Please Watch Responsibly: The Ethical Responsibility of the Viewer in Amélie Nothomb’s Acide sulfurique

Amélie Nothomb’s Acide sulfurique (2005) provoked divisive controversy at its release as a result of the way it translated the Nazi concentration camps into a dystopian reality television franchise. Supporters of the novel, however, celebrated the author’s attention to modern voyeuristic culture as a sinister threat to complacent belief in human equality and compassionate reaction. In this paper, I suggest that Acide, despite its oversimplification of moral choices and values, offers a critique of contemporary bystander behaviour by questioning the socio-political responsibilities of the intra-textual viewer as a reflection of the genuine ethical demands placed upon viewers of suffering in everyday life. Reframing the Holocaust through reality television provides an uncomfortable viewpoint from which to consider contemporary attitudes to ongoing events of genocide, displacement and mass racism across the world, particularly where these events are, in the majority, mediated by screens and by temporal or spatial distances that dilute our ethical relations between self and other. This paper begins by tracing the roots of Nothomb’s simulated concentration camp in European – and international – reality television programmes and considers how this genre establishes a sense of spectacle that separates those who are viewed from those who are viewing. Through discussion of Stanley Cohen’s definition of moral panic and Guy Debord’s theory of the spectacle, I argue that Acide demonstrates the transformation of the viewer into a bystander who is complicit in the murders committed by others but whose physical and psychological distance from the events provides a moral acquittal. Ultimately, Acide challenges us – as readers and potential viewers – to question our ethical responsibilities as co-participants in the memory of the Holocaust and ongoing suffering of others.