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Reviewed by:
  • Unwatchable ed. by Nicholas Baer et al.
  • Tanya Horeck (bio)
Unwatchable edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen. Rutgers University Press. 2019. $99.95 hardcover; $29.95 paper; e-book also available. 412 pages.

As a feminist film and media studies scholar who has long worked on violence and spectatorship, and recently completed a book on digital-era true crime, I tend to think there is not too much that can faze me. And yet of course there are always limits. I drew the line recently with the Instagram account @crimescenecleanersinc, which shares crime-scene photos of the aftermaths of violent deaths to more than four hundred thousand followers. I initially decided to follow this private account, which comes with a graphic content warning, for research purposes (and, if I am honest, pure curiosity): I wanted to see how far the true-crime phenomenon might go. Suddenly, alongside pictures of pretty flowers, random celebrities, and my friends' holidays, my Instagram feed was filled with lurid photos of bloodstained carpet, blood-soaked mattresses, decomposed bodies, and the wreckage of car crashes. Accompanying the Instagram crime-scene photos, taken by the people charged with cleaning them, are brief, matter-of-fact descriptions of the causes of death, followed by hashtags that rate (on a scale of 1 to 10) the difficulty of cleaning the scenes up. "Murder. Bludgeon #Death #2easy #crimescenecleanersinc" and "Speed Kills. Motorcyclist wraps self around everything #Death #9difficult" are two examples.1 I found the appearance of stomach-churning images in [End Page 166] my otherwise "happy" and innocuous Instagram feed unsettling and quite sickening. I hurriedly unfollowed the page, sharing the sentiments of a fellow crime scholar who remarked on my Facebook post: "So, so awful … Unfollowing again. Have seen enough."2

The issue of when "enough is enough"—of what it means to watch or not watch potentially challenging images—is the subject of the important and innovative essay collection Unwatchable, edited by Nicholas Baer, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Gunnar Iversen. The question animating this socially urgent and intellectually galvanizing book is as follows: In a 24/7 digital media culture, "where potentially traumatic content is never more than a click, scroll, or swipe away," how do film and media scholars theorize the ways we engage with difficult and troubling content?3 The concept of the unwatchable is a novel way of exploring the challenges of visual experience in these difficult political times, characterized by the rise of white supremacy, the so-called alt right, political violence, the global migrant crisis, attacks on democracy, ecological disaster, and other horrors. In this political climate, the issue of watching or not watching seems especially fraught. As the editors ask, "In what moments are we justified in covering our eyes, and when is it crucial to look intently upon the face of Medusa?"4 In other words, when is it appropriate for us to refuse our gaze, and when is it politically necessary to watch?

The tensions and contradictions that underlie attempts to define the unwatchable are duly noted in an introductory discussion of its semantics: "[T]o describe something as merely 'watchable' is to damn with faint praise, while the more explicitly pejorative 'unwatchable' can serve (however ironically) as the ultimate temptation to watch or imagine."5 What it means to "proclaim a media object 'unwatchable'" is the book's key question, as various essays bring out different understandings of the term—from that which is too horrifying or offensive to watch, to those images that are literally unwatchable because of their poor production values or "material degradation," as with some archival prints of lost or forgotten films from the past.6

In an elegant introduction, the editors deftly trace the notion of the unwatchable from Plato and Aristotle to the study of aesthetics and visual culture, early and classic film theory, and recent feminist, queer, critical race, and disability studies. The editors, sensibly, do not try to put limits on the idea of the "unwatchable"; rather, they give the concept room to breathe and let it take shape through their contributors' musings. Thus, for instance, Jeffrey Sconce declares the Hollywood biopic...

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