How is this different from the real-time narrative shaping that is the news, people's opinionated friends, etc?
I can't say whether fictionalized accounts of Vietnam happened that quickly, but I wonder - not having seen WTC - whether the 'filling in of gaps' might not be a good thing - if done well. That is, if it clarifies the truth of what actually happened, as opposed to what people have wrongfully been told, post-event, through Fox, the White House and - yes - opinionated friends, isn't it a good thing?
Absolutely, Becks, although there's not a damn thing we can do about it.
In a final chapter of Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory, he points to evidence that fictionalized, standardized and cleaned-up accounts and depictions of trench warfare eventually supplanted real memories of that unbearably horrific experience of modern times even among the people who had actually been there.
My first reaction to that poll was that I would have to think for several seconds to know in what year the attacks happened. My memories of the day are clear and probably not being supplanted by media revisionism, because I don't consume much media. But my backdrop for the memories is the house I live in now and the school I was going to for a few years. I would have to puzzle out which of those years it was.
I'd be more concerned if people couldn't place the attacks chronologically in relation to other events.
On the other hand, as a student of history it may take years before we find out whether or not the attacks took place in 2001.
This is my favorite example of movie revisitism supplanting the real facts:
Alot of people still believe that we did give a warning based upon that movie.
"but did it happen this quickly?"
When did you turn into Mickey Kaus?
OT, but I just have to share - anyone else wondering why - as a security precaution - they would have people pouring potentially explosive liquids into giant garbage cans IN THE MIDDLE OF A FREAKING AIRPORT?
My first reaction to that poll was that I would have to think for several seconds to know in what year the attacks happened.
Ditto.
I'd be more concerned if people couldn't place the attacks chronologically in relation to other events.
Right, exactly.
With regard to the question raised by Becks: I think history is inevitably revised, and the revision starts immediately. The net-out is hard to gauge, though. I'm happy that All the President's Men exists as a movie, because I think it's better that people learn imperfect history than not at all. But I wish quite heartily that JFK did not exist as a movie.
For a stupid modern example of rewriting history: Remember when the NYT had to recant its oh-so-cute story of sneaky Air Force One slipping its way into Baghdad for the president's "surprise" Christmas (?) visit? I remember reading the story aloud, wondering if it could possibly be true.
I thought that we already knew from the unreliability of eyewitness testimony that there ain't no such thing as facts; that perceptions themselves are affected by beliefs, attitude, prior knowledge. In other words, it's cultural constructs all the way down.
For a nice example of memory changing to fit later stories (or not, depending on what you believe) look at the argument about whether returning Viet-Nam veterans were spat upon. Or look at Elizabeth Loftus (sp?) and the whole recovered-memory mess. Or the child sex & satanism stuff from the 80s. History is changing even as it's happening.
Personally, having seen too many signs saying "Remember 9/11/01", I still have a hard time remembering what year it was.
In other words, 1 had it right.
Becks, this is a great post, and not just because I agree completely. I think movies and television have a superior power to shape people's understanding of people and events, and there is seriously a danger in codifying important history in film too soon.
The thing that we have to remember, though, before we get too worked up about it, is that most people's experience of Sept. 11 was only shaped by television anyway. Except for those who were there.
The thing that we have to remember, though, before we get too worked up about it, is that most people's experience of Sept. 11 was only shaped by television anyway. Except for those who were there.
Agree entirely.
Silvana: How are you doing, anyway?
With all of the repetition of the same shots, live tv has a chaotic quality, filled with unknown details, and dread of what might actually be happening, or has already happened that we don't know yet, that works on us in a way very different from any narrative. And it is more compelling in some ways, even if obviously much less comprehensible.
I'm fucking fantastic. Been sleeping a lot, taking a lot of pictures, and wandering around for hours. Today I went to a place called "Tacheles" which is this huge old building that's been taken over by artist-squatters, and is gritty and covered with graffiti, and after I had been browsing one gallery for five minutes the artist offered me a beer, which I drank while we discussed why I didn't like his work. Awesome.
Looking forward to coming back to Chicago, though.
On the 30% -- a lot of people have given up on citizenship. Whether they're too busy, don't care, are swamped with personal problems, or are completely cynical, a lot of people are just not engaged at all. Voting levels of less than 50% are common.
Rove (by which I mean "the Republican machine") is masterful at delivering screened information to these people, getting them roused up, and getting them to the polls. Some of the uninformed are in his 30% core, but many are within the moderate 21% which end up voting inexplicably for far-right Republicans.
Rove (bwImtRm) is also great at discouraging voters, both with objective obstacles and withy the propagation of hopelessness and cynicism.
The Rove database has the electorate carefully analyzed into demographics to be encouraged to vote and groups to be discouraged from voting, each tagged with the key issues that can move them.
most people's experience of Sept. 11 was only shaped by television anyway
Yes, but I feel there's a big difference from it being shaped by live news coverage vs. a movie with a sweeping soundtrack, etc. A review in Slate came closest to capturing my dread about it:
For all its crude effectiveness as a true-life melodrama of survival, World Trade Center doesn't do much with 9/11, except to sentimentalize it for popular consumption. But sentimentality itself is a wildly useful political tool—one of propaganda's ultimate aims has always been to make us cry. What exactly Stone is propagandizing for is another question, one that we may have to wait for his next movie to answer.
I'm more concerned that we were led into a criminal war based on that day, rather than that a movie is being made "too soon." I'm opposed to the idea of sacralizing 9/11 ("Never forget" type of stuff), simply because then we end up with the image of the US as victim artificially seared into our minds -- when I think we're all pretty clear that with the exception of that one day, the US hasn't been anything like a victim within the last several decades, probably since Pearl Harbor.
For the world's most powerful nation -- which is currently in the process of decimating a powerless but resource-rich nation for "reasons" that turned out to be lies -- to have a population of people with the date of the sole large-scale attack on the US mainland since the War of 1812 seared into their consciousness, cold resolve in their eyes when they read yet another bumper sticker -- that's simply obscene. 9/11 was a terrible day, and an appalling number of people suffered real and irretrievable losses on that day -- but that was the exception. The rule is that we are the ones raining down terror from the skies on innocent people.
I remember when Homer's Iliad came out. Some of the other veterans and I agreed it was much too soon - it was sentimentalized and melodramatic, certainly not the war we remembered. But poetry has tremendous power to re-shape people's understandings.
Epic poetry is a textbook example of inaccurate memory. Oral epic poetry survived unto the XXc in the Balkans, and it was been possible to find very recent events wrongly commemorated in epic form, partly just by the conventions of the form itself (e.g., describing certain events happening in the bright morning when they actually occured on a dim afternoon).
The fact is that *any* narrative, which is to say story, is going to involve fictional elements and distortions. It's impossible to create a coherent interpretation of discrete facts without making them into a story. And first-hand experience is inevitably fragmented and especially in major events like this one woefully incomplete.
Which isn't to say that some stories aren't better, or truer, than others; of course they are. But it isn't so simple as just to reject fiction or favor first-hand experience.
The particular filters are the problem: TV and Hollywood, as we have them right now. Even people who agree with Oliver Stone think his stuff is wildly exaggerated, inaccurate, and slightly nuts.
I can't remember what year I was married, although I know it was a few semesters before the 9/11 attacks. I know we were living in James Shelly's house the year of the 9/11 attacks, and I think we were married and living in Lubbock for a year before we moved to James' house. Also, I think we got our dog that year. Was that the same year as the election, or the year before?
Shit, I don't know jack. I can't really expect other people to.
Oh wait I remember
I was married in 2000, the same year an asshole was elected president and the Onion ran the headline "our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is over." We lived in Lubbock another year. Then we moved to James' house in Auburn, and 3,000 souls perished in a horrific act of terrorism.
We got our dog in 1999, which is the same year my CV says I defended my dissertation. That's a reputable source, right?
Once again B and Emerson demonstrate that they're far more articulate than me.
There was a time when I thought it might be possible to understand why people invent, or choose, one story over another. I gave it up for lack of sufficient smarts.
Part of it is consistency with previous beliefs. People will generally choose the story that confirms what they've always known.
Part of it is symbols and meanings. People will try to preserve the meaning of symbols, or will do certain stylized things (e.g. inversion, negations)
Part of it is peer pressure. People will tend to adopt whatever they hear from a source they trust.
Part of it is analytical categories. People tend to have a rather fixed set of categories, and it's always easier to change the story to fit the category than to change the categories.
Anyway, there's different sorts of truth. Narrative truth, experiential truth, scientific truth, cultural truth, whatever. I think a lot of confusion and miscommunication arises when people don't realize that they're talking about different sorts of truth. Oliver Stone's movies have a sort of truth - but it's not historical truth. People who think there's only one sort of truth tend to miss this curve and shoot through the guard rail of reality testing and slide down the slippery slope of hideously mixed metaphors.
I would be less concerned about the date thing - since, as rob demonstrates in 23/24, people in general are worse at this than we expect - if 9/11 weren't at the center of such staggering public misperception. But once you know that more people think that Iraqis were on board than think that Saudis were on board, once you see Baghdad-bound missiles with 9/11 slogans written on them by earnest trained killers, it's much more chilling to realize that 38 of the next 39 people I pass on the street can't contextualize the biggest historical event of the last decade.
Government of and by the people will not be for the people if the people are fucking ignorant.
On a rob-related note, we closed on our house in March of '01, got married in June, I got a new job in July, and we got a dog one week before the attacks.
Oh, and Ken Fucking Lay was screwing over widows on the verge of heat stroke.
It was a big six months all around.
After thimking some more, I'm going to venture to disagree with John Emerson
Epic poetry is a textbook example of inaccurate memory. ... describing certain events happening in the bright morning when they actually occurred on a dim afternoon
Yes, that would be inaccurate, but it need not mean that the story as told in the poetry is untrue. It depends on the expectations and understandings of both the author and the audience. If everyone expects such details to be invented, present only for narrative truth, then the story remains true.
The particular filters are the problem: TV and Hollywood, as we have them right now. Even people who agree with Oliver Stone think his stuff is wildly exaggerated, inaccurate, and slightly nuts.
TV and movies these days are just as stylized and conventional as Kabuki or epic poetry. The forms are as fixed, even if the prescribed content is different. TV and movies aren't themselves the agents - and the directors and TV people haven't complete agency here either.
There's something larger at work in the society, in the culture. Just as with Suicide (Durkheim) there are larger patterns and trends in the stories we can see, patterns operating above the level of the individual. Some stories are allowed, some aren't. The boundaries are being contested constantly, but the boundaries are real.
Personally I think the stories which make sense within the world of the dominant American culture are seriously crazy, but that's just a personal opinion. It's not that any particular person or medium is crazy, it's US society. It's not that Americans are ignorant, it's that the system of beliefs Americans have adopted to understand the world, the system of beliefs that determines what facts and what stories can be heard, is seriously bad.
MHS, you're not allowed to say such things. I tried to argue for the metaphorical truth of religion once and no one would have any of it.
"This is my favorite example of movie revisitism supplanting the real facts"
That paper is somewhat misleading. Pretty much all of Japan was leafletted from July 27th on, with the entire Potsdam Declaration, which included saying: ""...The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people. The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland..."
Obviously the leaflets couldn't specifically warn of atomic attack; no one could be sure the bomb wouldn't malfunction. And Nagasaki wasn't specifically warned because it was the alternate target; Kokura was the primary target, but there was bad weather.
And one might suggest that Hiroshima had already given warning warning of what an atomic attack was like.
Of course, the arguments over whether either bombing was justified erupt every year. It's a healthy debate.
If "pretty much all of Japan was leafletted," the warning was so general as to be effectively useless. What were people supposed to do? Call their congressmen?
And one might suggest that Hiroshima had already given warning of what an atomic attack was like.
Which is to say, Little Man served its purpose as an instrument of terror. Remember that Kyoto was on the short list of targets, because its destruction was certain to demoralize the Japanese, until war secretary Henry Stimson insisted that it be taken off. Needless to say, the official narrative tends to ignore the terrorism angle.
It's all narrative, whether you call it fact or fiction, but some narratives are rightfully called propaganda.
Which is to say... Needless to say..., bad construction.
"What were people supposed to do? Call their congressmen?"
Surrender.
The point is that surrender was not the prerogative of the presumed readers of thousands of leaflets scattered about the country. If surrender vs. incineration represented any kind of real choice, I'm guessing surrender would have polled pretty well after the firebombing of Tokyo.
jmcq, surrender didn't "poll too well" after the bombing of Nagasaki. Perhaps you can point to anti-war demonstrations? Acts of civil disobedience? Mutiny in the army (as in France 1917)? Sabotage in arms factories? Mass surrenders (as in Germany in 1945)?
And, yes, I'm aware there were mutinies in the Japanese army after Nagasaki: they happened because the army wanted to keep fighting and the government was thinking about surrendering. They don't count.
It's not that any particular person or medium is crazy, it's US society.
I don't disagree. I wrote TV and Hollywood,as we have them right now. Not the electronic media per se, but the particular organizations which dominate them in the US.
A common or almost universal experience of people like me who have family and childhood connections who are movement conservatives is to find that your old friends are very comfortably living in a TV-induced dream world, and insist on remaining in it until their minds are changed by something that affects them directly and materially. They listen to TV and not to me, and the conversations are painful enough that I avoid them.
To the extent that people get their gut feelings and most basic intuitions mostly from TV, people who follow their intuitions often are making themselves slaves of some whizkid political operative or advertising genius somewhere -- the media really work at getting past rational barriers into the subconscious.
As a non-moviegoer and non-TV watcher both, I'm twice removed from normal social reality, and might as well just shut up about things.
As for the XXc epics, the inaccuracy went beyond the example I gave, and amounted to slapping a contemporary name and a couple of minor details on the same old story. The possibility of the ingression of an event of a completely different kind was nil. For people to think of life differently, they had to quit paying attention to epics.
Havelock's "Preface to Plato" shows how Plato's battle against poetry really was justifiable. Ancient Greeks of the non-philosophical type found their reality in the Homeric equivalent of cowboy movies, just like Bush. In early medieval Christianity (Charlemagne) the head monks wanted to suppress epics, but the novices and ordinary monks still kept singing them. The church ended up integrating Germanic epic (military) values into Christianity. (The Frankish epics were ultimately suppressed, though, even though Charlemagne tried to have them preserved.)
Having actually seen "WTC" earlier this week, I can say that with the exception of sentimentalizing the rescue work of 9/11, it evades all the traps and lures described above. It's a pretty conventional disaster-rescue film in that regard. But that doesn't make the observations about how media CAN distort history any less accurate or relevant.
(A really excellent remake of "Towering Inferno" could be produced today.)
Another data point, from a recent interview with Oliver Stone, discussing the PG-13 rating:
I’m a mainstream filmmaker. I don’t want to just play in Boston art houses. I want a wide audience. We previewed the film in Minneapolis and Seattle, and I insisted [the studio] invite 13- to 16-year-olds. These kids were like 7, 8, 9, 10 years old when 9/11 happened. They don’t know what went down—they just felt a lot of brouhaha at home. You’d be surprised how many of them said afterward: "I really wanted to know what happened that day." We were shocked. So let’s show it to everybody.
Why can't we get a good feature-film documentary of 9/11, rather than awaiting the Steven Spielberg cute-kid-saves-the-day version?
35: Absolutely, much of the military wanted to go on fighting even when it was obvious the war was lost. How much of the civilian population agreed is impossible to say, but I'm arguing that civilians (perhaps I should have made the distinction) were effectively powerless to do anything about it, or even to make informed decisions. I'd love to believe that civilians could somehow have risen up, but I just can't see how that could have happened.
This matters because people like Paul Wolfowitz have justified the present war in part by insisting that people are responsible for the government they have (and therefore deserve whatever happens when we show up to fix things); whatever shred of truth there may be in that, it's a fundamentally dishonest position, not least because the near-impossibility of people assuming responsibility for their government is a defining characteristic of tyranny.
And the fact remains that "The Beginning or the End" (the film referred to upthread) presents a gross distortion of facts.
Hey I just saw this and how apropos to this post.
I've been fortunate, I suppose, to be on the far periphery of some of the world's recent terrorism episodes: I was in a plane on Sept. 11 (2002), while the bombs that struck London, where I live, did so when I was out of town on vacation.