The World Trade Towers, September 11, 2001– from Beware of Images

This photograph of a man falling from one of the World Trade Towers came to my attention on September 11 of this week. It stopped me in my tracks. For me, with knowledge of the events of that day in 2001, this image of one individual, falling, is arresting enough. I don’t have to look straight on at the fiery explosions that many people envision.

A commentary on the photograph suggested that (I’m paraphrasing liberally, to address just what personally struck me) as time passes, terrible tragedies lose their “original humanity, urgency, and intimacy”, that by fictionalizing disasters we make them “larger than life”, using “spectacular images” to accomplish our own ends, and to express “…our fears and hopes, our dreams and nightmares”.

I understand the frustration over seeing human tragedies used cynically and disrespectfully to survivors, to create an advantage for some person, group, or cause, which was really the point of the commentary. This is actually a pretty spectacular image to use to make that point. It made me stop and look and see that man’s story (which is part of a larger one) in a flash, frozen there mid-fall. And this is what fiction can do. It can freeze frame a moment like this one, and it also can give us a larger than life story, a context for the times when our world does explode and each of us  is truly shaken.

King Kong (1933). At the top of the Empire State Building– from the Los Angeles Times, courtesy of Warner Brothers Entertainment.

So, I’ve written about that here– my response to this idea that the human element loses its importance to us once we give ourselves to fiction.

The Monstrous as a Path to Understanding and Empathy

It is easy to look down on a fascination with fictional monsters and un-nameable fears. Surely there are enough horrors in the tangible present without inflicting imaginary horrors on ourselves?

It can be too difficult for us to look in the mirror at the world we live in, the world we have created, and face it, and ourselves, head on. Like an ostrich, we can close our ears and eyes to the wrongs and evils that surround us as things fall apart, and a lot of us do. We are afraid to see what is happening—what is seen can’t be unseen.

Fiction allows us to view the horrors around us on the edge of a mirror, from the corner of our eye. We may not be facing them head on, but fiction offers us opportunities to experience fear, and visions of destruction and survival. In fiction, we witness bravery, cowardice, evil, heroism, hopelessness, and powerlessness, in dealing with forces that seem unstoppable. The awe-inspiring sacrifices that some people make, and the horrifying choices of others, are emotionally wrenching and gut-clenching.

In fiction, the unseen can be revealed. Sometimes it is defeated and sometimes merely driven back. Monsters, both human and other, may cut a swath of destruction, but it is sometimes possible to feel sympathy for them as ostracized and misunderstood.  And the beautiful may be true monsters, corrupted within. All of these things happen in our daily lives, and facing them head-on can be more than some of us can handle. Rather than looking away entirely, though, horror fiction and movies give us the chance to begin to see our way through difficult times and destroying fears.