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Now Rolling … This is a test of America’s ability to feel. Of all the ways to describe the events of today, the comment I heard most frequently was: "This is unreal." On the most obvious level, it is an understandable reaction to a profound confusion before true grief can set in. It is our only way of describing, by way of a non-description, the pictures of ash and dust and bodies transmitted via television into our homes and businesses, and shown on jumbo monitors downtown.
On another level, one yet unexplored, it is an admission that our images of Manhattan and Washington are almost completely mediated through a series of popular cultural representations, especially for people who do not live in or have not visited those cities. Those representations — particularly those involving terrorist threats and attacks — have simultaneously prepared us for this type of tragedy and distanced us from feeling and understanding its impact. One eyewitness account, which was passed along on an e-mail list, described the panicked crowds as "a horror film running in overdrive, jumping frames and cutting in and out." The comparison was echoed by many of the media. As she was driving through "ground zero" in Manhattan late Tuesday evening, Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC commented: "I don’t know how to describe this to you … it was like driving through a movie set." Dan Cohen, a Fox News Channel producer who is trained as an emergency technician, was stationed at a makeshift hospital at Chelsea Piers, which is where NBC’s Law & Order is produced. Cohen told the Associated Press: "It now looks like the show M.A.S.H." Tom Shales, television writer for the Washington Post, and his counterpart at the L.A. Times, Howard Rosenberg, both referenced two films created more than 20 years apart. "It looked like scenes from such movies as The Towering Inferno and Independence Day. But this wasn’t special effects. It was actually happening, and viewers sat powerless and traumatized as they saw it happen," Shales wrote, adding, "For those of certain generations, it was the most harrowing day of television since the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963." Rosenberg wrote: "Pictures of suffering were almost surreal, at some points capturing bodies being blown from exploding towers along with debris, and tiny specks of humanity tragically leaping to their deaths just ahead of the flames. It was a case of life seeming to imitate the special effects of bad movies, whether grisly deaths of Towering Inferno or the aliens of Independence Day hovering above the U.S. with plans to attack the president."
Attempting to grip onto some reference point to contextualize this very real tragedy, all we could do was look to fiction. I heard someone I work with say very soon after the initial attacks, "This is like a Tom Clancy novel." Sure enough, later in the day, Clancy himself was being interviewed on CNN. The pop cultural references, of course, are much more direct. Films like Diehard 3 and The Siege presented nightmarish scenarios of a Manhattan overridden by terrorist attacks. Those type of movies were foremost in my mind as I watched the unbelievable images of the World Trade Center collapsing. In pop culture, collapsing buildings also have an element of comic spectacle. Sure enough, in those initial moments, it all seemed like a special effect, one that we’ve watched Bugs Bunny or other cartoon characters cause a million times by pressing on a TNT detonator. Is this method of pop cultural compensation a bad thing? Is there any other way for us to begin to grasp — or describe — the enormity of the attacks? Ours is, after all, a country that has not been damaged, in our lifetime, by war or natural catastrophe on the level we are now witnessing. For most of us, our only "real life" experience with massive death tolls has been through television coverage of earthquakes in places like Turkey, or the 1999 floods in Central America. In reaching for some historical point of comparison in the United States, the only event that even begins to reach these as-yet-unknown proportions would be Pearl Harbor. Ironically, Pearl Harbor has not only been re-presented to America this past summer with the blockbuster film, but it was also the starting point for this weekend’s opening episodes of HBO’s Band of Brothers. That mini-series began with comments from actual World War II veterans. One of those comments stuck with me even before the events of today: The veteran said there was no doubt about his duty to his country and the justice of his cause. I wonder whether the mediation of this present moment will lead to a greater passivity. In this case, we will be watching it as a story unfolding instead of finding our place to make an impact. Then again, it is, in part, the pop cultural representations that have made buildings such as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon iconic symbols of America. From King Kong to The West Wing, we have often fetishized buildings in New York and D.C. Many more people have associations with the images today than they had with a naval station in the middle of the Pacific. By erasing some of these buildings from the American landscape, a visual scar is left across our minds. Bernie Heidkamp is a contributing editor to PopPolitics. Related Sites |
