The Spectacle

On a Saturday in January 2026, two friends reach out to ask me if I am watching, if I see what is happening. During the first Trump presidency, this happened regularly, especially during the pandemic. In 2020, it felt like we were all watching the same things, absorbing the same news of violence and death, thoughtlessly glued to the same series. We watched the footage of army trucks loaded with coffins leaving Bergamo, the town overwhelmed by COVID-19 deaths, in the same week of March that we watched Tiger King on Netflix. In May of that year, we watched George Floyd die in the street; the nine minutes of Derek Chauvin kneeling on his neck were immediately available on our devices. “Are you watching this? ” we asked each other in horror, without needing to explain. 

It’s rare that this happens to me now, and getting those texts feels like going back in time. It provokes an uncanny sense of doubling, though it’s not like the news cycle took a break in the meantime. We still absorb coverage of police killings on the same screens that we use to escape these realities. But on this particular Saturday in January, the coverage of two Alexs – Honnold and Pretti – illustrated something I might not have realized otherwise. Between the first Trump presidency and the second, the attentional dynamics of the spectacle seem to have accelerated. The inexplicable urge to watch death—an urge that is at once demanding and repulsive—continues to shape the way we relate to precarity and signal our participation in the show. In absorbing these videos, in paying attention, I wondered whether we haven’t desensitized ourselves to the very realities that cry out for our attention. In watching and in turning away, I wondered what other relationships to the spectacle are possible.

I am sorting laundry on that Saturday of the new year when my husband and I get a text from a friend. “Are you guys watching Alex climb Taipei 101?” he asks us. “It’s live on Netflix right now!” Our friend doesn’t need to say which Alex. We had watched Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Free Solo in 2018 when it was released, and it was part of our language as a couple for a while. We’d go to a bouldering gym on the weekends in Portland, Oregon where we were living at the time. Once we got started on a route, one of us might yell “free solo!” from a few feet off the ground, barely hovering over the padded floor to make the other laugh. It was a gift that kept on giving. 

Though we don’t climb much anymore, Matt and I have watched Free Solo many times, eventually with our kids. It’s somehow even more impressive after you’ve gotten a sense of the gap between you, the occasional gym climber, and Alex Honnold. When I watch the extreme close-up of his toe gently resting in a barely perceptible groove in Free Solo, I can feel the memory of my last trip to the gym, the clunk of inelegant knees, feet inexpertly stabbing at colorful holds, grip blown out after just a half hour of desperately hanging on to the wall. The evident calm that he manages to achieve while dangling over Yosemite Valley boggles the mind. 

Beyond the climbing, the documentary is arresting for the ethical questions it poses on our own participation in its making. To Honnold, the mountain is an invitation, whose meaning is inferred by his aim to climb it, and in turn, gives purpose to his own life. For him, the face of El Capitan only has meaning in the context of trying to reach the summit. For the rest of us watching, it’s what very well might kill him. 

What will happen to the movie if he falls to his death? we wonder. And is our desire to watch, the presence of the cameras themselves contributing to the possibility of this other person’s death? Free Solo seemed to invite that question; in one scene, a veteran climber urges Honnold not to let the pressure of the cameras muddle his perception. In another, we see the cinematographer break down while watching Honnold attempt one of the riskiest moves of the day. The cinematographer turns his body away from the wall in the field below El Capitan, overcome with emotion. In training its gaze on the distress of the person in charge of the camera, it felt like the film was questioning its own making. When Free Solo came out in 2018, I was still active on social media. After watching, I kept up with Alex and Sanni on Instagram for a few years, especially during COVID, until I deleted the app. As a result, I have the erroneous sense that I know him personally, from the way he always says “I’m so pumped” to mean he’s tired, to the flippant tenor of his response when he gets asked if his philosophy of climbing has changed now that he has kids: “I didn’t want to die before I had kids, and I still don’t want to die.” And so, when our friend texts us about “Alex” in January of 2026, it was almost like tuning in to see what an old friend was up to these days. 

“I hope he’s getting millions to do this,” Matt mutters as he watches Honnold inch his way up Taipei 101. His brow is furrowed, arms folded across his chest as if in opposition to what he is seeing. I can’t decide if I want Honnold to be making millions or not, because I’m still trying to connect this old friend in my mind — the one who took a shower and washed his clothes by stepping on them underfoot in Free Solo, with the showman I’m seeing on the screen. It’s completely incongruous to me that Honnold is now blasting past a luxury shopping mall when he was once eating a giant stir-fry straight from the pan in the back of his van. Didn’t he eat it with the same spatula he used to cook it? I remember, unhelpfully. The dish towel hangs unfolded in my hand.  

“I can’t decide if it’s better or worse. If he made millions to do this, I mean,” I reply. The kids have since heard the sound of the TV in the living room, and have heeded its siren song. They join us on the couch. The coverage has cut abruptly to a commentator who is giving an upbeat account of the science of tall buildings.

“Hey, I know that guy from YouTube!” my daughter says. She recognizes him from his science videos. The discomfort that I had swatted away while trying to square this new Alex with the old one elbows its way to the front of my consciousness. I am filled with a sense of vertigo trying to keep track of the web of media and products that the coverage of this climb weaves together, all the voices barking at us in the living room. 

We look it up—the money question. Honnold didn’t get millions. He was paid what he called an “embarrassing amount” in an interview with the New York Times two days before the event. At first, I naively interpreted the headline to mean that he thought it was embarrassing that he got paid at all. That it was a purity question. Getting paid lends some sort of garish Squid Games quality to the feat. But no; it’s embarrassing, he says because it’s less than what a lot of professional athletes make, and he only got “mid six figures.” If he didn’t do it for the embarrassing paycheck, what makes this project worth his time, and more importantly, worth the risk? As Honnold told the New York Times: “I’m not getting paid to climb the building, I’m getting paid for the spectacle. I’m climbing the building for free.” 

In 1967, the French philosopher Guy Debord published a critique of contemporary society under the title, The Society of the Spectacle. In it, he argues that everything that was once directly lived is now mediated through an endless flow of images. Representations of this spectacle, Skyscraper Live — the streaming platform, the brand endorsements, the tower itself — shifts the focus from things to appearances. The spectacle, Debord contends in one of the book’s many aphorisms, is “the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise.” What we are absorbed in watching, when Alex Honnold summits Taipei 101, is an illusion celebrated as sacred, the truth of authentic life rendered profane. And all the while, we’re supposed to feel good about it.

As Honnold climbs, I think about the opening sequence of Mad Men, meant to evoke the aesthetics of advertising in the same era that Debord was writing. In the sequence, a silhouette of a man careens off a modernist skyscraper. The opening sequence thematizes a panicky sense of isolation, the alienation from one’s own life and from other people in an all-absorbing culture of images. (I also remember the micro-scandal when some accused AMC of exploiting “sacred” 9/11 images in their promotion of the show with the image of the falling man, the one that recalled Richard Drew’s photograph.) Debord writes that the agent of the spectacle is an enemy of his own individuality and the individuality of others; their activities are not really free because they have no real choices. Perhaps this is the source of Honnold’s malaise, his embarrassment over the figure. 

While I’m watching, I try to imagine what exactly Netflix would show if Honnold fell, of the images that would circulate after his death. I learned later that Skyscraper Live was streamed on a 10-second delay, and the crew was instructed to cut away so that they wouldn’t show his death. But you can see the people inside the building filming it all on their phones, rattling posters at him as he passes. Those cameras wouldn’t cut away. At one moment, we see Sanni watching him through the window. As he moves out of view, the cameraman catches her wince as she turns away, unable to watch. I suddenly realize that if he plummeted to his death, his kids would be able to find the footage when they grew up.

My kids have since joined the cheering crowds at the site. They are rooting for Honnold from the couch. They receive him uncritically as the seasoned showman he has become, waving to the crowd, talking to the announcer while he rests. At one point, he says he has to keep going, but the announcer holds him back. “Wait!” she screams, “let’s chant for Alex!” He changes the plan, and moves his body back, adjusts himself so he can hear through his headset. At this moment, Skyscraper Live is the carnival version of Free Solo, where the spectacle comes before the money, and even before the feat itself. 

After another floor, my husband and I look at each other, unsure if we should let our kids keep watching. There’s a little graphic in the corner of the screen where you can watch a dot as Alex ascends, floor by floor. The dot is red. I imagine the dot falling off the virtual building and sinking to the virtual ground. “We’re turning this off,” one of us says, and the screen goes dark despite their protests. I don’t want them to see a man die. Matt and I had a babysitter for the evening; we left the house before he finished the climb, before we knew whether he would make it. 

II

At dinner that night, I get a text from another friend who wants to know if I’m watching what’s happening. Not a climber. I am not exactly sure what she is talking about; it couldn’t be Alex Honnold , could it? “What happened?” I ask. She apologizes for being vague. “The news,” she says, “Minneapolis.” At the table, on my phone, I watch the footage of Federal agents surrounding and killing another Alex: 37-year-old Alex Pretti. Now that I don’t have social media, I find out when the police kill someone later than I once did. I read that Pretti had been at the protests after ICE killed 37-year-old Renée Good just a few weeks before. 

The ubiquity of the bystander video in contemporary protest culture has brought videos of police executions into the mainstream. Despite the fact that it’s possible to use generative AI to create videos of basically anything now, these witness videos remain a leverage of accountability and a challenge to government narratives on a scale and speed unparalleled in any other historical moment. 

But watching them, and thereby participating in the spectacle changes us, too, I realized. Since Trump’s first term and this one,  I have become less reflective about absorbing these videos of terrible and lethal violence. When the one of Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck in Minneapolis circulated in the spring of 2020, I thought hard about whether I could or should watch it. I remember trenchant social media debates about whether one could ethically justify looking away. At the restaurant, I just search for the video and press play. 

The day feels like it is menacingly full of doubles, of déjà vu, all mediated through the screen: Honnold then and now, Minneapolis now and then. Like Floyd, Pretti’s friends knew him as kind and gentle. Pretti’s parents would eventually hire the same federal prosecutor who helped convict Chauvin. “We’re not doing George Floyd again. We’re not rebuilding our city again,” said Cynthia Wilson, president of the Minneapolis NAACP.  Like Sanni at Skyscraper Live, I pull away, not wanting to look, and yet can’t help but watch the spectacle unfold. Later on the same phone, I read that the Trump administration had already tried to claim that Pretti “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” In the bystander footage, I notice that he holds his phone up, not his gun. I could see this from the table at the restaurant. I imagine what it would be like for his parents to read these narratives, fabulated hastily to justify a public execution. What it must be like to read the quickest-circulated and best-read speculative fiction that explains why their kid got what he deserved. But while the bystander video of Floyd’s murder catalyzed protests and organizing around the country, Pretti’s phone got him killed. When we watch, we are absorbing the footage of a murdered documentarian, a mise en abyme of witnessing, with death at the center. 

By the next day on the New York Times website, there is a timeline of how the shooting unfolded, with screenshots from the witness footage. There is a diagram that shows the position of the agents, the other nearby civilians, and a dot that represents Pretti. The dot is yellow, while the ICE agent dots are blue. Instead of being absorbed by the blue dots, I imagine the yellow one escapes and climbs a skyscraper, floats away. 

III

On Mondays that Winter I am teaching a class on feminism at a recovery center and mentoring the writing tutors who go there on Fridays. Hours before we are scheduled to discuss an Angela Davis interview, there’s a call for a day of national protest after the latest ICE killings. I get a phone call in the morning from the center and hear that the women in treatment have asked to attend the protest near them. The administration has agreed, and they want to delay class for a few hours. I imagine how ridiculous it would be to insist that they miss the protest to write an essay about Angela Davis. We postpone class, and the tutors and I end up at the campus protest together. 

In the reading assignment for that day, which comes from a 2014 interview, Davis writes about the need to globalize thinking about the militarization of the police, that we understand how after the advent of the war on terror, police departments were equipped like soldiers. She points out that Israeli police have been involved in training US police. “When we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine… it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.” 

At the protest for Alex Pretti and against ICE, one student organizer is waving a Palestinian flag, wearing a keffiyeh; another talks about George Floyd. Though in 2014 when Davis gave the interview I had assigned, they were maybe ten years old, and in 2020 they were only teenagers, some not yet able to drive, the student organizers understand what Davis is saying. They argue that the ICE attacks are connected and not separate from police killing Black civilians in the streets, or the use of defense tech against civilians in Gaza. They shout together and pass out cards with their chants on them. One speaker tells the crowd of mostly college kids — and also 37-year-old me — that they are too young to give up on a better world. I wonder if I still qualify. I think of this again at the end of the night when my husband says, wearily, that he remembers the puns on the signs from the last Trump presidency. 

After the protest, I think about the other Alex again, the climbing one, and what the skyscraper shares with his double, aside from a name and the threat of death. I wondered why I felt so disappointed in the climbing Alex, and realized that it’s because the language of climbing feels like a metaphor for politics that went unmobilized that day. You can “work on a problem” for weeks, months even, and then finally, without warning, a solution emerges where it hadn’t been before. The thing about climbing  is that it feels like it has the potential to interrupt the spectacle, to jam its endless flow in the unexpected movement of bodies through space, in the challenging of convention. Climbing can be a special kind of embodied attention where you learn to adjust yourself to reach, either nimbly or desperately toward your destination. And once you get there, some other “project” is waiting. There is something in the ever-upward unconventional movement, the tentative fingertips searching that feels imbued with potential, with possibility. 

Debord thought as much; he wrote that experimental interventions in space could serve as a challenge to the rote mechanics of capitalist society. In “Theory of the Dérive,” he proposed the dérive—a rapid, playful, movement through urban space—as the antidote to a society of appearances. Engaging this technique would be a means to jumpstart the thoughtless relationship to our environs: the commute, the trip to the shopping center, the walk past ads. Who better than the dirtbag climber to employ this method? Debord wrote, “In a dérive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.” 

On a day when we watched another Alex get killed on a city street, I wished that Alex Honnold had done it differently; that he’d cut through and across skyscrapers and the spectacle in the same instant. Honnold emerged for me as the situationist manqué, absorbed in the jaws of Netflix instead of sticking it to man. 

On a Saturday in January of 2026, in the second Trump presidency, one could tune in to one of two spectacles: a once-dirtbag climber scaling a skyscraper for the spectacle of it all, or ICE shooting another civilian for the world to see. Two Alexs, around the same age, my age, two dots on my screen, only one still young enough to reach up tentatively for a better world.