Like Watching a Movie
by Kieth Merrill
“It was like watching a movie.”
If I heard this description once, I heard it a hundred times in the course of the week that changed America. We didn’t know what else to say. There was nothing in the scope of our own reality with which we could compare. There was no personal experience to quantify the terror or help us explicate what we were seeing and hearing on TV.
In the absence of easy words the outrageous fiction of movies became a common reference point. How else could we describe the shock of terrorism at the heart of America. How else could we characterize the violence of airliners slamming into skyscrapers, people leaping to their death and the lofty symbols of America’s economy collapsing like colossal accordions in a crushing mushroom cloud.
“This is like something out of a movie.”
I said it to myself more than once, but thought farther, “like a blockbuster disaster film with bad effects and shaky camera work.” But knowing it was REAL elevated the emotional impact horrific images and direful sounds to a place fictional films have never been and can never go.
Terrorists kidnap the president in Air Force One. The Whitehouse is blown up in Independence Day. New York is a war zone in a Kurt Russell Thriller, and the entire East Coast is destroyed by a special effects tidal wave rendered with an impressive sense of realism. There are hundreds more.
Terrorism, conspiracy, bombs, murder, suicide, mayhem, war, fanaticism, death, disruption and destruction have been the steady diet of movie goers since David W. Griffith projected Birth of a Nation. The digital revolution has removed the final technological barrier between what filmmakers can image and what audiences must endure.
One barrier remains: The line between FICTION and REALITY. Some have supposed it is a fragile membrane. Some worry the sophisticated art and science of cinema have obscured the boundary all together. In my view, these events affirm that the breach between fantasy and fiction is a vast chasm.
Hollywood movies have shown us fictional versions of everything that happened in New York and worse. But it was FICTION and we knew it. For years, I have been against the dangers we face by submitting ourselves to the mind and will of strangers [film makers] for two hours in the dark. For the first time I realize that awareness of what is real and what is not – even if subconscious — provides a powerful emotional defense. At the movies we are safely wrapped in a psychological shield which may be more protective than any of us realize.
In a movie we can close our eyes and the moment passes at 90 feet a second. The end of the story is set from the beginning. We are in effect on someone else’s ride. It is only a movie. Involved as we may become we never really forget that differentiating fact. It isn’t real. [Try to explain that to my wife who has pretty much given up on going to movies all together.]
We can get up and walk out of a movie. If sufficiently offended we can emotionally withdraw from the experience. Who of us has not been subjected to a scene so intense that the audience and we have disengaged ? We begin to talk. We express our incredulity. We make audible wise cracks and even laugh out loud.
I ramble on about it, but the point is simple. Nothing we have seen and nothing we have experienced in the dark isolation of the movie house begins to equate with what we saw and experienced beginning in the dark hours of September 11.
There was no protection. There was no way to disengage. When we closed our eyes it only got worse.
No emotion, no psychic or physical reaction, no sense of fear, no dread nor anger conjured up by Hollywood magic can be likened to what we as Americans are feeling as the images of the terrorist attack and the awful aftermath bombard our senses in perpetual reruns.
No grief, no empathy, no concord, nor sorrow created by fictional characters on the silver screen can compare with the depth of genuine heartache we feel for those whose lives were snuffed out in an instant.
No passing sentiment manipulated by clever writers and persuasive actors touches the indubitable and enduring compassion wringing out our hearts for the thousands whose lives have been changed forever by the violent destruction of loved ones.
When our TV broke down a year ago, I stopped watching. When it was finally replaced with a new hi-definition wide screen I didn’t bother to connect to satellite. Selected DVD movies were sufficient entertainment.
So it was on the morning of September 11 that the news reached us by radio. My wife, a faithful fan of Talk Radio, burst into my office at home and told me what had happened. It was just after 7:00 AM.
I was at that moment working on an article for Meridian Magazine on the adventures of film making. Everything else in my life seemed suddenly irrelevant.
Without access to TV I did not see what the rest of the world was watching. But as I listened on radio to the urgent news reports the images of the horror in New York played out like a mind’s eye movie in my imagination.
It was 24 hours before I was able to connect to the satellite. By the time I saw with my eyes the images I had imagined in my head, I had had time to prepare myself emotionally. But nothing could have prepared me. I was awe-struck into silent disbelief.
I was jerked across the line between imagination and reality. I was dragged across the vast chasm between the movie of my mind and the real event. I thought then and I have pondered since the inexplicable power of an image that we know to be REAL. I had never quite recognized the layers of emotional armor that protect us from images we know to be FICTION.
The debate over the influence of entertainment on social behavior has raged for decades. In recent times traditions of decency and grace have crumbled like the wall of Jericho at the blaring cacophony of changing mores. Movies and TV have been blamed for everything from the massacre at Columbine High School to the rising incidents of spousal abuse.
In the early hours of the American Holocaust some were quick to wag fingers at popular fiction. Jack Ryan, the enduring fictional character created by best selling author Tom Clancy becomes president in Executive Orders after a suicidal terrorist crashes a 747 into the nation’s capital building in Washington DC.
How nave to suspect that Osama Bin Laden needed Tom Clancy’s fanciful imagination to come up with his vicious terrorist attack on America. Violence in entertainment may not be easily defensible, but those who cherish the opportunity to lay blame for social disaster at the shrine of their favorite whipping boy are ingenuous at best and ignorant at least.
This is neither the time nor place to discuss the generally held assumptions that violence in the entertainment media leads to violence in the world. Suffice it to say that fictional media do not impact the emotions and perhaps indeed our chemical signals like a cognitive awareness of reality.
The events of last Tuesday and the troubling wake that has yet to wash ashore may have “seemed like a movie”, but our response to it is as foreign to a theater experience as the suicidal killers are to the kindly man next door.
The government and military will make plans for retribution. Students of terrorism will track trends and dissect history. Anthropologists will search for clues in the tangled briers of genetics, tradition and environment. Sociologists will probe into the deeper meanings of it all. There will be movies made and books written.
In the end I suspect that most of the world will stop short of the real cause, the deeper and more ancient origins. President Bush called it in the early hours. “This is a struggle between Good and Evil”, he said. Others were quick to adopt his idiom, but the demonic reality of “evil” while powerful in speech- making is considered by most to be metaphorical rhetoric rather than the most probable reality. I believe otherwise.
I believe the tragic events in New York and Washington were inspired by an unholy alliance with evil itself. I have a profound believe that the ancient war in heaven continues. I believe the manifestation of such evil in the world is as much a confirmation of the Plan of God as is all that is good. Satan’s diabolic pledge to possess the hearts and minds of God’s children and reign with blood and horror on the earth is not idle folklore.
In the moments of our shock and stupefaction it may have seemed like something out of a movie — an epic disaster film of extraordinary proportion. But is was not a movie. It is not a fiction. It is a dreadful reality. It is a moment in time that has changed our world and us forever. It is in my view the beginning and end of an era in the Great War of Heaven that commenced in a time beyond our comprehension.
The story of that greater campaign and of the true God of this world commanding the legions of light remains a film I’d like to make. Perhaps in time we’ll find a way to merge what’s real and what is not into a movie experience that transcends the emotional limitations of fiction alone.
My heart felt sympathy and prayers continue for those whose lives have been violated by this act of true evil.
2001 Meridian Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
