Unfortunately, the Director Doesn't Always Yell "Cut"

Both Baudrillard and Zizek mention words such as “reality,” the “unimaginable,” “violence” and “cinema.” In many ways, I think that these words all relate with one another, especially in the world of Hollywood film. Hollywood is known for making the unimaginable possible. From action movies to romantic comedies, Hollywood has got film techniques down to a science. For this blog entry, I want to discuss the irony in people’s reactions when Hollywood disaster truly becomes our reality. 

Everyone thats 18 years or older has heard of films such as The Titanic, Escape from New York and Independence Day. What do all of these films have in common? They all have some type of disaster. Titanic has the boat sinking with thousands of people dying and Independence Day has this unknown powerful source that wants to annihilate anything and everything in our world.  Hollywood, like I said before, is very good at making the impossible become possible on the big screen, especially with our new advancements in technology. Zizek points out that watching the World Trade Center, also known as WTC, collapsing seemed as if it belonged in a Hollywood movie. 

Zizek says, “for us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe productions” (Zizek 2002, 233). 

I find this quote rather fascinating because he makes a very valid point. When people were watching the WTC on the television screen, it almost seemed at any moment the director would step in front of the camera and yell “cut.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Baudrillard explains how whether we like it or not, images are our primal scene. We can’t escape from the images being shown on media outlets, especially if they are images that are unfamiliar to the human eye. Humans are fascinated and find pleasure out of images that we have never seen before. It’s because we are becoming aware of something new and unknown, but in the WTC event was it something really new to us?

Zizek explains in his reading that Americans should not be surprised about the WTC collapsing due to all the disaster fantasy movies that Hollywood has embedded into our brains. American’s shouldn’t be utterly shocked about these acts of terrorism because they somewhat relate to some large Hollywood films. Zizek says, “[T]he unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and that was the biggest surprise” (Zizek 2002, 233). For years, people have been watching films like Independence Day, Titanic, Twister, The Day After Tomorrow and so many others. The reactions that are shown inside the theater when something is eliminated or collapses is completely different when it comes to real life disaster.

Before the WTC terrorist attack, Americans had this preconceived notion of what reality really was in society due to the separation of America and other countries. We used to blame others for violence and acts of terrorism, because in America we are better than everyone else (not really but this is typical American behavior). Media creates this distance by separating third world countries and other countries from our American reality. It turns into this “Us versus Them” phenomenon, especially when watching the news. News media creates a large distance between our country and other countries because, as Zizek says, “the real horror happens there, not here ” (Zizek 2002, 232).  

When the WTC collapsed, American’s reality shattered because what was seen in corny Hollywood disaster films came to life in the streets of New York on September 11th, 2001. Every news media outlet was covering live footage of the second plane crashing into the WTC center. We weren’t watching something that was happening in a Third World country. Instead, every American was glued to their tv screen that day because the horrors of terrorism were occurring in our beautiful country.  Zizek says, “what happened on September 11 was that this fantasmatic screen apparition entered our reality. It is not reality entered our image: the image entered and shattered our reality: (Zizek 2002, 234).  

Here is a picture that I drew when I was little of the WTC collapsing. It truly shows how invasive media can be on young minds. (If you look closely you will be able to see people jumping out of the building with sad faces).