𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚎 𝙴𝚡𝚙𝚕𝚘𝚜𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙴𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚘𝚖𝚢 𝚘𝚏 𝚅𝚒𝚘𝚕𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝚒𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚊 𝙲𝚞𝚕𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎

𝙾𝚑 𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚎

𝙳𝚒𝚛𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚋𝚢: 𝚆𝚒𝚗𝚜𝚕𝚘𝚠 𝙲𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚎-𝙼𝚞𝚛𝚍𝚘𝚌𝚑

𝙷𝚘𝚝 𝙳𝚘𝚌𝚜𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟼

The return of a documentary about the 1970 whale explosion in the coastal city of Florence, Oregon, United States, could have been an opportunity for reconsideration. However, what unfolds in this film is not a critical engagement with the past, but rather the reproduction of a normalized violence; a violence that begins with a real event and, over time, transforms into spectacle, humour, and ultimately into a source for the production of meaning, identity, and economy.

This display of violence, which turns the body of a creature into an event and a piece of news, is narrated by witnesses in an exaggerated language that evokes images linking the mind to vast historical catastrophes, such as atomic explosions. Yet what makes this scene more disturbing is not the explosion itself, but the structure of spectatorship.

People have gathered. They have brought chairs. They hold cameras.

And from behind their home television sets, they follow this moment.

The question is simple: what is meant to be seen?

A body that once belonged to the ocean’s ecosystem is now shattered into thousands of pieces before a curious crowd. This is no longer an “incident”; it is a scene designed to be seen.

There is no doubt that the carcass of a massive whale, with its intense odour, required immediate management. But the issue is not why something was done!

The issue is why it was done this way.

At a time when the world had, only a year earlier, witnessed the Apollo 11 Moon Landing, the claim of inability to manage a carcass points less to technical limitation and more to a lack of responsible imagination.

Other methods existed, more complex, more time-consuming, but more humane. Yet the choice moved toward the simplest and, at the same time, the most spectacular option: explosion.

This reveals a deep gap, technology advancing far ahead of action and ethics, a gap that demands analysis and reflection. Here, we encounter a fundamental contradiction: a civilization capable of producing power on the scale of massive explosions, from modern warfare to nuclear experiments, capable of constructing skyscrapers in major cities, yet unable to move a single body. In confronting a dead body, it resorts to an act born not of understanding, but of erasure.

This gap persists:

We have the ability, but do we understand what we are doing?

From Catastrophe to Economy:

When Violence “Works”

The decisive point lies not in 1970, but in the continuation of this narrative into the present. A violent event gradually becomes part of a city’s identity, retold, reproduced, and eventually tied to the economy through tourism and cultural commodities.

Here, we encounter a mechanism that can be observed more broadly within the cultural logic of dominant powers: the ability to transform any event, even a disaster, into capital, narrative, and brand. This is not merely a local example; it is an instance of how media culture can render violence not only normal but productive.

The Psychology of Spectatorship

The viewing of this incident raises another question: what is being transmitted?

Perhaps the most important question is not about the event itself, but about the spectators.

The children who witnessed these images,

the children who, years later, fell asleep with stories of the whale.

With what image of the world did they grow up?

When death is narrated as an “interesting event,”

when the fragmentation of a body becomes a recountable memory,

What kind of imagination is formed?

Here, the issue is not only ethics but also the structure of the cultural unconscious.

What kind of dream is constructed when the first encounter with nature passes through the spectacle of its destruction?

The Contradiction of Judgment

In a world where certain forms of animal killing are quickly condemned as “barbaric,” how can such an event, with this intensity and exposure, become a “humorous memory”?

The answer lies not in cultural difference, but in the mechanism of narration: in how something is framed, and what is allowed to be seen.

This documentary, rather than distancing itself from its subject, contributes to the continuation of a narrative. Anarrative in which death becomes spectacle, violence becomes memory, and catastrophe becomes economy. And in the end, the question that remains is:

What exactly are we looking at?

And what is being formed within this act of looking?

I do not wish to write a formalist critique of the documentary itself, as its use of widely available footage, meaningless interviews, and the creation of a few caricatures results in a film that should not have been made. This should not have been a reconstruction of immorality, nor should the name of that city have once again been inscribed in the history of cinema.

When the economy becomes the ultimate goal, ethics and politics take a distorted path.

Perhaps it would have been better if the atomic explosion in the film by Christopher Nolan had remained in cinematic memory!

At least it leads us toward deeper reflection.