Dance Footage and Snuff Films

Shani Louk was filmed early on Saturday morning, dancing in the desert to a noxious remix of Gymclass Heroes’s already noxious “Cupid’s Chokehold” — dancing with the carefree good cheer of a million other carefree, cheerful dancers in TikToks and Instagram stories across the Internet. If you didn’t know the context — and if you weren’t fortunate enough to know her personally — you would have scrolled on by.

But we know the context. Hours afterwards, her dead body was filmed being paraded around on the back of truck as Palestinian militants screamed “God is great”.

The Hamas raid on Israel was filmed from both sides — with jubilant terrorists capturing their hunt for targets in Call of Duty-esque footage while terrified Israelis filmed their progress with trembling hands.

Millions watched: most appalled — if, no doubt, also morbidly curious — and some delighted. “Can someone please tell the freedom fighters in Palestine to flip their phones and film horizontal,” sneered the porn star Mia Khalifa. It is irritating when you can’t get the perfect shot of someone being gunned down.

Most surreal is the footage of paragliders descending on the rave where Louk and hundreds of others had been dancing. It is almost like a dream sequence, if you have the stomach to watch. The terrorists approach in perversely gentle quiet as young men and women continued to groove. They might have thought it was some kind of stunt.

Credit: Yuuuot3

Snuff films are nothing new, of course. There were the ISIS videos. There was the footage of Brenton Tarrant’s murderous rampage. My Twitter feed has been full of videos of young Ukrainians and Russians dying since March 2022 — with Russians, and their supporters, taking enormous pleasure in the former and Ukrainians, and their supporters, taking enormous pleasure in the latter. (Of course, it makes sense to be glad when your enemies die inasmuch as they won’t have the chance to kill you and the ones you love. Finding entertainment in the footage, though, seems wrongheaded in more than a moral sense. It happens to your side too.)

What strikes me here — beyond the obvious — is the morbid sense of worlds colliding — of the cheerful dance footage being interrupted by the snuff film. Of course, that was never out of the question when they were dancing near Gaza (who the Hell agreed to that?). But it was also not out of the question because of how much modern life is filmed.

The incongruent has powerful resonance. I came across a photo of a body being taken from a flattened Palestinian tower block wrapped in a pink Spongebob Squarepants blanket. There is an impulse — an unconscious and unpleasant one — towards seeing the rubble of grey buildings and feeling as if destruction was almost their destiny. But one can’t scroll past that blanket. I don’t know who it covered. But that blanket had been meant to make a child glad. To keep them warm. It isn’t meant to be like this.

And back in Israel was a different kind of incongruence. The social media timeline — that window through which we see the world — has always offered a bizarre procession of the cute, the erotic and the appalling. Dog videos, bikini shots and war footage can arrive one after another (and, thanks to the “For You” feature, not even because you’re following someone who’s a fan of them). But the sense that they can merge is doubly unsettling. The bikini video becomes the war footage. A similar example I recall (not as horrifying — indeed, a little comic) was the Myanmar woman doing aerobics for a Facebook video as a coup was taking place behind her.

“Across the communications landscape,” J.G. Ballard wrote in an introduction to Crash, “Move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography.” There might be no pseudo about events — which is not to say, of course, that their context and interpretation may not contain a heavy dose of the pretend but that the consequences will be as real as anything.

It was easy to otherise modern snuff films. They were real — but in a sense they weren’t. They weren’t real to us. They were the products of the eternal “over there” — of Middle Eastern warzones, and East European warzones, and the sort of freakish one-offs we couldn’t imagine happening in our environments. One compartmentalised and, in doing so, excluded.

But as much as I’m not trying to be so monstrously presumptuous as to claim even a hint of stolen psychological valour from the grim experiences of people living amid violence, the blending of the anodyne with the atrocious seems eerily symbolic of the spread of war, of rising crime, of social unrest et cetera.

Most of us might not be scarred by it in a personal sense until the moment — and may the moment never come — when the USA and China go to war. But horrors will bleed across our windows to world — spreading paranoia and encouraging attempts to erect barriers between different forms of media, like the rich abandoning metropolises for gated communities.

Understandable, of course. There’s no point in being hooked up to a constant stream of horrors. But the struggle to preserve innocence can become horrific in itself — if, that is, it entails the sustained avoidance of reality.

Rest in peace, Shani. In death, she has become an image of beauty in the face of barbarism. But I’m sure was much more besides to those who knew her. As are countless people in countless videos shimmering across our timelines.

UPDATE: Since posting this I have seen reports that Ms Louk’s mother believes her daughter is alive. Tragically, given her motionlessness in the video, and the unnatural position of her legs, I think this is extremely unlikely. But it’s worth noting and of course I hope a miracle has happened.