It’s all over, isn’t it?

‘America’s Next Top Model 8′: Week Four: Crime Scene Victims

Sarah
Pushed Downstairs by a Model

Nigel: The look on your face is just extraordinary. Very beautiful and dead. (later) I think Sarah is the classic example of someone who isn’t typically pretty, but translates amazingly well on film.

Guest Judge Photographer Mike Rosenthal: I think you just put a little bit too much thought in the pose. I thought with the facial expressions, you did a great job.

Why no ‘Beaten to death with a huge porcelain phallus by a Model‘? The poverty of imagination on display is only too wearyingly familiar. Someone with real balls would have recreated the murder of Sharon Tate. If you hate women - or yourself for that matter - that much, put some bloody effort in. Misogyny as a creative driver is so 1970s.

The most shocking part about this is that the image aren’t really that shocking. Most models look dead inside anyway; that glassy stare looks out from a million magazine. What are the pictures trying to say? Anyone trying to make a real point would have hung their model from a hook in a meatlocker. Or given us ‘Anorexia-induced liver failure by a model‘.

As it is, the whole exercise is a moral vacuum, exquisite in its amoral vapidity; pointless. The pictures don’t fuel any sense of outrage but merely top up the resignation to the fact that the human race is slouching towards a tyranny of the mediocre and not giving much of a toss along on the way.

I give us ten years at the outside. By then we’ll be so emotionally stunted we’ll be eating our own young and rutting in the street like animals. Those of us escaping this psychic cataclysm will be regarded as latter-day Travis Bickles. We won’t be the lucky ones.

(Link via Rochenko)