A Conference Highlight

The relevance of the pandemic with popuar movies is pretty amazing this year at the conference. I am attending one of the last sessions this year. It's been amazing.

"While Žižek (Welcome 16) and Baudrillard (30) state that we anticipated and therefore foresaw the attacks of 9/11 in our fictions, many experienced it as a catastrophic, if not apocalyptic, event that changed the way Americans understood their place in the world. While not all experienced 9/11 as traumatic, many did, even those who lived far from the events and only witnessed them through the media. Trauma is a rupture of the psyche that occurs when one experiences an event that cannot be integrated into our life narrative. The traumatized victim is often compelled to relive the event in a repetition compulsion. We can see part of this enacted in a variety of films released after the attacks. Over and over, films exhibit echoes of 9/11, whether in the crashed plane in War of the Worlds (2005) or depictions of the Middle Eastern terrorist in films like The Hurt Locker (2008). Yet, perhaps the most recurrent theme after 9/11 is the collapsing building. While buildings had collapsed in films prior to 9/11, the events of the attacks added cultural and emotional associations to these images of crumbling spires and clouds of ash billowing through the streets. The collapsing building film re-enacts what many felt to be the apocalyptic destruction of what Donald Pease calls the “Virgin Land” myth of American exceptionalism, the belief that America was impervious to all foreign attack.

Fear is an object-oriented emotion, an aversive emotion geared toward a present threat, whether real or imagined. Images of collapsing buildings present echoes of 9/11 repeatedly as a fearful, present threat. Yet these films also trigger a pervasive sense of anxiety, an emotion like fear that is instead focused on a future threat. Seeing skyscrapers crumble on the screen for years has kept the image alive in the American imaginary, urging us to wonder if it could happen again. From the fear presented in the film to the looming, future-oriented anxiety, the collapsing building film can capture viewers who have been traumatized by 9/11 in an emotional web, one that continues to play out today. While we see examples of collapsing building films as early as the very-9/11-focused World Trade Center in 2006, this theme continues to capture the viewer’s imagination in films like Cloverfield in 2008, Man of Steel in 2013, London Has Fallen in 2016, and even the revealingly entitled Skyscraper in 2018. While the conscious depiction of 9/11 may have grown more distant over the decades, the emotional association of the apocalyptic event of 9/11 in the collapsing building film has survived in a web of fear, anxiety, and trauma. This presentation pairs a cultural studies perspective with affective neuroscience to investigate the phenomena of the collapsing building film to ask if we have escaped this cultural trauma through filmic narrative therapy, or if we are still stuck in a repetition compulsion, forced to witness and relive this American apocalypse over and over again."

Nathanael Cloyd