On the 28th of March, 1757, an audience of thousands gathered in Place de la Grève, a public square in Paris. They were there to witness the execution of Robert-François Damiens for the crime of attempting to assassinate King Louis XV. Although Damiens’ attempt was ultimately unsuccessful, he was sentenced to death by dismemberment, also called quartering, an exceedingly gruesome punishment usually reserved for the most severe crimes such as treason or regicide. As the royal executioner Charles-Henri Sanson (who would later famously execute King Louis XVI during the French Revolution) harnessed Damiens’ arms and legs to four horses, the massive crowd watched intently, anxious yet eager. When the horses were driven in opposing directions, the plaza was drowned by howls of abhorrence, cheers of delight, and thunderous applause.

Public executions were often utilized for their deterrent capacity, permitting the state or authority figures to project their superiority and display their power in front of those under their jurisdiction. Besides serving as a control mechanism, these gruesome events, in their simplest form, were a popular form of entertainment that amalgamated fear, desire, and violence into a spectacular show for the public gaze.

Today, we deem such spectacles barbaric. We reject being governed by such archaic threats and demand unending varieties of entertainment as the price of our coercion. And the spectacle complies. It tames itself on the surface, becomes more palatable, more irresistible for our modern appetites, while at the same time proliferating, intensifying, and becoming ever-present. This transformation, however, does not make the all-encompassing spectacle of our times less disturbing and nauseating than the old. We know what we crave is still morbid. Maybe not in the sense of people meeting their ends by guillotine or quartering, but in the dying of reality, meaningful human interactions, self-determination, and our sense of self. We are still disgusted by what we see, and yet, we still cheer and howl, unable to look away.