In a Word

In high school I once heard talk about a banned video called Faces of Death—purportedly a collection of actual human deaths caught on tape. It occurs to me that the people who talked up this video, if they are not now in prison, would appreciate Spanish television. Here in Spain you don’t have to track down a banned video called Faces of Death to see actual faces of death: you only have to turn on the news. On the news, just about anything goes. Blood stains on the sidewalk, corpses in smashed up cars, shootings recorded by security cameras—it’s all here. A recent story involved a woman who survived being stabbed in the back of the neck with a butcher knife. The reporter explained that her assailant had driven the blade so far in that the knife was still there, jammed deep in the (fully conscious) woman’s neck, when authorities arrived. The thing is, a viewer did not have to take the reporter’s word for it: as the woman was being escorted to the ambulance, cameramen got up close and personal, and there she was on television, a woman-with-a-butcher-knife-jammed-deep-in-her-neck being escorted to an ambulance.

Seems the only thing you can’t show on the news in Spain is the face of a minor. Even as the faces of adults are shown freely, no matter how brutalized or disfigured, the faces of children are routinely obscured with fuzzy pixels, no matter how innocuous the story in which they appear. You might say that, on the news at least, children are treated with more respect than dead, dying, or seriously maimed adults, which does make a certain biological sense, children being the future and whatnot, and does correspond with Spain’s reputation as a good place to be a kid. But if this fuzzy-pixel practice is meant to show reverence for the young, if it is meant to preserve and/or remind us of their innocence, it often misses the mark, at least for this viewer. A fuzzy-pixeled face can appear inhuman, androidish, alien. In a word, scary. Here’s what I look like with my face fuzzy-pixeled:

Granted, not many minors are severely bald, and most minors are cuter and more virtuous-looking to begin with. Still, the fact is that a dis-emfaced body–any dis-emfaced body–can be more than a little disturbing. Too, in the US we are accustomed to this fuzzy-pixel effect being used to mask private parts. So that an American watching Spanish news might be excused for wondering if a Spanish kid has a rear end, or worse, for a face.

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Charlie Geer is the author of the novel “Outbound: The Curious Secession of Latter-Day Charleston.” His work has appeared in Tin House, The Sun, Bloomsbury Magazine, and The Southern Review.