Where Do We Go From Here?

It's time to get back to work.
I'm still dazed. And I'm exhausted. Not from lack of sleep -- I'm sleeping enough. But it's not good sleep. I can't close my eyes without seeing planes slamming into office buildings and skyscrapers crumbling to the ground. And I wake up wondering when the nightmare will be over, when some demigod prankster will pop out from wherever he's hiding and say, "Ha ha! Fooled ya!" Or when I'll realize it's been a movie, and that next March, people in gowns and tuxes will applaud mightily as some unglamorous noncelebrity special-effect geek accepts his Oscar. Where is the HBO FIRST LOOK that will let us in on the secrets of how these stupendous FX were created?
But reality persists.

On April 22 of this year, my brother, Ken, my best friend, Bonnie, and I visited the observation deck on the south tower of the World Trade Center. It was a lovely day melting into a beautiful night, and we watched the sun go down over Manhattan, Brooklyn, and New Jersery -- on a clear day, which this was, you could supposedly see for 80 miles in each direction. I prefer to remember the Twin Towers this way, rather than share more pictures of destruction with you.
all photos by Ken Johanson

My brain is reeling with more thoughts than I can possibly get down in any coherent manner right now. So much has happened and so much has changed in the last week that I'm having trouble concentrating on it all. Maybe I'll start with the reason you are reading this, and the reason I'm writing this: Movies. Many of you wrote to me this week and said, basically, "Forget the latest movie for the moment -- tell us how you feel about this."
My first thoughts, when I started selfishly thinking about myself again last Tuesday, was, How can I ever write another movie review again? How can anything so silly and so frivolous as a smart-ass review of a piece of popcorn fluff of a movie ever mean anything ever again? Stephen Thompson, an editor at The Onion, said one of his writers said last Tuesday that "the age of irony is over," and he's right. But irony was my stock in trade. Maybe I'll find other ways to express myself. Maybe I already was: I'm amazed, when I go back and read what I've written so far on my new screenplay, to see how it anticipated this change in the mood of the world. There isn't a flip moment in it -- it is, in fact, basically about how one FBI agent is finally, slowly being driven insane by the horrors he has seen as a profiler of serial killers. It is about how the disease of violence affects us all, eats away at the best of us eventually. It couldn't have been more prescient. Perhaps the mood of our culture was ready to change, from sarcasm to sincerity. Perhaps we were already growing weary of taking everything as a joke before this happened.

the towers from the plaza

I hate this. I hate that there's a "this" that happened that I don't even have to elaborate upon, that we all know what "this" is without further explanation. But entertainment will continue -- we need it now more than we have in a long time, distraction from reality. And the people who write about entertainment will continue, too. The years of the Great Depression and World War II were, in fact, the last golden age of film. As my colleague, Bryant Frazer -- who reviews film at Deep Focus -- pointed out in a posting at the Cinemarati Roundtable, film noir was born of WWII. We will see great art -- books and music and journalism as well as film -- being made in the coming years. The tone of it will be different, but it will be the best stuff we've seen in half a century or more. It sounds perverse, but that prospect excites me. I know that much of it will spring from unexpected horrors that we cannot yet even imagine, but I know we will be made stronger as a culture and as a people because of them, and because of how our entertainment will filter it all for us, help us understand what's going on, and why.

looking toward Brooklyn

And the silly stuff will continue, too. By last Tuesday night, already I was starting to feel less like I'd never write again and more like I simply had to... otherwise, the bastards win. Just as the relinquishment of our precious civil liberties in exchange for greater security would mean that those who oppose our way of life would score a victory -- for what is their aim but the eradication of our freedom? -- so too would the abandonment of fluff give them reason to cheer. What does it mean, that so many people can work at things like making silly sitcoms, staging operettas about pussy cats, publishing books about metaphysical chicken soup, editing magazines about home decorating, and devoting all their creative energies to selling us toothpaste? It means that we have freed huge portions of our population from the drudgery of doing physical labor in exchange for the basic necessities of survival. (Of course, anyone who's struggled to pay the rent on a shoebox of an apartment in New York City might argue with me.) It means that those who aren't involved in producing all this entertainment-stuff -- within NYC and outside it as well -- have enough disposable income to consume enough this entertainment-stuff to make producing it a profitable endeavor.

up Fifth Avenue to the Empire State Building

We enjoy as a luxury the freedom of leisure unprecedented in the history of humanity. Our strong economy -- and it was strong, and is strong, even amidst all the dot-com failures and massive layoffs and talk of recession, strong at the very least in comparison with most of the rest of the world -- makes that possible. What better way for someone with a grudge against all that our culture represents to destroy a symbol of that economic might? The World Trade Center truly was (and will be again) the seat of financial power not only of New York City or the United States but of the whole planet -- the free parts of the planet, anyway. And the destruction of much of it -- and the WTC encompasses more buildings than just the famous twin towers -- is not only an actual affront to the economic domination of democracy and capitalism but a symbolic one as well. (It's odd at first glance -- and less odd when you think more about it -- that the attack on the Pentagon last Tuesday was so much less affecting than the one on the World Trade Center. The U.S. really is less about military might these days -- at least symbolically -- than it is about economic and cultural might.) And really, isn't New York City as a whole a symbol of the triumph of our system of government and economy, which seems to incite so much resentment from certain quarters around the world? (I'm trying not to sound jingoistic or any of those other scary words they threw at us in social studies class in junior high. Forgive me if I'm failing at this.) NYC is the media capital of the world: second, I believe, in film and TV production, after Los Angeles; the seat of advertising and publishing of all types. This city is the heart of the Western culture that those who attack us hate so much.

the north tower

They hit us. Hard. But if we retreat into our shells or bury our heads in the ground then the assholes who did this to us have won. And no fucking way are they going to win.

Other random thoughts after last week:
My friend Marian has always said that she is impressed by firemen because they are the best example of how testosterone can be funneled for the greater good -- all that masculine energy gets poured into saving people's lives. This week, Meg Wood's Boyfriend of Week site features as the Boyfriends of the Week "two cities' worth of rescue workers and heroes," and after reading her moving essay, I realized that the extraordinary efforts of these men (and women, but it's mostly men) are the wonderful flip side of the perversion of the male drives for dominance, for violence, that were behind the attacks. Meg's BOTW site has always been about celebrating the best qualities of men and maleness in an era when men are too put down, and I thank her for reminding us that testosterone isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Of course, there are always idiots. Though they have been surprisingly few in number, there are reports cropping up everywhere of Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans being threatened, verbally abused, and physically harmed or killed merely because of the sounds of the names, the tenor of their accents, or the way they are dressed. If someone out there is considering applying for the job of Poster Boy for Arrogant American Idiocy, please keep this in mind: According to White House officials and Arab groups, the vast majority of the 6.5 million Muslims in the U.S. are not Arabic, and the vast majority of the 3.5 million Arabs are not Muslim (they're Christian). So if you're thinking about getting into the terrorism business yourself -- and that's what you are if you're running down a woman simply because her head is covered, as happened last week in New Jersey -- then at least make sure you're picking on the right people.
Obviously, I am not advocating attacking anyone, regardless of religion or national origin. (Think what America must mean to Arabs and Muslims if they left their homes to come all this way for a better life.) I was being sarcastic. I must be feeling better.

MaryAnn Johanson
The Flick Filosopher
September 19, 2001

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