My fifth grade teacher had this idea that one day scientists would use machines and microphones to reclaim sounds from the ether. It was a Christian school, and this was as much a cautionary tale as a science lesson. Anything you say may be used against you. Now, be good. And enunciate!
I doubt whether even Mrs. Cook dreamed this payback could extend to video. The BBC has a feature tracing the final moments of Jean Charles de Menenzes, the innocent man who the Metropolitan Police shot dead on the Tube. Eerily, it includes enough video from covert and security cameras to make us all witnesses if not to the bloody finale then to the sequence that caused it.
It is a cautionary tale reclaimed by science. Look what happens when a police officer on stakeout takes a leak at the wrong moment, when the chase is its own momentum. Tomorrow: same bus, same tabloid paper, but the ordinary guy who got on at Upper Tulse Hill will be news, not near you. Who wouldn’t run for it, on the Tube so soon after 7/7, seeing eight nervous men nodding and winking at him? Seven shots, blood everywhere, and then they turn the guns on each other.
Of course, even the finest of cameras would have trouble catching the nods and winks, much less the thoughts behind them, in the secret place where all errors begin, where no surveillance reaches and reconstruction is always suspect. Maybe one day science will find a way to rewind our thoughts. But for now our best hope of getting at what really happened, what was meant and what it meant, is art, not science. It’s fiction.