Mark Dery on "Aesthetics after 9/11"

Over at Thought Catalog, the inimitable Mark Dery riffs somberly on terrorism, art, Hollywood, and the society of the spectacle where we all have a front row seat:

The reflexive habit — reflexive, at least, in these United States — of falling back on the mythic languages of Hollywood and Madison Avenue when we’re narrating our lives is a fact of life in the Society of the Spectacle. In his essay “This is Not a Movie,” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane noted TV commentators’ tendency, on 9/11, to resort “to a phrase book culled from cinema: ‘It was like a movie.’ ‘It was like Independence Day. ‘It was like Die Hard.’ ‘No, Die Hard 2.’ ‘Armageddon.’”

Apparently, even the severe-clear horrors of 9/11 weren’t immune to the Stepfordization all around us — the replacement of the immediate by the mediated, the physical thing by its filmic image. Reversing the polarities of the real and the fake gives Americans a big, fat, Baudrillardian migraine because, while European philosophers seem to think of the United States as Disneyland with the death penalty, we pay lip service, at least, to the primacy of hard fact and harbor a romantic attachment to authenticity. (Umberto Eco maintains that our longstanding love affair with the simulacrum — Disneyland, Forest Lawn, Las Vegas — is borne, paradoxically, of the fact that “the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”

Yet the ontological vertigo caused by the destabilization of the Real is nothing compared to the moral nausea we feel when filmic images insinuate themselves between us and our visceral reactions to real-life horrors, refracting other peoples’ agonies — and, sometimes, our own — through an aesthetic prism.

"The Savage Eye: Aesthetics After 9/11"

• [Kaleberg]

  That’s a rather naive complaint. People either cannot describe something, or they have to use existing words and tropes to describe them. If people had called the disaster “terrifying”, would you complain that the word “terrifying” has been overused, indicates a lack of descriptive ability, or is otherwise somehow a sign of something other than that the event was indeed what our co-lingual society believes for the most is terrifying? Of course people are going to use existing, often well worn words, and make allusions and comparisons with what they believe are commonly familiar real and fictional events. What are they supposed to do, go autistic? Use telepathy?

  Good grief!

  • [Gyrofrog]

    Of course, the Surrealists made similar observations concerning how, following some cataclysm, observers would report “it was like a dream…”  At the same time, since we’ve heard it all before, that too reinforces the Postmodern argument.

  • [eviladrian]

     Why do you think it’s a complaint?  Mark loves that kind of medium/message confusion!

    • [Kaleberg]

      My apologies, I misread. I’m too used to a certain kind of complaint and have become oversensitive in that direction.
      - K

• [darue keller]

  Here’s a singer/songwriter’s personal response, with a new video who’s aesthetics may be appreciated…
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2qHmAj2Hek

• [Brainspore]

  In his essay “This is Not a Movie,” the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane noted TV commentators’ tendency, on 9/11, to resort “to a phrase book culled from cinema: ‘It was like a movie.’

  Perfectly understandable response. Most of us (or at least most people who have never been to a war zone) have never seen carnage on that scale outside of a movie. Thank goodness.

• [SedanChair]

  Apparently, even the severe-clear horrors of 9/11 weren’t immune to the Stepfordization all around us — the replacement of the immediate by the mediated, the physical thing by its filmic image

  Either that, or 9/11 just happened to be characterized by giant explosions of liquid fuel. You know, “like a movie.”

  • [Brainspore]

    I suppose there are other real-life events that would make fair comparisons. ”It was like the bombing of Dresden.” “It was like witnessing a horrific meteor impact.” “It was like trying to escape the Hindenburg.” “It was like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire times 100.”

    But then, most of us never experienced any of those things first hand.

• [strangefriend]

  One response to 9/11 was the Church of Euthanasia video I Like To Watch. From the download page:

  “I Like to Watch” is a four-minute music video which explores the connections between the September 11 attacks, professional sports, and pornography. It’s often understood as a critique of the voyeurism inherent in mass media, but this wasn’t the original intent. The video simply attempts to capture the author’s personal experience of watching the attacks on TV, including childish glee, vindictiveness, perverse fascination, and sexual arousal.

  The video also frames the attacks as Freudian drama on a national scale. The towers are phallic, and the gashes made by the planes are vaginal. The violent penetrations ultimately deflate and invert the towers, in a forced transsexual surgery that emasculates America.

  “I Like to Watch” was released on the Internet on December 11, 2001, and received over one million downloads within two weeks. By the end of the month, even the Washington Post referred to the 9-11 footage as a “money shot” and called it “our new porn” [12/31/2001, Page C1]. The music was distributed on vinyl by Null Records (Berlin) in September 2002.

• [Cefeida]

  Interesting article, if a little bit too flowery…found it hard to find the meaning among all the words, at times.

  But as a European, I can give you a small sample reaction to the attacks from this side of the Atlantic from someone who’d never yet been to the US; I thought :’this is just like all those American movies, except it’s real.’ 

  We do grow up with a notion of America as some mythical land, largely because your pop-culture dominates tv and cinema. America in a young European’s eyes is the place where all the aliens land and all the great stories happen. But there’s always a Happy End. It’s guaranteed. 

  My brain spent quite a long time struggling with the idea that the seemingly invulnerable USA had just been hurt this badly. Actually, at first it didn’t seem like it could be that big a deal. Then, as hours passed and the Happy End didn’t come, for the first time in my life I suddenly thought of America as of a real place where real people live. And die.

• [gwailo_joe]

  Words words words…I at least read the entire FA: some points hit home.  Many of the ‘artistic’ references do not, at least to me.  I find the ‘destruction as art’ motif to be a little phony frankly: I know what it’s like to break things.  Demolition is usually pretty easy.

  Real creation?  That’s hard.

  Building things.  Growing things.  That takes effort and thought.  (Good demo takes some thought too…but it’s on a different scale.)  

  So 19 zealots conspired to inflict the most amazing display of destruction most anyone alive had ever seen; yes…that shit was cinematic and shocking on many levels.  The innocent loss of life of course…but not least: the poke in the eye of the greatest power the world has ever known.

  I laughed.  I am not proud to admit it, but my very first reaction upon seeing a burning Pentagon was AHHHAAAA!  ”Reap what ye sew bitches!”

  The pathos and sadness came later of course: killing thousands of people is not ever a cool thing to do.

  And what what the result?  Who among us is unaware of the miserable fallout from that black day?  Those few madmen (no artists they) through their misguided actions, led to the deaths of innocent Muslims by a thousand fold of the North American lives they extinguished.

  Reap what ye sew indeed.  ”What happened on the morning of September 11th was that imaginations that had been schooled in the comedy of apocalypse were forced to reconsider the same evidence as tragic.”

  It took me a second or two.  Still, I hope I never see anything like that again.

  And ‘aesthetic’ has something to do with ‘beauty’ right?  You can make up words to fit pretty much anything…but for all the massive impact of 9/11…I fail to see anything beautiful about it.

  • [benher]

    “I laughed.  I am not proud to admit it, but my very first reaction upon seeing a burning Pentagon was AHHHAAAA! ”

    I’ll admit it. 
    The US has been elbows deep in the world’s problems for decades. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for the Military Industrial Complex and it’s uber-rich backers.

    Regardless, our collective response of cheap plastic flag waving, commemorative trinkets from China, and Hollywood movies hardly do much to honor the dead.

    • [J Miller]

      Spoken like someone who was personally untouched by the 9/11 acts of terrorism. 

      If they had blown up a bunch of soldiers your point might be just a touch more salient… but they killed analysts… and civilians… Did you go “AHHHAAAA” for those folks who weren’t in the military?  How about the passengers on the plane used to attack the Pentagon… did you even consider them in your “AHHHAAAA” moment?

      • [Mantissa128]

        I wonder how many analysts and civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

        Just sayin’.

        • [novium]

          No one’s proposing that we laugh at those. And anyone who said they found it funny would not find themselves in very friendly company, I think.

• [Matthew Stone]

  I share a similar sentiment in feeling that 9/11, despite being the most horrific tragedy in the USA’s recent history, has nevertheless been over-dramatized to the point  that it’s lost its original meaning, similar to other landmark days on the calender.

  Look at Norway, a country that reacted to the Breivik Massacre, the greatest act of terrorism committed on its soil, by declaring that they would not undermine their core values and respond to violence with “more democracy, more openness, and greater political participation”. In contrast, the USA learned from 9/11 that we can’t trust anyone, that the world hates us, and we need to give up our civil rights so the government can protect us.

  Our obsession with this disaster keeps us from moving forward and rebuilding. There’s still an air of fear and terror hanging over us, and as long as it does, it means the terrorists won.

  Course, I could get labeled as a terrorist for saying any of this…

• [novium]

  I don’t see any problem with “like a movie” because it encapsulates two things: one, a literal comparison to familiar stories and images- a borrowed language to talk about something with have little experience with- and two, the absolute surreality of the experience. “It was like a movie: it didn’t feel real. The world doesn’t work like that. This can’t be true. “

• [Avram Grumer]

  One of my reactions, on seeing the original event eleven years ago, was that it was very much not like a movie. In the original news footage there was no dramatic slow-motion close-up of the planes hitting the towers, as a movie would have shown it. When the first tower fell, it was obscured by smoke and hard to see; a filmmaker would have chosen a clearer angle. And so on.