Throughout the coverage of Tuesday's attacks, television news anchors kept saying that it didn't seem real. They compared viewing the horrific events unfolding on their monitors to watching movies like \Armageddon"" or ""Independence Day."" Even eyewitnesses described a kind of unreality. One man videotaping the towers from a mile away said he thought it was a movie shoot before the second plane hit.
I, too, admit my inability to grasp the reality of Tuesday's events. I'm truly afraid that my interaction with the world is based upon its fiction alone. My lack of tears, of horror, might not be shock but a permanent condition of my upbringing at the hands of film and television.
I'm not talking about the numbness to violence that cultural critics blame on mass media, though that might be some of it. My flight reaction, my adrenaline levels have listened to action movies cry wolf for so long explosions no longer hold shock value.
What I really fear is my own confusion. This same screen that brings me tapes of ""Air Force One,"" ""The Siege"" and ""Outbreak"" now says that it's telling the truth. On one level, I believed it and tried to call my sister in New York. On another level, what?
At first it was a jumble, one static shot of smoke billowing from the towers. But soon the networks began to succeed as they desperately tried to create a familiar narrative. Those who died and their families were the victims, but so too were all Americans. The bad guys were unknown. Then began the flashbacks to the crashes, new camera angles, recaps of events edited into order. This became a news story. A story.
Adding faces to the dead, the networks listed off the semi-famous people on the planes. They put together segments following families reunited with survivors. As I watched these personal stories'daughters catching sight of their father, a man following on Rollerblade as his mother or grandmother was driven to the hospital'the enormity of the events drifted further away.
Now it was a story; it had a plot. I was interested in what would happen next, but shouldn't I have been terrified? As TV news tried to make things more real, I was settling further into my comfortable position in my armchair. The more it made sense, the more it resembled fiction.
Now, it was up to me to fill in the holes. I imagined scenarios of the hijackings. I've seen ""Passenger 54."" I know from ""Die Hard 2"" how they got the planes. Somebody with graying temples must have put up a heroic struggle over Pennsylvania. And, the people in the towers'I was a skilled enough screenwriter to know what they went through.
None of it happened the way I imagined it, though. There was no soft focus as the beautiful girl in a sundress gave her handkerchief to a square-jawed young hero. More so, none of my imagined solutions were possible. I couldn't have sensed it and warned anyone, there was no dumb luck that set off an alarm at the Boston airport, there are no time machines.
All the stories I can apply to Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 are conventions I have learned from film and television, and they contain all the stereotypes and easy answers of both. Has it always been this way, and has mankind always dealt with the world through fiction? I worry that it hasn't, and I am alone in my failings. Maybe others sitting next to me feel this way too, but then their closer connection to me as an audience than to the mourning families of the victims makes me even sadder.
