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The following is excerpted from Hijacking History: American Culture and the War on Terror by Liane Tanguay.
CNN and CBS
issued two commemorative DVDs that seemed to be aimed at satisfying a Freudian “compulsion
to repeat” occasioned by the “trauma” that the networks themselves had helped
to generate in the first place (for Freud, the principle of repetition- compulsion
arises from a situation inassimilable into “reality,” or Lacan’s “symbolic order”
– essentially, language – which therefore leads to repeated attempts to resolve
it). CNN’s America
Remembers: The Events of September 11 and America’s Response and CBS’s What We Saw: The Events of September
11, 2001 – in Words, Pictures, and Video reassert the event’s “traumatic” significance while at the
same time re-indulging in repetition-compulsion. Both releases emphasize the
shock value of the event, alluding first and foremost to the sheer ordinariness
of the morning prior to the first strike on the North Tower. CBS anchor Dan
Rather begins his introduction to What We Saw with the most banal of observations concerning the circumstances
of that morning – namely, the weather: “September 11th, 2001,” he intones, “The
sky over New York that morning was crystal clear.” Similarly, CNN, in its rather more dramatic and highbudget re-encapsulation
of events, begins with a view of the curvature of the Earth from space, at the
edge of which gleams the first light of day, in the process making the event a
global rather than simply a national trauma. Following some opening remarks by
an assortment of prominent reporters and news anchors about what they had been
doing or covering that morning, on that “most routine day,” dated footage shot from inside a passenger plane shows the
Twin Towers intact on the New York skyline – an attempt, it seems, to lull
viewers into remembering exactly how “normal” things once were. The emphasis on
ordinariness – of the weather, of a working day for tens of thousands of
people, of the victims and survivors themselves – serves the same function that
it does in the media scares already discussed, placing the viewer at the centre
of the next “event” while simultaneously maintaining the status of the attacks
as a shattering, inassimilable shock to the system. Also stressed is the theme
of innocence lost that accompanies the presentation of a trauma: CNN’s America Remembers lingers on a shot of a deserted school
playground strewn with debris from the towers, even though no children from the
school were injured or killed in the attacks.
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