Short

They watch the screen without a word. A man on his knees is pleading. Three others stand behind him in caftans and ski masks, two wielding assault rifles, the third, a gratuitous but still-daunting RPG-7. The standing three are motionless. They are ambiance, pillars of peril lit seedy green by the camera spotter, not looking at the kneeling man, not at the lens, not at anything. Another man, this one in camouflage fatigues, enters from the right and speaks to the viewers, to the four teenagers huddled around a computer monitor in Bakersfield, California, calm, machete in hand, cordial even. He turns toward the prisoner, and here the video clip pauses. It's a composed still, foreground and background collapsed, everything gloomy and carefully out of focus, like an old study painting with one crisp point of reference at center, otherwise anonymous. The walls behind the figures are blank. There's a jump cut and the clip continues, machete at the neck now sawing back and forth, two of the gunmen holding the struggling, screaming hostage, their rifles swinging like chimes in a storm, while the third man, the one with the grenade launcher, stands stock-still overseeing the performance. There's a flash of blood--the scene cuts to a deadpan anchor at an Al Jazeera newsroom before going black. End of footage. Four teenagers lean back in their chairs, thinking it all very lame and amateurish, and wait for the next clips to load on the website: a skateboarder who curbies his jaw, a burning cat, breast implant surgery...