death by text, again
Music: PJ Harvey: To Bring You My Love (1994)
Last Friday a Metrolink commuter train in California collided with a freight train, killing 25 people and wounding another 130. It has been reported that train's engineer, Robert Martin Sanchez, ran a red light because he was busy text messaging two young train enthusiasts. This is the second national news story in a year about text message distraction that ends in death.
I've already commented about how Paul Virilio's arguments concerning new technologies come to bear on text messaging. Every new communicative technology invents new forms of disaster---novel crashings. The "train wreck" idiom takes on new meaning with this latest, novel crash. On the one hand, it's something akin to the butterfly effect. A simple, non-intrusive sentence leads to massive death. On the other hand are the stories circulating on television and the Tubes about Sanchez: text doesn't kill people, people kill people. And Sanchez was tragically gay.
At some remove, in the U.S. popular imaginary tragic gayness or youth is yoked to the novel crash in a peculiar way: the mediation of gageteering. It's not simply that Sanchez was stupid; rather, it's that he was pathologically broken and getting off with his cell phone. On the newish television show, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet, an "expert" attorney (I didn't catch her name) and Geraldo Rivera were discussing the crash. The "expert" attorney made a big, self-righteous ta-do about how Sanchez was gay and text messaging "two fourteen year old boys!" She insinuated that Sanchez's pedophilic motives led to the train wreck. I was angered and offended by this "expert," not simply because of the nauseating but sadly common claim that homosexuality and pedophilia are somehow related, but also because of the logic that enables idiots like her to be on television: accidents are erotic.
Of course, David Cronenbrerg has already dissected this connection in Crash, a cold and disturbing film in which car crashes are fetishized as fuck scenes. The more threatening the coming crash, the more intense the orgasm. The sheer enjoyment with which television journalists and experts reported the accident (with aerial shots that create the aesthetic distance Cronenberg's cold, blue tones does in Crash) is disturbing because of the sexual character of the presumed cause and the psychobiography of Sanchez that is now part of the story. The story is basically this: a gay pervert was so into text messaging---phone sex with the signifier---he crashed his train! The fetish of the accident cues the fetish of the phone, an unmistakably dildo-like object that inspires, at some unconscious level, fantasies of immortality (the Psy-fi fantasy, as Larry Rickels would remind us, of the Star Trek communicator device). Sanchez, in other words, couldn't control his desire---he was punished for his enjoyment.
Where have we heard this story before? Friday the 13th, of course, and countless other "splatter" classics in which giving oneself over to libidinal desire (tragic flaw) leads to getting one's head cut off . . . so to speak. That's what I mean by Sanchez's tragic gayness; this is the way the story is spinning down. Or to get even more reductive, this story is ultimately a message: stop that or you will go blind!
Now, as someone who really does not like "texting," I am in sympathy with the warning. I'm down with banning cell phones from moving vehicles, absolutely. I just don't think we should pathologize the libidinal or characterize texting as some sort of "dirty" form of communication. I mean, Sanchez was texting two kids who were crazy about trains---he was being a nice guy and effed up. Let's not blame the new crash on "unnatural desire" or some other stupid, homophobic nonsense.
I personally dislike texting because I can't get my little fat fingers to mash the right buttons. It's also expensive. And it's a heck of a lot harder to text than to simply call someone and leave a voice mail message. But if I could text well, I probably would do it just like the rest of you. But not in my car.
And to riff Rufus: my phone is set on vibrate just for your text, right this moment. It's in my front pocket. Excuse me if I don't text you back; keep texting though.