IN THE Academy Award-winning film The Barbarian Invasions by Canadian director Denys Arcand, a brief but crucial scene catches a hospital security guard watching smoke tail from the World Trade Center towers. The overhead television then presents a talking scholarly head who opines that the attack embodies the title incursion.
It’s a passing moment that is, perhaps, less piquant to a Canadian than to a U.S. citizen, for whom the image of the wounded towers has seared its mark onto the national identity.
It is a jarring moment because it seems nearly immoral to deploy that image in the name of art. Repeated viewings have all but inured us to the fact that unseen people are burning, asphyxiating and leaping to their deaths. But the now-iconic image has become a temporal milepost, one likely to turn up in all sorts of aesthetic products, in order to set a sea-change: And then this happened, and everything was different.
Arcand seizes on the commentator’s remark for a leitmotif, to emblemize death’s assault upon the central character, Remy, formerly a glib academic in his own right. Remy, and the friends who gather for his extended, pre-death wake, recur from Arcand’s 1986 film The Decline of the American Empire. The bookend titles point to Gibbon’s history of Rome’s fall, but the second film seems to say that the inevitabilities of history and politics pale before the intimate joys of life and love. And so that moment with the burning towers, however grim, serves to remind us that life stumbles on, even with the Visigoths at its heels.
The towers have found a home in iconography, but the day that brought them down has yet to submit to aesthetics. In the weeks after the attacks, some observers noted an awful beauty in the rubble, or in the oft-repeated video clips, but they soon learned that this amounted to little more than high-minded twaddle; even if beauty resided in that horror, it was not the sort anyone wanted to savor.
In the months since, attempts have been made to wring art from the attacks, with little success. If you’ve gone to galleries or art fairs, you’ve probably come across halting efforts to envision flaming towers or careening planes. Almost always embarrassing, aren’t they? A kind of presumption attaches to these attempts, whether they analyze or mourn or beat the collective chest.
Time will tell, of course, but so far the pageant of redevelopment-as-memorial in lower Manhattan has yet to produce anything promising. Memorials have tended toward somber theme-park attractions in the wake of Maya Lin’s Vietnam gravestone, and the plans for Ground Zero appear to follow the pattern. Probably the finest effort so far has been the temporary “Tribute in Light” by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, the twin rods of blue light spiking upward near Ground Zero, a project LaVerdiere described movingly in a lecture last fall at UNLV. It might have been the best idea for a permanent memorial, but capital, anguish and anger have carried the day.
The convenient shorthand of “9/11,” which we’ve seized for its simplicity, only confirms we’ve yet to wrap our minds around the event. The numerals are all over newspapers and TV news graphics these days, as we try to do just that, via the Kean commission. It’s instructive to recall that the Bush administration first resisted the inquiry, then hampered it, then grudgingly agreed to accommodate it. Only the persistence of victims’ families cornered it into cooperating. It might yet wish it had opted earlier for candor over control.
The few attempts at dramatically documenting the day and its aftermath have played the administration’s tune. Witness Showtime’s paean to gutsy leadership, DC 9/11: Time of Crisis. Then we learned that the Department of Homeland Security was looking for a Hollywood liaison, the better to stage-manage future legends of governmental grit.
It’s often observed that people no longer can distinguish the truth from its distortions in Hollywood’s mirrors, but recent weeks offer hope otherwise. If you were watching NBC two Sundays ago, you might have caught Homeland Security, which materialized free of the relentless promos that herald all such productions. This sad orphan, intended as a series pilot, chronicled the creation of DHS—a tale for the ages, to be sure. Toward its conclusion, a woman scolds a man trying to talk to her, because the president is on the TV above the bar, delivering the State of the Union address. The man absorbs the rebuff, then dutifully pays attention. Life does not go on; it only hardens into stony determination.
But people no longer pay attention to the overhead TV. Perhaps NBC sensed another sort of sea-change, the public’s growing reluctance to swallow choreographed accounts of that barbarian invasion.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.