NYC Unviels 9/11 Memorial Hole

Yesterday being 9/11 Part 5 obviously necessitated endless bullshit parades from the jackals that sit barking at us from our televisions. Amongst the jagged braying and "grief porn" money shots of teary-eyed mothers there were occasional moments of relative sanity and insight, but the oppressive weight of Remembrance and Mourning was hard to escape. It must truly be hard to have lost someone in 9/11, your grieving process forever hijacked by ideological narratives, dredged up every year because WE MUST NEVER FORGET those patriots who died that day, those worthy victims. Oh to have a son who died of AIDS, his death would be swept so nicely under the rug, referred to only obliquely through the occasional statistics-quoting talking head.

But this is getting away from what I wanted to talk about, which was Slavoj Zizek's article in the Guardian. Now firstly if you haven't read Zizek's piece written right after September 11, you really should get on it. It's a very insightful take on the symbolic importance of the attacks on the American psyche, and is quite readable despite the occasional forays into Theory-speak. In Zizek's article yesterday he continues his description of 9/11 in terms of Hollywood fantasies writ Real (and then consumed as fantasies once more). The one specific point he makes that really struck me though was one concerning the two recent 9/11-based movies United 93 and World Trade Center. These movies were praised upon release for their realism and lack of sensationalism. But, as Zizek explains:

The realism means that both films are restrained from taking a political stance and depicting the wider context of the events. Neither the passengers on United 93 nor the policemen in WTC grasp the full picture. All of a sudden they find themselves in a terrifying situation and have to make the best out of it.

This lack of "cognitive mapping" is crucial. All we see are the disastrous effects, with their cause so abstract that, in the case of WTC, one can easily imagine exactly the same film in which the twin towers would have collapsed as the result of an earthquake. What if the same film took place in a bombed high-rise building in Beirut? That's the point: it cannot take place there. Such a film would have been dismissed as "subtle pro-Hizbullah terrorist propaganda".

This, it strikes me, is extremely true. How is it that a movie set in a "bombed high-rise building in Beirut" would inevitably be seen as making a political statement, yet a similarly-made movie about the WTC can be praised for being apolitical? Why are our victims depoliticized, but their's politicized? Sure, racism, yeah, but that seems too reductive an explanation. Similarly, Zizek's claim that the movies' abstention from direct message gives an implicit message of trust in one's government seems to miss the more interesting implications of his posed question.

Obviously the dead of 9/11 have been used extensively for political ends, yet somehow in making these movies they have been presented as just "normal" people who happen to get caught up in this catastrophe. Now I haven't seen these movies, but from what I've read it appears that by avoiding showing the perpetrators of these crimes, or spending time delving into their motivations, the movies effectively depoliticize the events. It can't be argued against that the events took place; however politics enters into the equation when you try to explain why they took place. Did the attackers have some legitimate grievances, and if so, who is responsible for these grievances? Could the attacks have been prevented had certain groups preformed their jobs more thoroughly? These are the two most contentious questions, I would argue, and would almost inevitably be encountered if some of the broader context of the attacks been covered.

In our hypothetical Beirut movie, we could similarly never show the American-made Israeli warplanes dropping bombs from above, never discuss why they were attacking, whether it was justified or not. But still, in showing the required scenes of crying parents and suffering children, the film's political critique would become unavoidable. Because we know who dropped the bombs causing this suffering, and we can't help but ask why we would ever create such suffering. Why does one movie provoke such a questioning reaction, the other not?

Five years on, the events of 9/11 no longer posses the traumatic punch that they once did, they have been fully assimilated into the ongoing storyline of "the war on terror," becoming, if not actually understood, at least absorbed into the culture. (The Real has returned into the symbolic order, Zizek would say, or at least something like that). The Western story about 9/11 heavily involves its victims, the poor innocents killed by savage terrorists. The Western story about the conflict in the Middle East (for example) largely has to do with what the Arabs have done to us (or our allies in Israel). A story about the victims of 9/11 fits nicely into the dominant narrative (or dare I say, discourse?) being espoused by our politicians and media. A story about the Lebanese victims (or Iraqi or Haitian or...) of American violence does not fit into the dominant discourse about these events.

The first thing that is almost always brought up in "proper" complaints about the war in Iraq is the number of American soldiers killed, when in fact this number is far FAR smaller than the number of Iraqi civilians killed (this goes the same for Vietnam too: oh it was a costly war for America was it?). If we are to go by the basic moral standard that the lives of innocents have the same value regardless of race, sex, religion or culture (as Chomsky so often reminds us), then surely the emphasis of these narratives are grossly skewed towards American lives. WTC and United 93 continue with this government-approved bias, while a hypothetical Beirut movie would uncomfortably puncture this communal fantasy, placing the victims of American violence on the same plane as American victims.

Most people, when confronted with the suffering of others will feel compassion regardless of race, religion, etc. Discussion of 9/11 is suffused with mention of its victims, so why would seeing a movie about its victims cause any confusion or questioning among the viewer? However in discussion of America's follies in the Middle East and elsewhere, mention of civilian victims is relegated to a code word: "collateral damage". The confusion one would feel, the questioning that would occur were you to see this collateral damage up close, if only in movie form, comes from the struggle to fit this information into a discourse that leaves this tragedy as a footnote for historians.


I suppose in the end it is just good old racism.