Excitedly, the young reporter warns us that some of the images we’re about to see “are disturbing.” He then shows them to us twice – the gape-mouthed woman in the foreground, the anxious policeman pushing her away from danger, a man standing over a dead body, the repeated sound of gunfire, and (the Don DeLillo Death touch), the glitzy background of the Bellagio at night.
Postmodern deaths happen while people are having fun.
You Tubes are now available showing closeups of the dead lying along the Las Vegas Strip. As Walter Benjamin, quoted in my title, noted many decades ago, our own destruction has become a thing recorded and delectated. Our own close to 50,000 gun deaths a year yield plenty of shared footage — especially when it’s mass murder, as in the 2017 slaughter of sixty people two miles down from the Bellagio.
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Here’s an even better one! Clearly shows the shooter doing his thing.
Bonus point: Since it’s night, we can see his gun shoot off sparks. Coooooool
And listen. Shooter’s a social media personality. Ya gotta assume he got a friend to film him shooting. Fantastic upload.