The Power of Sound

One thing I'll always regret is watching the video of Nicholas Berg being decapitated. It's a horrifying sight, and I couldn't get it out of my head for days afterwards. I still think that watching it rearranged some molecules in my head in a way that will never be the same.

Watching the video of Neda Agha-Soltan die has the same searing effect. As this Gawker contributor put it:

I first saw the video of Neda's death on Sunday afternoon at around 2PM. For the remainder of the day and up to this point, I've failed every effort, and there have been many, to get it out of my head. Even when I went to the gym late in the day, a place of solace where I'm usually able to blast music in my ears while exercising and just forget about everything going on in the outside world, I found myself unable to remove Neda from my mind.

My coping mechanism is analysis. I find solace in deconstructing my reaction to determine what gets me so rattled. I've found that as with Nicholas Berg, it's not the images, it's the sound.

Both videos are the types of gore that we've all seen countless times in horror films or war epics. There's nothing in the images themselves that is any more disturbing than what we see in an Eli Roth or a Steven Spielberg film. Our eyes are accustomed to glossing over such graphic violence, but there's no way to trick the ears. The anguish of Nicholas Berg and Neda's friends is far too real to the ear to dismiss it. The stylized sound of the cinema allows you to wrap up violent images and store them away as fantasy in your mind.

The horror of these clips is driven home by the unmistakable sound of human suffering that no actor or sound designer can ever replicate. We know it's real because we hear it, and that's what makes it so damn hard to shake.