A Plea for Eros

crash, who heard and saw the horrific destruction only blocks from where she was standing, remained calm. It was only when she had put Juliette to bed that night and saw the plane cut into the building on television that she began to cry.
    The problem of direct and mediated images is important to September 11 and its aftermath, not only because most of the world witnessed what happened on television but because the terrorists knew that they were staging a spectacular media event. They knew that in the time that elapsed between the first plane crash and the second television crews would have descended on the scene to record the horrifying image of an airliner entering the second tower and that the tape would be played and replayed for all the world to see, and they knew, too, that it would resemble nothing so much as a big-budget Hollywood disaster movie. A hackneyed fiction remade ad nauseam by the studios was manipulated by the terrorists into grotesque reality. At the same time, it must be said that it took very little imagination on the part of screenwriters to take actual events of terror and enlarge on them to fit the writers’ own notions of a thrilling spectacle. September 11 was not unimaginable. We could all imagine it. It’s the fact of it that annihilated the fantasy.
    On September 12, I was traveling in a subway car during what is normally rush hour on my way to collect my fourteen-year-old daughter, Sophie, who had been stranded overnight on the Upper West Side near her school. There were only a few of us in that car—myself and five or six other silent, stunned passengers who had decided that a trip was necessary. Because the regular line had been damaged by the attacks, I left one train to find another and noticed a large poster for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie plastered to the wall in the station. A picture of the oversized actor was accompanied by a text—the gist of which was that a firefighter had lost his wife and child in a terrorist attack and was out for vengeance. It made me sick.
    I was not alone. Immediately following the devastation in New York, Hollywood recanted.
The New York Times
carried articles in which studio powerhouses made dramatic statements about how everything had changed. A new era had dawned. A novelist and screenwriter declared on television that she would never write the same stories again. Sincerity charged back. Several periodicals pronounced “irony” dead. An acerbic, often cynical film reviewer for
The New Yorker
ended his column with a heartfelt statement about love. He seemed to mean it. My brother-in-law, a sculptor, reported a conversation that he had with fellow artists who said they were rethinking their work. For a brief time, photographs of firefighters and policemen replaced pictures of celebrities in the tabloids and on magazine covers. The news channels dropped commercials from their coverage, as if they knew that alternating film footage from the site, where rescue workers were digging for pieces of the dead, with ads for dishwashing liquid or an allergy drug would be unacceptable. But by now, this talk of a cultural sea change is mostly gone.
Collateral Damage,
the Schwarzenegger film, was withdrawn but later released, and now it has come and gone. The movie moguls backed away from their statements, arguing that they had been in shock and didn’t know what they were saying. Television commercials were reinstated long ago, and images of corpses lying in the fields or cities of other countries are cut short by pleas to rush into your nearest Ford dealer to save hundreds of dollars on a new SUV. As for irony, the word had been misused so often in the press before September 11, had been trumpeted far and wide as the tone of our age, as if it meant nothing more than a cold and cynical distance. Irony is always double. The juxtaposition between the declarations made immediately after 9/11 in the media, announcing a new earnest world, and the return to business as usual only months afterward might serve as a singular proof that the ironic point of view is sometimes the only legitimate way to interpret the reality we live in.

3
    There aren’t so many flags in the city now. Some still hang outside houses or flutter from the radio antennae of cars and taxis, but they are no longer ubiquitous. In the city, we understood those flags, but many Europeans I have spoken to in these past months mistook them for American chauvinism. They weren’t. They were what