Persona
In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona the main character is an actress who suddenly refuses to speak. At the start of the film we don’t know why she’s chosen to do this. All we know is that she fell silent while in the middle of a performance, and she is in such anguish that she’s now interned in a mental hospital.
There’s a poignant image in this film that’s haunted me for the past eleven months. Though I watched Persona years ago, the shot keeps surfacing in my mind. In it the actress is in the hospital, convalescing alone in an empty room that appears more like a prison than a place of healing. The door is shut, maybe even locked, the blinds drawn across the windows. Nothing adorns the depressingly blank walls.
The only objects in the room are a bed and a television set. She paces the room restlessly back and forth. Then she decides to turn on the news. The television screen becomes the only source of light in the room, and it immediately shows her the image of a man self-immolating in an extreme act of protest. In the dark she watches the flames engulf him. She tries to scream, but the strange silence (which now seems less of a decision or a vow of silence, and more like an actual physical affliction) chokes her cry. She can only cover her mouth in horror, as the television relentlessly projects the harrowing imagery.
This is how I’ve felt for the past eleven months. Western media, complicit in shrouding the unabated genocide of the Palestinian people of Gaza, has left us no alternative but to see the truth with our own eyes, through the lens of those currently experiencing what can only be defined as mass torture and a sustained policy of extermination undergone by a fascist government fully backed and funded by the USA. Through the phones of Palestinians, we witness images whose horror we can scarcely put into words, images that turn to nightmares waking me up at night. If I can scarcely stomach seeing these images anymore, what is like to live them?
A few days ago I saw footage of a barefooted child walking across the rubble of his leveled city. The rubble, we must remember, is suffocating people buried alive. The child carried on his back a sack full of flour to take to a baker. His eyes appeared catatonic. He could barely speak. What kinds of things have his eyes seen?
The way an observer processes an image has to do significantly with its context. This image I could only find on Instagram, because social media is the only way Palestinians can appeal to people of conscience around the world for help. Corporate media, those who say democracy dies in darkness and other such meaningless platitudes, will provide no such relief, attention, or outrage for the people of Gaza, in a genocide that has proven to be the bloodiest for journalists in modern history, a genocide that has chosen children as its main victims, a genocide that is slow and knows no end or limit.
The context for the image of the traumatized child is advertisements of shoes and tablets, funny dog videos, wedding photos, slapstick humor. Susan Sontag, a writer who we can agree lived her life with deep ethical seriousness, famously decried television as “the death of Western civilization.” I wonder what would Susan Sontag make of Mark Zuckerberg’s piece of software, where every profile is a television channel, every user a mix of a celebrity, a politician, and a commercial campaigning for likes and followers. I wonder what would she have made of the fact that the goal of this free piece of software is to collect the behavioral data of its users to then sell to the highest bidder. I wonder what would she have made of the fact Instagram actively censors Palestinians on its platform at the request of the Israeli government, while to still generate profitable engagement, its algorithm is a delirium vomiting trivialities alongside images of decapitated children, of bloodied babies without limbs writhing in agony.
What would she have made of all this? The death of Western civilization is behind us, and what we are witnessing is its moral putrefaction as embodied in the corporate policies of the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, and the foreign policy of the likes of Joe Biden.
Not satisfied with torturing Gaza, Israel now seeks a regional war. To fully understand how and why this is happening, one needs the added context of the details emerging from their methods of torture at military prisons. In a rare move, nine Israeli soldiers were arrested for gang raping a Palestinian prisoner nearly to death. What happened next broke new grounds in the levels of societal depravity: a civilian mob stormed the military prison to defend the rapists (among the mob were members of the Israeli Knesset). These people were on the news saying the soldiers had a right to rape, while across the Israeli state broke a debate around this issue. Is rape moral? That was their question. And for many, the answer is yes. Why is Israel seeking a regional war? Because its government is insane. Because Zionism as a political project has proven to be a catastrophe for both Palestinians and Israelis alike (the latter is so achingly expressed by David Grossman in the final lines of this essay).
If we have any claims to a livable future, to any sort of hope for our species, these kinds of things must be addressed, must be loudly condemned, must be brought to justice. Yet they barely make a ripple in the news, let alone the hollow halls of power of the so-called international order, the international order that welcomes the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, as an honored guest at the Paris Olympics, the international order that invites Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to a thundering standing ovation in the US Congress as he asks for more bombs to “finish the job.”
Before 2023 Gaza already constituted the most terrible crime in contemporary history: a population of two million people constricted in an area of 365 square kilometers, 70% of whom are refugees expelled from their homes during Israel’s expansions. All this under military occupation: Gaza had no control over its seas, skies, and borders. It was besieged down to calculating the minimum calorie count for each of its inhabitants, in what was described by Israeli officials as keeping the economy on “the brink of collapse.” In the words of Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, Gaza was a concentration camp.
Now we reach the hideous culmination of the crime. For nearly a year Gaza has experienced prolonged starvation, the proliferation of diseases, daily bombings with the most advanced weaponry, the poisoning of its land, the destruction of its water treatment facilities—all this under the supervision of the most powerful government on the planet. On August 26, 2024 the IOF announced it had received more than 50,000 tons of military equipment and weapons from the USA, the grand broker of peace in the Middle East.
There is no end in sight to the suffering of those trapped in Gaza. In fact now the horizon reveals a world war inching ever closer towards the rest of us. People say it's getting dark. On the contrary it's brighter than ever before: the flames tower sky-high. Walter Benjamin defined history as a record of wreckage piling on wreckage, and progress as a grim storm merely delivering us to new horrors. Fanned by the technological capacities of the twenty-first century, limited only by the creativity of those exercising cruelty, and aided by the disintegration of the habitable conditions of our planet (which has proven to be quite the profitable business endeavor for certain men), the great fires of our age reach untold proportions.
At the end of Persona we discover than the main character was an actress not only by trade. She was playing a role within society her entire life, and she simply suffered a breakdown when she couldn’t play this part any longer. This is why she fell silent, an act of her own soundless immolation.
We too may refuse to play our parts in racist, violent systems that regard human beings at best consumers, at worst statistics in climbing death tolls. We may remove our blindfolds and break the choking silence that does not even allow tears for all that has been smashed and burned in Palestine. We may recover a voice that has been taken from us. The natural response to horror is to scream. The place to do so is in the streets.