In the cinema and in the series as in the news, the emotion discharged at 300,000 volts by the producers and broadcasters gets into us. Audiovisual works crackle, the din of bad news disrupts our hearing and our sensitivity. Our minds only hear the loud cries, react only to the moose’s charge. Bombarded, stunned, dazed, under an overdose of strong effects, some in front of the screen become addicted to excess. More than yesterday. Because the pandemic has changed us. This constantly changing world is frightening and dulls the senses. The overflow protects us and the industry adapts.
Who still wants to invite the public to follow an intimate path of discovery and depth? Some little frequented authors, to salute very low. Otherwise, everyone presses the mushroom to attract the attention of the spectators. How then can the imprint of their messages be preserved? Punchy works are forgotten as soon as they are consumed, disasters are swept away by fresher ones. Sometimes, in the storm, we cut the sound, we turn off the light before breathing through our nose. In order to pass between the drops to stay alive. Not easy !
Last week, when a man drove his bus into the Ste-Rose daycare center full of children, causing deaths and polytrauma, the impact stunned us like a blow. Viewers wept at the atrocity of the senseless crime as much as they were shocked by its media portrayal.
But how to really meditate in the middle of the hubbub? A small voice assures us: empathy requires self-reflection in order to take root. When diving inward, there arises the slight embarrassment of seeing traumatized, bereaved, broken people come and testify before the camera from the ground which has opened up in front of their feet. But the news machine must satisfy voyeurism, offer low-angle shots of the place of horror, bombard the public field with shocks, each more terrible than the other. Truth and fiction go together. Where does reality stop? Where does the show start? In the image, the explosive charge is so strong. How to listen to oneself think?
Series Megantic on Illico, well produced and hard-hitting, has the immense merit of putting faces and destinies on the terrible tragedy of July 2013, when the train full of oil with the brakes finished had crushed a city and its inhabitants. These apocalyptic images, we had seen them loop on TV, with the mushroom of fire, the smoking ruins, the funeral, the desolation. Yet disembodied scenes. Not anymore.
The author Sylvain Guy based himself on several testimonies of survivors, sometimes amalgamated but real, to paint the scenario. We applaud his quest for truth. Still, a host of emotions are bludgeoned in this series. Even when the action takes place the day before the disaster, the slightest intimate relationship burns with intensity. Without blank moments, without downtime to allow the viewer to take the hit. The frenetic pace elicits tears, then creates anesthesia. His trepidation is like a drug. We freeze there.
Last Sunday, on the show Everybody talks about it, Pascal Lafontaine, the man who moved the train to Mégantic at the risk of his life (like the character in this series), took the floor. He had lost his wife and relatives in the train explosion, but his calm, his modesty bore witness to the shock suffered better than any recreated image. Listening to him denounce journalists and onlookers who had pinned him down after the tragedy, insensitive to his torments, we hurt our humanity. Pure bastards, these mindless curious and these hordes of media trampling on the distress of others? Not even. Sometimes in commissioned service, all desensitized in this XXIe century particularly bombarded with fictional, real, transposed images of violence. In repeated post-traumatic shocks. How to reach the hidden sensitivity of those who show off? So many paths of communication would have to be cleared quietly.
Always at Everybody talks about it, a child rescuer and the father of a boy injured during the tragedy in Sainte-Rose came to tell their own descent into hell. Very dignified, isolated from the assembly, without armor. The one everyone considered a hero hardly dreamed of a medal of bravery. With his companion, he breathed elsewhere. Like Pascal Lafontaine, this hostage of the Lac-Mégantic nightmare. A veiled light emanated from these men. She seemed to invite us to feel their tragedies and intimate struggles outside words and thundering symbols, in preserved areas. I listened to their overwhelming silence. It was he who made me tremble.