Yes, the act was unequivocally an act of evil,
badness, negativity - but the fact remains that all
violence (domestic, personal, sexual, terrorist,
military) is evil. Cinema has glorified, codified and
exploited this evil which traumatizes and maims
bodies, minds and lives as entertainment, and the
symbolic resonance of this happening live on TV to
such a famous landmark (geographical and
psychological) of western civilization forms part of
the emotive reaction of Americans and the world.
One shred of hope which this act has produced is the
possibility that no-one in the west may look at cinema
violence, 'special fx' etc in the same light again;
*but* why does it take an attack on the symbolic
centre of western 'democracy' to make people aware of
this?
I was horrified as a teenager when a friend
recommended _Scarface_ for its 'great deaths' - a
pure declaration of relish in violence as
entertainment. In the 80's the west was mildly
perturbed that an American poll voted Clint Eastwood
as Dirty Harry as a hero along with Reagan (!), the
Pope, Ghandi etc. Directors like Sam Peckinpah, Oliver
Stone, David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino are lauded
for their crude abuse of willing audiences. Maybe the
spectres of censorship and (religious and moral)
repression still haunt us and blind us to the
glamourized carnage that assaults us every day from
our screens.
With all due horror, sympathy and pity for the victims
of the attack (and as someone who comes from a country
under the constant threat of terrorism), it must be
remembered that other parts of the world live with
this terror every day - the aggressive moralistic
rhetoric of Bush and co. is depressingly familiar, and
encourages more violence (already Muslims resident in
the USA are being randomly attacked). The disbelief
and rage of US citizens is understandable, but one
hopes that they will come to a more subtle analysis
and begin to question the effects of their own foreign
policies in the light of this trauma.
One last point relating to film and philosophy - if
our analyses and theories (of the symbolics and
mediation of images in society etc) mean anything in
relation to film, then surely they can and *must*
apply to current media coverage also - not out of
disrespect to victims of terrorism, but out of a need
to be human(e), to be intelligent and subtle in our
decoding of socio-politico-psychological realities, to
try in micro-efforts not to let emotion and 'good vs
evil' rhetoric blind us to what should matter - the
creation of a world where freedom means more than
western capitalist democracy and blood-lust-fuelled
revenge (nurtured by Hollywood over the years) have to offer.
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