When Your Cry of Horror is Fulfilled Expectation
June 2nd, 2005 | Published in Quotes, Culture
In the latest forms of mass-sport, like air races and motor races, the thrill of the spectacle is intensified by the promise of immediate death or fatal injury. The cry of horror that escapes from the crowd when the motor car overturns or the airplane crashes is not one of surprise but of fulfilled expectation: is it not fundamentally for the sake of exciting just such bloodlust that the competition itself is held and widely attended? By means of the talking picture that spectacle and that thrill are repeated in a thousand theaters throughout the world as a mere incident in the presentation of the week’s news: so that a steady habituation to blood-letting and exhibitionistic murder and suicide accompanies the spread of the machine and, becoming stable by repetition in its milder forms, encourages the demand for more massive and desperate exhibitions of brutality.
—Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1934), pp. 304-305