Is it fate, or algorithms? Either way, it seems as constitutionally necessary as my morning cup of coffee for my feeds to be saturated with images and videos of maimed Palestinian children. I do not slouch into my social media apps as casually as I used to. I even err on the side of caution when checking my WhatsApp messages. Now, I only really use the app for its messaging capabilities, but I have lived long enough in Malaysia, where gossip and conspiracy are coveted commodities, to think twice before opening any old notification. Sometimes you find yourself opening a typical uncle-propelled conspiracy theory video or fake news article with a salacious, click-bait headline that has already been dishearteningly ‘forwarded many times’. Yet other times, more intense shared content comes about, often without warning. I once received a video of two politically noteworthy men in a hotel room engaged in what could have been mistaken for Olympic Greco-Roman wrestling. The veracity of this video certainly puts a new spin on the term ‘deepfake’. On one occasion I received a shaky video taken in a crowded public area where it quickly became apparent, I was witnessing the last moments of a young man’s life as he plunged six stories to his gruesome end on the concourse level of the famous KLCC mall. The amateur snap-zoom in on the young man, lifeless at the site of his impact, dispels any mystery of what I had just been involuntarily thrown into witnessing. Tragic and traumatic as that one was, another video has really stuck with me lately.
One evening as I was winding down for the night, a notification flashed upon my mobile. Unsuspectingly, I tapped upon it. The scene was a rather placid, overcast blue body of water. A distant head popped up through the surface. The head bobbed calmly, without much movement. Shouting was heard, but it is unclear if the shouting came from the head or elsewhere. This prompted me to increase the volume. The head suddenly shifted from looking left to looking right as the man’s shoulders breeched the surface. A fin, slightly larger than the head, also pierced the surface. Then a tail fin preceded the white splash of disruption to the right of the head. The shouting was definitely coming from the head. What dug down to my bones was how the shouting changed. The sound lost what can distinguish it from a howler, roar, or squeal, attaining an inhuman pitch. It is the utterance a human makes only when they are at the precipice of mortal fear. Something many actors have tried, but never quite get right in the movies. The utterance cut through but was drowned out by the phrase ‘oh, my, God’ repeatedly draining from the mouth of either the camera woman or an onlooker beyond the camera’s frame. The head and the pair of shoulders beneath it lifted up out of the ocean before falling into a descending wave which is torn through by the snout of a shark as it leapt atop the victim. For an instant, all is below the water’s surface. Suddenly, the head and a fin broke through the surface, only to synchronously resubmerge. The shark’s tail flailed in and out of the water. Then, an instant of calm. The ocean is again placid just as a man leaning over the edge of a small motorboat sails into frame. The man on the boat prepares a rope in futility. Only a red mass stared back at him. One more faithless ‘Oh, My, God’ is heard before the screen faded down and a centred swirl arrow asked if I’d like to view all that again.
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