Canadian media is a near total lack of competition, and thus no reason to risk offending major advertisers.
But still, people want news that is titillating (which usually involves someone getting into trouble of some sort), and so the trend toward tabloidism in our media thus exploits such as movie-star peccadillos and crime-in-the-street. The first group is fair game, while the second group - us - has no legal recourse, or chance to offer proof that by far the majority of us are law-abiding and considerate of our fellow man, and not just a potential source of criminality.
This devolves into today's classic chicken-or-the-egg argument whether art is copying life or life is copying art. I tend toward the latter position, and refer posters to the many comments on these threads which hold that most anti-social behavior we exhibit is the result of being convinced by the media we must do so for self-preservation.
This suits our neocon politicians just fine, for it validates their "market" behaviour, and their belief that altruism among humans is a rare occurrence - if it occurs at all.
I think that the current round of "zero-tolerance" laws are simply purposeful demonstrations to people that it is only law (or religion) that guides us to moral behaviour, a core belief of the followers of Friedman and Strauss, aka Fascist authoritarianism.
Skookum1
4 years ago
me too
And Crown privilege, of course; we also don't have the same Bill of Rights protecting freedom of speech and "the public right to know" which has prevented similar press blackouts in the US (whether court-ordered as a result of libel chill).
No less corrupt than the US, and IMO just as corrupt as Mexico. Mexico also has a lap-dog press, or did in the PRI days anyway; La Jornada is pointedly anti-government though from a doctrinaire big-S Socialist direction; there are "liberal" papers like PAB-friendly Excelsior but there are also rank old-guard sympathizers like El Dia, ready to cover up and deny anything that makes the ruling class look bad and was the mouthpiece for the PRI during thet totalitarian years. Essentially press monopolies run by poiltical parties/factions, all with their own reasons to hide various forms of poop. We don't have NDP-run papers in Canada, other than smalltiem affairs like The Tyee and the Straight. Of cousre, our small independent publishers don't get murdered like in Mexico, which happens with alarming frequency.
It's because of the freewheeling US media that the same levels of political corruption present in Canada and Mexico are more difficult to achieve in the US; their "secret government" uses extralegal means to cover up what it needs to, but the US media is there waiting like a hawk, waiting for a slip-up. In Canada, a mainstream-paper reporter will run for cover rather than risk breakign astory which could land him behind bars, as happend with the uranium price-fixing scandal or the Grant Bristow affair. Swashbuckling freedom-inspired lawyers here get called into court, charged with contempt if they won't take the medication the court has ordered for them, and their cases are disregarded or "washed" by the media and their cases forgotten (Cram and Clarke).
Yet Canadian political writers/activists continue to rail about what's wrong with the US, and why we shouldn't want to be like them. God help us all, they're deflecting any really critical discussion of Canada's failings by pointing next door. I'm glad you're aware of the difference now, hallelujah; or rather the similarity.
Skookum1
4 years ago
more
Suffice to say that if the FBI had raided the Statehouse or Governor's Mansion in Olympia or another state capital, and there was evidence of influence-peddling involving the sale of public assets to a major multinational.....oh, even CNN and Fox would be all over it. It's one of the reasons I think, as I said above, that annexation would have its payoffs in truth and in public recourse; our media monopolies would also be shattered; sure, they'd be able to expand into the states, or try to buy up Gannett or whatever, but goings-on in Canada would become of interest to American public scutiny.
Easier to think about in a liberalized post-Obama US, of course; but it's important not to confuse the leadership with the system; if we'd been part of the US, George W. would never have become president.....
Not just right-wing authoritarianism; socialist agendas also call for laws (or the socialist "religion") that guides us to moral behaviour; the idea among the left is even that moral behaviour someone is absolute, scientifically, instead of cultural and relative. Coercion rather than encouragement is the name of the game on both sides of the fence; and granted the Soviet Union and China were/are not big-F Fascist authoritarian states, but the control of press, and of the legal/constitutional system, by one political faction is a problem no matter where it rears its head. That in Canada it has the pretence of a free press, just as the pretence of this being a democracy which it's decidedly not, makes it little different from a state-controlled media envirnoment. When the media is the de facto governing system, as it is in Canada, it can make up all the lies it wants and only has itself to account to, likewise the courts, the police, adn Parliament.
I'd go for an independent judiciary, independent legislative branch, and full independent and constitutionally-enshrined freedom of the press/speech.....over "peace, order and good government" as an excuse for all kinds of injustice.
Skookum1
4 years ago
back to "Horrific B.C."
Just wanted to add that there's something odd in the arts culture here, too; I've mostly seen it via hordes or independent/student film scripts I either auditioned for or (gasp) wound up in, but there's a predominance of vampire and zombie flicks churned out by wannabe directors/writers here; some get to the bigtime like Fido, the pet-zombie thing from Kelowna, but there's tons you never get to see, partly because they're so god-awful. But the fascination with zombies and vampires, usually disease-caused epidemics, is way too common here; creepily so. I guess it's partly the result of a generation raised thinking the Thriller was "great art" because it sold a lot of recordings and the dance moves were cool, but the vapidness of the story concepts and their obsession with gory death, or gory ways to be undead, is really striking. You don't see this in indie/student films in Ontario, Quebec or Nova Scotia.....
The other side of the film/TV culture here is crime dramas, usually dark ones like Da Vinci's Inquest or Cold Squad or Intelligence. A dark, cynical worldview, somehow befitting the flat grey light and ever present gloom of the cloudscape overhanging the city for most of the year.....
Skookum1
4 years ago
back to "Horrific B.C."
Just wanted to add that there's something odd in the arts culture here, too; I've mostly seen it via hordes or independent/student film scripts I either auditioned for or (gasp) wound up in, but there's a predominance of vampire and zombie flicks churned out by wannabe directors/writers here; some get to the bigtime like Fido, the pet-zombie thing from Kelowna, but there's tons you never get to see, partly because they're so god-awful. But the fascination with zombies and vampires, usually disease-caused epidemics, is way too common here; creepily so. I guess it's partly the result of a generation raised thinking the Thriller was "great art" because it sold a lot of recordings and the dance moves were cool, but the vapidness of the story concepts and their obsession with gory death, or gory ways to be undead, is really striking. You don't see this in indie/student films in Ontario, Quebec or Nova Scotia.....
The other side of the film/TV culture here is crime dramas, usually dark ones like Da Vinci's Inquest or Cold Squad or Intelligence. A dark, cynical worldview, somehow befitting the flat grey light and ever present gloom of the cloudscape overhanging the city for most of the year.....