A Horrifying Feeling of Deja Vu

The images remain at once inconceivable and horrifyingly familiar. A plane hits a building in a nova of fire and glass. The crowd screams. The building falls. Debris rains down as a crowd of people tries to outrun the clouds of smoke. These could be scenes from the id, born in the part of the brain that registers the greatest human fear--that life is uncontrollable, can change horrifically in a single moment.

Which is one reason so many of those witnessing Tuesday’s events, whether at close range or from thousands of miles away, found themselves reacting with a chilling sense of deja vu. In many of their terrifying details and emerging subplots, the events were grimly reminiscent of countless fictional scenarios, both in literature and on film. As archetypal characters emerged--the heroes, the villains, the survivors--and defining images were edited and replayed, many people, including writers, movie makers and cultural analysts, at times felt the unnerving sense that Americans were not just watching a tragedy unfold, but participating in the creation of a new kind of cultural narrative.

Although no one would diminish the tragedy of Tuesday’s attacks by truly comparing them to a movie, Neal Gabler, author of “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality,” said that fiction and nonfiction disaster images have become so thoroughly ingrained in modern American life, they can’t help but condition people’s response. The popular imagination, he said, is saturated with real events like the Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 assault on the World Trade Center, and fictional ones like those in the “Die Hard” series, “Air Force One,” “Independence Day” and even “Titanic.” Consciously or unconsciously, people transpose these fictional story lines onto the real ones, grasping at parallels and using them to order reality.

“When you consider the scale of the disaster, Americans have dealt with this with surprising equanimity,” said Gabler, who on Tuesday was taping a TV show at Radio City Music Hall, less than two miles north of ground zero. “And I think the reason is that we’ve seen it before.”

The effect, however, is two-sided. Familiarity can provide an emotional framework for coping with tragedies and terrors that might otherwise be emotionally and psychologically crushing. But pop culture’s echo-chamber effect can also distort our perceptions and make our response somehow feel second-hand.

And just as pop culture may provide a matrix that can help survivors cope, he added, it also seemed to offer a blueprint for the terrorists. The precise choreography of the attacks suggested the planners were consciously using movie-like images to terrorize the public. “Everybody has these movies on the hard drives of their heads,” Gabler said. “And when you’re thinking of the cultural ramifications [of such an attack], you’re thinking cinematically.”

Beneath what seem to be purely commercial considerations, the need to mentally prepare for disasters is precisely what prompts the creation of such action adventure and post-apocalyptic tales. People have always used storytelling to try to make sense of life and death, says L.A. psychotherapist and former screenwriter Dennis Palumbo. “People feel small and impotent in the face of social and technological advances. And so we try to harness our anxiety by dramatizing the worst-case scenarios,” he said. “In these type of stories, there is an inherent control, by the creator, if nothing else.”

Like Gabler, Palumbo believes the images Americans have seen, or imagined, may help them put the tragedy into some kind of framework, but in the end, he believes they will have little emotional effect. “Regardless of how many crowds we’ve seen running,” he said, “when we see it on CNN, it’s as if we’ve never seen it before. Real human terror can never be replicated.”

In her influential 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag argued that one of fantasy and science fiction’s functions is “to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.” She also fingered some primal anxieties that recur in disaster narratives: the fear of dehumanization, global annihilation and the scientist “as both satanist and savior.”

From the hijacking of sophisticated aircraft and the use of cell phones by desperate passengers and office workers, to the role of the Internet in tracing suspects’ identities from credit card receipts, scientific technology was handmaiden to both perpetrator and victim on Tuesday. And the technology used to disseminate information both illuminated and blurred the rapidly evolving events.

“For a moment I wasn’t sure if it was a bad video. It was hard to tell. We’ve gotten so good at simulating these things,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford University linguist and National Public Radio commentator.

Steven de Souza, the screenwriter for two of the “Die Hard” movies, said that as a filmmaker, he was overwhelmed by the “coverage” of the falling towers. “‘Coverage’ is the term for all the cameras you need when you blow up your building in film. Because you only get to do it once. It is just amazing to me the number of cameras that were in Manhattan on Tuesday. It’s horrifying, but I can catalog the shots: the explosion, the clouds of smoke, the people running. We are watching this film get polished.”

Perhaps more disturbing, De Souza said, is watching not only the disaster but the perfecting of the image of the disaster. “Every image you see gets more and more cinematic, as they add different camera angles,” he said. That process will change how we visualize history. Most iconic images are photographs; this, he said, will be the first iconic image that is not only moving but cinematically perfect. And that, he believes, makes it harder for people to know how to react.

“When Kennedy was shot, when the Challenger blew up, I knew exactly how I felt,” he said. “But I have not had a clear reaction to this yet. It’s too virtual to be visceral yet,” he said.

*

Emerging information will create a clearer narrative and help us order thought and feeling, he said, adding that no writer could create heroes as great as the passengers who reportedly attempted to wrest control of the hijacked aircraft that crashed in Pennsylvania. “In a movie, one of them would have known how to fly a plane, and they would have landed safely. But real heroism doesn’t always include a happy ending.”

Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplay for 1977’s terrorist saga “Black Sunday,” among other films, sees absolutely no connection between fictional story lines and real events. “I don’t know of any movie that is as horrifying,” he said. “Movies have personal violence between people, violence that is motivated by plot and characters.” This act, he added, is simply the result of the undeclared war between the Palestinians and Israel. “I can only hope that yesterday’s reality does not inspire anyone in Hollywood to top it.””

Edward Zwick, whose 1998 movie “The Siege” also has been cited for its eerie similarity to Tuesday’s events, said he hopes reality will do what art could not--open a real dialogue about the historic and ongoing hatred that fuels many of the real-life attacks.

“We had an agenda to raise consciousness,” he said of the film, which depicts an attack on the Palestinian American community after terrorist attacks in New York. “What is striking to me is [America’s] capacity for denial, our radical innocence. Some of what a writer does is imagine something mysterious and ineffable, but often it’s more about projecting yourself into a situation that others endure. Although nothing has ever been done on this magnitude, if you live through certain periods in Ireland, in the Middle East, you have an awareness of this kind of fear.”

Many of the people who worked as consultants on the film, including survivors of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and several people who worked security at the buildings, he added, were there Tuesday. “So that is what I am thinking about most, right now.”

Like Lehman, other writers reject any connection between Tuesday’s events and fictional works.

“As a practical matter, I would’ve said yesterday’s incident was not credible,” said Tom Clancy, author of numerous political thrillers. “To have four or eight people cast away their lives at the same time on the same day does not strike me as a credible threat. It’s too far off the reservation. But that’s what happened, so we’re going to have to adjust our evaluation of what’s likely to happen.”

No fiction writer would dare to use four commercial airplanes as weapons of mass destruction, said Ray Bradbury, author of “Fahrenheit 451” and “The Martian Chronicles.” “It’s the worst week in American history,” he said. Every time he watched replays of Tuesday’s events, Bradbury said, he experienced a fresh sense of horror and sadness.

“We human beings have been out of the cave only a few hundred thousand years and we’re 500 years from the stars,” he added. “And we have to learn to forgive ourselves. I can’t forgive the murderers, but we have to forgive ourselves as human beings for failing to see that this kind of thing could arise.”

As the attacks continue to reverberate, the narratives attached to them are being reworked in various ways. Constance Penley, an assistant professor of film studies at UC Santa Barbara, said research has shown that many people tend to remember major tragedies and large-scale disasters very selectively, omitting or rewriting important details and sometimes inserting themselves in various ways into the story. Disasters are complicated events, Penley said, and already the telling of the story of Tuesday’s attacks is being simplified. “There are political interests and media-spectacle interests that collude to create this extraordinarily reductive story line that distracts us from all the complexities of the real story line,” she said. “I would like to see [it] be much, much more complicated. Look at how the Oklahoma City story line got derailed, when it turned out not to be [Arab terrorists]. It was our own guys.”

Narrative, after all, not only tells us what happened, but sometimes suggests what we might or should do next.

“This now becomes a war over who writes the end of the movie,” says Gabler. Will it be the murderers, he asks rhetorically, “or did [they] just write the beginning and we’re going to write the end? Not just speaking metaphorically, this is going to be about who gets the final cut.”