HOW many times have you heard recently, “I just can’t watch / read / listen to the news anymore”? You may have said it yourself. I have. Sitting down in a comfortable house at tea time in front of the telly … and seeing film of refugees, starving children, brutal wars, cruelty. It sounds trite, but I lose my appetite. Poor me.
Waking in the morning to shocking reports, killings, drone attacks, forced migrations, innocent civilians targeted, icecaps melting. All the stupefying, ungraspable numbers. The feeling of helplessness, guilt even at not being able to do anything. And then trying to start your day.
For the sake of “balance”, we’re made to listen to apologists, explaining why these people had to die, or be driven from their homes, or left to starve. Or that none of it really happened at all. Government spokespeople justifying why there’s nothing whatsoever they can do about it.
So why should we watch the news? It’s distressing. For some, it can lead to real mental problems. To doomscrolling, going down the rabbit hole of poisonous social media. The world’s gone mad and there’s nothing we can do about it.
So we bury our heads in the sand. But we know full well it won’t make reality go away. We’ve been numbed to the point of indifference, even cynicism. There’s a psychological term for all this – Headline Anxiety.
A current example is the documentary, Gaza: Doctors Under Attack. The film the BBC commissioned but for – not to put too fine a point on it – incoherent reasons declined to broadcast. They were finally forced into allowing Channel 4 to show it. So long as there was no reference to the BBC. A film described as “crucial … that the world needs to see”. I decided not to. Too upsetting.
Then I heard there was a public screening in Glasgow. For reasons I still don’t quite understand, that felt different. Perhaps I could watch it. Something to do with sharing the pain, the feeling of powerlessness. Clearly I wasn’t the only one. The screening, in Glasgow University’s 160-seater Andrew Stewart cinema, sold out in a couple of days. As one of the panel said on the night, it was easier to get tickets for the Oasis gig.
Is there some comfort to be had in viewing difficult material collectively? A sense of not being alone in the face of horrors. I asked people when I got there what had made them come along. Naturally, there were activists among them, people already involved in one way or another. More, it seemed, were medical workers themselves, doctors, nurses, students. Concerned about colleagues under fire.
The screening had been organised by the Scottish Palestine Health Partnership, practitioners trying to do whatever they can for their fellow professionals. It was hosted by the university’s Thinking Culture programme which finds innovative and creative ways of, well, making us think.
A young man sitting behind me was neither a medical worker nor an activist. He was simply confused and wanted to understand. Like me, he’d decided the documentary was too disturbing to watch at home. And he gave me a good example of his puzzlement …
“This thing about Hamas fighters using hospitals. I’ve no idea whether they do or not. But even if they did, well, if a gunman goes into a school and starts shooting, we don’t solve the situation by blowing up the entire school and all the kids in it.”
Throughout the film itself, there were audible gasps and shocked sighs. It was comforting – if that’s the word – to hear that other people were as affected by the content as I was. A shared pain, not in any way lessened by being in the company of strangers, but still consoling.
On the other hand, the experience was more intense than watching on TV. You couldn’t pause it for a moment, get your breath back. Couldn’t go and make a cuppa to gird yourself to continue watching.
The documentary is extremely well made – it holds your attention from the start. It shows more explicit footage than we’re used to in British broadcasting – there was no mistaking the violence and cruelty that was taking place. Now. Dead children. Mass graves. Torture victims.
It made me think of watching horror movies on the big screen. But there’s a huge, inescapable, difference. Not simply that one is fiction and the other is appallingly real. In a fictitious movie, we ~ enjoy the thrill, in a safe space, and usually see the baddies get their comeuppance. The whole point is that it’s not real, it’s escapism.
Gaza: Doctors Under Attack is anything but escapist. There is no resolution reward. Ben de Pear, the documentary’s producer, came to Glasgow for the screening. He said, before showing his film: “I can’t say I hope you enjoy it. You won’t.”
His documentary is dispassionate, serious journalism; its aim is not to entertain, but to assiduously follow the evidence. And that evidence is far more chilling than any fright flick.
I use the phrase “safe space”. Had this been a fiction then perhaps a cinema in Glasgow is a safe place to watch terrible, made-up, things. But one of the speakers had reminded us that a young health worker, Dima Alhaj, had been killed along with her baby, husband, and virtually her entire family in 2023. Dima had been an Erasmus student at Glasgow University, where we were sitting now. That brings the horror closer to home.
Whether we like it or not, Palestine is not so very far from us. Nor is Sudan, or Myanmar, or Kharkiv, or Tehran. As another speaker, a doctor, said, what is happening in Gaza has changed us all. We can turn off the TV, but the bloodshed doesn’t stop. Changing channels won’t protect us. We are involved.
The BBC’s decision to try and wash its hands of Doctors Under Attack only drew attention to both the film and its own mismanagement of it. As if we have learned nothing from banning the Sex Pistols, or Frankie Goes To Hollywood. The Clockwork Orange, Lady Chatterley, Kneecap, Gaza: How To Survive a Warzone … official prohibition only increases public appetite. According to Ben de Pear, the BBC had obstructed the entire process almost from the moment they had commissioned it.
From his journalistic perspective, the accusation of targeting civilian healthcare must surely merit investigation. Nothing like it has happened in modern history. But the corporation, he felt, was “frightened”. Fear of political reprisal, as much as any bias, led them into disarray. (A predicament that won’t surprise anyone who took an interest in the Scottish Independence referendum.)
At the end of the screening, a woman said to me: “I wish I hadn’t seen it. But I’m glad I did.” And laughed nervously: “Does that make any sense?”
Yes, I think it does.
It was clear from the medical people on the panel, and those in the audience, that they feel the need for such films. The victims of violence – whether in Israel/[[Palestine]], Russia/Ukraine, Sudan or wherever – need us to know of their plight. Especially where journalists are forbidden, where state propaganda conceals what is actually going on.
I had wondered, before going, if there might be something uplifting, something hopeful, in the experience of watching difficult material in the public sphere. There was. The courage and decency of ordinary people in terrible circumstances, health professionals going about their jobs even when they themselves have become the target, and have lost loved ones.
All that might have been apparent watching alone at home on TV. But being in the presence of brave volunteers, helping not for any political motive but because it’s what they do, that was heartening. The admiration and gratitude for organisations such as the Palestine Red Crescent Society. People who risked their lives by telling what they had witnessed, Israelis as well as Palestinians.
Do we have, as human beings, a duty to watch such films? To listen to the morning news, the evening headlines. Painful though it all might be. Perhaps it could propel us into some kind of action, however meagre. Write to our MP or MSP. Donate to a charity. Protest.
One of the speakers summed it up for me. A colorectal surgeon who has been volunteering in Gaza said before showing some clips of his own experiences, “I’m sorry”.
“Sorry to make you see this. But I think it’s important. I think you need to see this.”
