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Redressing the crisis
The idea of a ‘noise wake’ had come up in the context of the ‘usual’ response to manslaughter or other cases of lethal violence in the public domain, the silent march. Mayor Job Cohen had supposedly first suggested organising a silent march. This suggestion would have been turned down by Van Gogh’s family and friends because Van Gogh detested silent marches: a noisy event seemed a more appropriate commemoration. The manifestation was set to start at 8 PM, preceded by the sounding of the bells of all of Amsterdam’s churches and the blowing of train whistles at Amsterdam Central Station, which is well within hearing distance from the place of the wake, Dam Square.
As I approached Dam Square, I became part of a fast-growing stream of people heading in the same direction. Suddenly, I became aware of the ringing bells of the nearby Zuidertoren, and then I began hearing other bells as well. An enormous crowd filled the entire Dam Square from the Royal Palace to the Krasnapolsky Hotel, from the Bijenkorf Department Store to Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.[15] In response to the call to bring anything that could produce noise as a token of protest, people had brought frying pans, pan lids, whistles, drums, trumpets, amplifiers, ghetto blasters, firecrackers, etc. The majority of the public was ‘white’, and included adults as well as children. One sign read: ‘Headscarves off, Cohen out’.[16] Somewhere in the middle of the crowd, someone waved a Pim Fortuyn flag. The main stage stood in front of the Royal Palace. Furthermore, the live television broadcast of the event was shown on a large screen next to the podium.
Television producer Lennart Booij, a pupil and friend of Theo van Gogh, opened the event by inviting everyone to make a deafening noise. The noise, symbolically led by a bass drum on stage, lasted eight minutes. Then Mayor Cohen and the Minister of Immigration and Integration (Rita Verdonk) gave brief speeches. As Verdonk and Cohen represented opposite ends of the political spectrum on the issue of immigration and Islam– the mayor a moderate and the minister a hard-liner – their appearances and speeches provoked both applause and noise from the various constituencies in the crowd. The mayor in his speech emphasised the unanimous disgust and rejection of the murder by Amsterdam’s citizens; the Minister declared in return that ‘the limit had been reached’. The speeches were followed by two minutes of ‘deafening silence’.
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Illustration 6: The noise wake at Dam Square in Amsterdam. The screen showed alternating views of the speakers and the crowd (November 2, 2004). Photo: Irene Stengs. |
Towards the end of the noise wake, the diachronic association between Pim Fortuyn and Theo Van Gogh was powerfully expressed. All of a sudden ‘Pim Fortuyn’ appeared in the huge round window on the top floor of Madame Tussaud’s. Fortuyn’s wax statue could be seen watching the crowd far below, which provoked extra outbursts of yelling and other noise.[17] The event lasted for about 25 minutes; the drummer announced the end with another brief bit of drumming, joined again by noise from the crowd in the square. Then many people began to leave, while others chose to stay behind to make more noise, or to play music and dance, which altogether produced a kind of festive atmosphere.
Besides the actual happening, the noise wake was also broadcast live as a political event of an extraordinary order, or, in other words, a ‘media event’. Media events, according to Couldry’s reworking of Dayan and Katz’s Media Events (1992), are ‘large scale event-based media-focused narratives where the claims associated with the myth of the mediated centre are particularly intense’ (Couldry 2003, 67). I have selected two aspects of the national broadcast that illustrate how Couldry’s analysis helps us to understand how media construct social power during such events. As authorised interpreters of social reality, the joint national public broadcasting organisations were able to focus on or exclude aspects of the happening (initially announced by a television presenter as a ‘noise march’). First of all, I would like to emphasise that many of the participating politicians received individual attention with them being shown in close-up, which was often accompanied by details of who they were and their specific political affiliations (some were even briefly interviewed). In this way, the national broadcast created and sustained the idea that the centre of society was temporarily located at Dam Square, and that the selected people-in-the-media represented that centre. Second, the broadcast also played a redressive role, stressing the societally positive side of the public’s responses. During the entire event the camera alternated between shots of the speakers and close-ups of the public holding their various signs, banners and noise-makers. For instance, some signs that read: ‘No assassinations in the name of my Islam’ and ‘Muslims against violence’ were clearly shown at least twice.[18] In contrast, however, signs like ‘Headscarves off, Cohen out’, the Pim Fortuyn flag and other messages of a similar political nature were not featured and mostly just skimmed over in the passing of the camera. This, however, did not prevent some anti-Muslim violence from occurring. In the aftermath of the assassination, several Muslim schools and mosques in provincial towns became the targets of (attempted) arson.