Ethiopia v The History Channel Pt. 2/4
“Real or Imagined”
After asking-then-doing-anyway, the adventurer moves the door to the tunnels and enters. As he enters, he narrates to us that:
“Their original purpose is unknown. Did the builders dig down for engineering reasons or was there some threat, real or imagined, that drove them out of sight, underground?” (my emphasis added, kinda).
This marvelous quote appears at 9:42. It is appropriate to wonder why these were made; it is not appropriate to assume that whatever motivated them to do so could be bogus. It is their culture; it’s real enough. The tone of this program edits the reasoning into either option one or option two, something real or something imagined. This is unfair.
After explaining what a tunnel is and what they generally do, the post-production team really turns it up a notch because this brave man has just found 150 bats. I’ll give it to him, bats are creepy (as me about Budapest later), but the tone of this experience takes another shift. Not only are we in someone’s sacred ground, but we’re now also fucking around. We are pretending to be explorers in an already known place. This is my frustration that I will voice again and again. It is disrespectful, and we are watching someone play pretend in someone’s temple.
The craft or process of producing something is that, eventually, everything is deliberate by inclusion or exclusion. They could have excluded the odd close up of his face bearing the wait of his observation (the camera) through an impossibly tight situation, but they did not. It was deliberate, for ends of making this place seem more foreign and more crazy, that we still see this ’03 Gap model pull a camera with the total heft of his body (at least evident by his fatigued breath).
This isn’t necessary. This isn’t respectful.
At 10:53 he almost makes an honest turn. He seems to genuinely consider the process and reasoning behind the tunneling. He explains it as a practical thing; any civilization will use the resources available. In this case, the literal earth provided the opportunity to build down, not up.
But it’s his next remark that brings back my question mark: “…but there had to be another advantage.”
Advantage. This man begins to wonder about strategy, which is a deeply privileged term. I will likely come back to this idea in a later post, but to be able to observe something strategically is to have the privilege of not needing to be in the situation. It requires distance from the thing and assures there is a knowledge gap in considering the problem. The proof here is that this man is pretending to be Indiana Jones.
This is another “real or imagined” moment, where rationality (a favorite characteristic of the west) is pitted against something else (by contrast, something non-rational), as if to ask “what bizarre thing could make this wayward place do this?”
More soon,
Trevor