syn. adulterated, polluted, foul, unsound, unwholesome, tainted, warped
From Don DeLillo’s “Videotape”:
It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence--the realness beneath the layers of cosmetic perception. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. He dies so fast. There is no accompaniment of any kind. It is very stripped. You want to tell her it is realer than real but then she will ask what that means.
…
You don’t see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and down the back of his neck. The way his head is twisted away from the door, the twist of the head gives you only a partial profile and it’s the wrong side, it’s not the side where he was hit.
And maybe you’re being a little aggressive here, practically forcing your wife to watch. Why? What are you telling her? Are you making a little statement? Like I’m going to ruin your day out of ordinary spite. Or a big statement? Like this is the risk of existing. Either way you’re rubbing her face in this tape and you don’t know why.
…
Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason alone to stay fixed to the screen.
…
The horror freezes your soul but this doesn’t mean that you want them to stop.
Don DeLillo unreservedly narrates the filming of a grim death by a small girl, while alternately describing a man and his wife viewing the tape of it. It is in the latter account that a corrupt tone is evident. The man begins by wanting to show the murder to his wife, but his desire turns to pure obsession. DeLillo’s frankness and use of the second person creates an unsoundness in the tale. A man does not simply find a scene interesting and think his wife should see it; he hankers for the macabre images of death and dismemberment. DeLillo refers to the exigent yearning as being “fixed to the screen.” Only a corrupt mind could be that engrossed in unexpected fatality. Humans by nature are repelled by the “awful,” yet this particular man is not. He can’t get enough of it. DeLillo exaggerates the corruptness in the phrase, “Hurry up, Janet, here it comes,” which under normal circumstances would refer to some sort of climax to be enjoyed by sight - the finale of a fireworks display perhaps - not an individual receiving a lethal head-wound.
DeLillo, Don. “The Videotape.” The Bedford Reader. Ed. X. J. Kennedy, Dorothy
M. Kennedy, and Jane E. Aaron. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2002.
451-452.