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Magazine

Elizabeth Allen

The worst has come to pass
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The worst has come to pass. ”How many times has it been said since September 11, 2001, the day that we were all jarred from our sleep, the sound sleep of those who have been lulled into the sweet reverie of security and prosperity. The sleep of those who live in the safest, most powerful nation in the world. Tuesday morning, the soft sounds of “Good Morning, America” gave way to the cries of “WAKE UP, AMERICA! Look at the hate you inspire!”

For we believed them. We who have always been told we were the greatest, the strongest, the bravest, the most just. We believed them. Every morning we placed our hands over our hearts and pledged our allegiance to our fine little flag in unison. Was there room for doubt? Can there be any room for doubt now?

The world’s newscasters were undoubtedly the first to point out the irony of the horror we all watched unfold before us, minute after excruciating minute. The tragic irony of Doctor Frankenstein. America under attack. How many similar scenes had we taken in passively over the years? How many fictional terrorist hijackings, hostages, bombs, machine guns? How many virtual bad guys? How many invented good guys going about their daily lives suddenly caught in an unthinkable disaster? How many imaginary heroes who sacrifice their lives to save innocent victims? Just enough to believe for a split second that what we were watching couldn’t be true.

The dust of the World Trade Center had not yet begun to settle when the news teams were already clamoring to make this into another Hollywood blockbuster. Package it up for Americans in terms they can understand. Good versus Evil. Heroes and Assassins. We were all too prepared to accept the enemy they allotted to our sufferings. After all, haven’t we been taught to expect one? The most fearsome would be the enemy to use our own fears and fantasies against us.

Cinema has played a role in war since its inception. It provides one way to communicate directly to the masses through diversion, gives us a sense of shared common experiences with people we have never met. It instills in us its own judgement of what is right and wrong, and what is to be trusted or mistrusted and allows us to fantasize about how we would behave in the same situation as the protagonists. It is possibly the most powerful tool of creation of a collective imagination. It can become more real than real life.

I personally didn’t expect anything of this magnitude for another ten or twenty years. Most sci-fi dystopias begin sometime after this century, when mass destruction has enveloped all of humanity leaving all but Kevin Kostner or Mel Gibson and a few orphans in tattered clothes and fallen or sunken Statues of Liberty (that is, of course, in the event that Bruce Willis, Will Smith or James Bond hadn’t come to save us first. And don’t get me wrong, Mel, I loved Mad Max). But now that it has happened…

Science fiction points to the dark crevasses in the human consciousness and shows us what lurks there. It forces us to imagine a world beyond the one we know. It creates societies with rules that are of human making, within the realm of human possibility. It pushes the malevolence of human acts to their infinite power. It lets us imagine what could happen if…

Will we now be afraid to ask ourselves “what could happen if…?”

There is now an unofficial moratorium on disastrous action films in Hollywood, especially those involving terrorist hijackings. Does Hollywood feel it’s given away all its best ideas to the bad guys?

In recent days the “war against terrorism” has a fresh new recruit. After their successful divination of the September 11 attacks and in the midst of bacteriological attacks, Hollywood screenwriters and filmmakers have been called upon to serve their country by helping the feds to imagine other ways in which the “enemy” might attempt to destroy us. So the circle goes unbroken…