Filmmaking casts a shadow on the set of Bird of Paradise (1932) | Robert Coburn / Public domain
Within minutes of the deadly shot, millions of viewers across the digital public sphere saw right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s last moments in full graphic horror, from multiple angles. Each clip was pared down to shareable content. His death made him at once a martyr and meme.
German philosopher Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, argued that the “aestheticization” of violence was transforming politics into spectacle. Then, new media technologies—especially film—enabled violence to be staged and consumed on a mass scale. Newsreels, footage from battle, and films glorifying symbols of war were distributed and consumed as entertainment in cinemas.
Benjamin warned that fascist leaders exploited violent spectacle to glorify the power of the state, the grandeur of the machinery of war, and the morally unrestrained assertion of human will. War was depicted as beautiful: “A flowering meadow enriched by the fiery orchids of machine guns,” parades staged as choreography, aerial bombardments presented as sublime spectacles. This kind of imagery transforms violence and death into art, preparing audiences to see destruction as noble—and even redemptive.
Watching a man slump as blood spurts from his neck provokes powerful, sometimes conflicting emotions: disgust, horror, fascination, excitement. This imagery grips us viscerally. In the torrent of emotions produced by spectacular violence, viewers may struggle to gain critical distance and instead identify with what is depicted—–as though they are active participants in the violent scene despite remaining passive spectators.
Benjamin worried that this illusion of participation leaves audiences vulnerable to manipulation. Revolting imagery can be repurposed into rallying symbols: a bloody shirt waved in triumph or vengeance, violence cast as beautiful when it serves “us.” Moral judgment collapses into partisan spectacle.
Fascist demagogues deploy violent spectacle as art to shock and disorient the masses, distracting from widespread suffering and poverty by channelling public frustrations toward scapegoats and invented enemies. Benjamin cautioned that all attempts to aestheticize politics inevitably culminate in the same thing: war. The glorification of violence through art, and the emotions it triggers, prime the masses to embrace its enactment in the real world.
But Benjamin also warned that, while provoking intense emotions, spectacularized violence can simultaneously anaesthetize us. On the one hand, when violence becomes entertainment, spectacle and reality bleed into one another. What we witness may no longer appear as tragic human suffering, but consumable content. On the other hand, shaken by the intense emotional experiences, we may be left with little room for critical reflection about its wider significance. He feared that violent spectacle alienates us from our common humanity.
Trump and his allies illustrate exactly what Benjamin feared about the aestheticization of politics. Trump has spent a lifetime honing his instinct for spectacle. Since entering politics, he and those in his orbit have reveled in violent imagery, using social media to turn violence and cruelty into social media fodder and base-baiting entertainment. In just one recent example, the president appeared to threaten a military assault on the city of Chicago by posting an AI-generated image of himself depicted as the fictional—and psychotic—Lt. Col. Kilgore from the 1979 Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now. Trump titled his meme “Chipocalypse Now!” and posted above the image, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of War” [sic]. The president has joked about brutal attacks on his opponents, including Paul Pelosi, husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was assaulted by a Trump devotee with a hammer. And Trump instinctively turned the moment of his very own attempted assassination into theatre—standing with fist raised and mouthing, “Fight!” while blood ran down his face.
Trump and his followers wasted no time to metabolize the shocking spectacle of Kirk’s shooting into the politics of war. Instead of calming tempers, Trump and his administration leapt to blame the “radical left”—by which they meant the entire Democratic Party—before the shooting suspect had even been identified. Trump’s Republicans are casting half the country as complicit, laying the ground for crackdowns against a huge swathe of political opponents and minority groups. They wave the bloody flag in a bid to accelerate their antidemocratic agenda.
The result is a politics where cruelty is not a byproduct but constitutive. Trump realizes Benjamin’s nightmare of aestheticized violence: politics reduced to spectacle, violence turned into policy. His actions ensure that the United States—and the world—become a more violent, more divided, and more unstable place.
