Literature
(Photograph by Dan Kohn, from the NY Times)
Yesterday people saw what looked like an utterly unique hijacking situation: Air Force One swooping low over New York City with military F-16 fighter jet escorts. Not only was 9/11 evoked, but its very singularity was challenged: the Event could be re-imagined, seen (and recorded) again, in 'real time'.
"Oh my god...that's not normal...that's a hijacking, I know it..."?so one Youtube movie-maker utters as she captures the banking jumbo jet as it disappears behind buildings. Yet apparently it is 'normal' in what the director Paul Greengrass explicitly calls the "post-9/11 world" (his film United 93 is part of this cultural matrix). The youtube movie maker was able to identify this event as a hijacking in the style of 9/11. Of course, the hijacking of the Presidential jet was itself already cinematized in Wolfgang Petersen's 1997 film Air Force One. How are such heavily and deeply mediated events able to spring up onto the bouncy surface of the really real? (A theory: hand-held cameras seem to help.) Is the 'normal' truly at stake when we know precisely how to categorize the abnormal?how to film it, photograph it, and talk about it?
Air Force One, hijacked, over NYC, in 2009: how much more overdetermined can symbolism get? It turns out that it was just a photo-op conducted by the Air Force: they needed new, flashy pictures of the Presidential jet over NYC. They just forgot to notify the public that there would be a jumbo jet flying at skyscraper level in NYC, again.
My musings here are not meant to discount people's real feelings of fear yesterday at the sight of the jets overhead. But we need to think seriously about what the literary critic David Simpson describes in his book on 9/11 as "the metaphysics of transit in all its varieties...." We do not yet know how to talk about airliners and fighter jets, especially when they invade the psycho-social space of the so-called 'normal'.
- Revisiting Air Force One
Air Force One w/ AT-ATs © Joey DeVilla Ten years ago, when I was a graduate student at UC Davis, I wrote a paper about the presidential airplane Air Force One. It was for a seminar on political theory, and I was considering this exceptional...
- Why Do Dreams Need Guns?
I just finished watching Christopher Nolan's most recent film, Inception. I found this movie perplexing on many levels, not the least of which was its relentlessly derivative post-Matrix feel. This included all the fights and guns, which never cease...
- Up In The Air
Jason Reitman's film adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel UP IN THE AIR treats the subject of flight in two not entirely compatible ways, and these ways can be seen in this promotional still, with the singular George Clooney?s contemplative face...
- Down On Up
The problems with Pixar?s latest film Up are primarily formal ones. These include the onslaught of events, and a virtual saturation of characters. The events in Up are sequenced irregularly and create strange senses of importance: for instance, the breaking...
- Marley & Me: What Is It?
When I went to Blockbuster yesterday afternoon, I had no intentions to write a post about Marley & Me. But this movie is such a curious oddity, in ways one might not expect from a film touted as "The Perfect Family Comedy!" (Mark Allen, CBS, DVD cover)....
Literature
Air Force One, hijacked, over NYC?
(Photograph by Dan Kohn, from the NY Times)
Yesterday people saw what looked like an utterly unique hijacking situation: Air Force One swooping low over New York City with military F-16 fighter jet escorts. Not only was 9/11 evoked, but its very singularity was challenged: the Event could be re-imagined, seen (and recorded) again, in 'real time'.
"Oh my god...that's not normal...that's a hijacking, I know it..."?so one Youtube movie-maker utters as she captures the banking jumbo jet as it disappears behind buildings. Yet apparently it is 'normal' in what the director Paul Greengrass explicitly calls the "post-9/11 world" (his film United 93 is part of this cultural matrix). The youtube movie maker was able to identify this event as a hijacking in the style of 9/11. Of course, the hijacking of the Presidential jet was itself already cinematized in Wolfgang Petersen's 1997 film Air Force One. How are such heavily and deeply mediated events able to spring up onto the bouncy surface of the really real? (A theory: hand-held cameras seem to help.) Is the 'normal' truly at stake when we know precisely how to categorize the abnormal?how to film it, photograph it, and talk about it?
Air Force One, hijacked, over NYC, in 2009: how much more overdetermined can symbolism get? It turns out that it was just a photo-op conducted by the Air Force: they needed new, flashy pictures of the Presidential jet over NYC. They just forgot to notify the public that there would be a jumbo jet flying at skyscraper level in NYC, again.
My musings here are not meant to discount people's real feelings of fear yesterday at the sight of the jets overhead. But we need to think seriously about what the literary critic David Simpson describes in his book on 9/11 as "the metaphysics of transit in all its varieties...." We do not yet know how to talk about airliners and fighter jets, especially when they invade the psycho-social space of the so-called 'normal'.
- Revisiting Air Force One
Air Force One w/ AT-ATs © Joey DeVilla Ten years ago, when I was a graduate student at UC Davis, I wrote a paper about the presidential airplane Air Force One. It was for a seminar on political theory, and I was considering this exceptional...
- Why Do Dreams Need Guns?
I just finished watching Christopher Nolan's most recent film, Inception. I found this movie perplexing on many levels, not the least of which was its relentlessly derivative post-Matrix feel. This included all the fights and guns, which never cease...
- Up In The Air
Jason Reitman's film adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel UP IN THE AIR treats the subject of flight in two not entirely compatible ways, and these ways can be seen in this promotional still, with the singular George Clooney?s contemplative face...
- Down On Up
The problems with Pixar?s latest film Up are primarily formal ones. These include the onslaught of events, and a virtual saturation of characters. The events in Up are sequenced irregularly and create strange senses of importance: for instance, the breaking...
- Marley & Me: What Is It?
When I went to Blockbuster yesterday afternoon, I had no intentions to write a post about Marley & Me. But this movie is such a curious oddity, in ways one might not expect from a film touted as "The Perfect Family Comedy!" (Mark Allen, CBS, DVD cover)....