Representing Atrocity:
September 11 Through a Holocaust Lens

By David Sterritt

  The attacks of September 11 unleashed waves of media representation that served multiple and often conflicting purposes. Among them were three imperatives of the American mass media: the journalistic need to report an overwhelmingly important news event to the American and international publics; the commercial need to attract and retain the largest possible audience, even after the central facts had been disseminated, discussed, and analyzed at length; and the ideological need to stir up a sense of national unity and purpose in the wake of the catastrophe. These three orders of perceived necessity – the journalistic, the commercial, and the ideological – are interconnected, of course, and each is easily detected within the others; for example, the ideological drive to kindle feelings of nationalism and patriotism served to justify the news media’s protracted and repetitive obsession with visual minutiae of the attacks, and this in turn fed the sense that prolonged and repetitive TV watching had become a patriotic duty for real Americans who cared about their country –  a perception that was quite a boon to commercial networks like CNN, which had gained its first great popularity with 24/7 coverage of the first Persian Gulf war.
   As cataclysmic as the events of September 11 were, their effects on the American psyche were driven more by the shock and awe of the attacks than by the absolute number of people killed. Most of the fatalities occurred at the World Trade Center in New York, where 2,819 died, while the number of US highway deaths in 2001 was estimated at 41,730 by the Department of Transportation, which declared that number – almost 3,500 per month – to be a historic low. But shock and awe are real phenomena, and soon after September 11 the conventional wisdom was clear: Everything has changed, nothing will be the same again, and, as a corollary, America will never allow things to be the same again – a position that had awful consequences, needless to say, when the Bush administration used it as an excuse for violent intervention in the Middle East not long afterward. In terms of moral weight and historical magnitude, the bellicose “never again” of the Bush gang bears no comparison with the principled “never again” voiced by the world after the Holocaust and its horrors. Yet any pledge to forestall some future possibility raises important questions about historical memory and representation – questions about how we’re to remember the past that has shaped our perspectives on the time to come. In an era as saturated with images as ours, matters of visual depiction must be front and center in this discussion, and that’s where we film and media critics come in. In this talk I want to revisit some points I made in an essay about two years after September 11, and then consider some developments in more recent years. My comments aren’t meant to be exhaustive, and my goal is to raise questions, not look for answers or solutions to the conundrums that come up. I have two basic questions in mind. The first, on the level of content and technique, is whether images can capture, reproduce, or convey the essence of events and situations more vast and horrifying than anything encountered in everyday life or the so-called normal world. The second, on the level of ethics and aesthetics, is whether it’s decent or permissible to try. On the practical level of everyday visual discourse, these questions can be boiled down to half a dozen words: to show or not to show.  
   The first challenge in thinking about these issues is the fact that the respective histories of 9/11 and Holocaust representations begin on visually opposite – and oddly paradoxical – terms. In the case of the Holocaust, no imagery of any kind was publicly shown until the death camps had been liberated and the worst of the horrors were over; and even then most films and photographs necessarily showed not the horrors themselves – aside from bits of footage shot by Nazis – but rather the appalling aftermath, captured by Allied soldiers with 16mm movie cameras. In the case of the World Trade Center, on the other hand, television provided the entire world with instant access – through live transmissions and instant video replays – to the sight of hijacked planes crashing into the towers’ walls and those walls crumbling under their own weight as thousands struggled to escape and flee. In a second important contrast, although most evils of the Holocaust were not documented as they occurred, they reached public awareness through indelible post-Liberation images of corpses bulldozed into mass graves, death-camp prisoners in states of near starvation, and the like, whereas the physical containment of the 9/11 tragedy, facilitated by the nature of the attacks and the fact that the twin towers imploded instead of scattering their wreckage outward, rendered the devastation of human bodies there almost invisible to the eye. The paradox here is that both atrocities, the protracted one of the Holocaust and the concentrated one of 9/11, produced unforgettable images despite limitations of visibility built into their material conditions – the concealment and secrecy with which the Holocaust was carried out, the suddenness and localness of the twin towers’ destruction. This notwithstanding, the popular media haven’t hesitated to fill the image gaps with pictures of their own making, through movies, TV dramas, and the like. A certain solemnity has usually surrounded popular representations of the Holocaust, but 9/11 has produced a more varied crop of responses – from United 93, the fine theatrical feature directed by Paul Greengrass in 2006, to the blitz of ideological belligerence that poured from radio and TV in the tragedy’s wake, hammering incessantly on aspects of the case that were readily turned into narrative (the hunt for Osama bin Laden, for instance) and appropriating the so-called war on terror – itself an ideologically coded and intellectually incoherent concept – to support commercially marketable “public affairs” coverage.  As a bonus for the media that cooked up and promoted this “reportage,” the war-on-terror rhetoric easily morphed into uncritical support for the war in Iraq, and John McCain didn’t hesitate to resurrect the bin Laden hunt for the purposes of presidential politics. With this in mind it’s interesting to note the progression of Holocaust representation through several stages, beginning with the elegiac documentary Night and Fog in 1955, moving through more conventional documentaries and narrative movies like Exodus and Judgment at Nuremberg, and then the towering historical films of the American Marcel Ophuls and the Israeli Claude Lanzmann, who worked a sea change in Holocaust representation by deciding to omit so-called atrocity footage from some or all of their films.
   The question of displaying death-camp footage didn’t trouble the makers of the first Holocaust documentary to become a classic: Alain Resnais’s Night and fog. Resnais was less concerned about the legitimacy of using authentic Holocaust images than about the even-more-basic question of whether he had a moral right to deal with the Holocaust at all, since he hadn’t been personally involved with the camps in any way. He told film scholar Annette Insdorf that he decided to proceed with the project only on the condition that it have a voiceover commentary by Jean Cayrol, a Holocaust survivor. This pairing of narrator and imagemaker is a key to the distinctiveness and power of Night and Fog, since it juxtaposes the perspective of a witness with that of an artist working to make sense of the witness’s survival and the evils that he overcame.
       Subsequent Holocaust documentaries have taken a wide variety of approaches: some rely heavily on archival film footage, others supplement or partly displace such images with didactic narrations, interviews with Holocaust survivors and participants, and so on. In positive or negative ways, all are inevitably related to the issues I mentioned earlier: whether filmed images can capture “truths” about sets of events so extraordinary, and what boundaries are established around representations of such events by moral and ethical considerations. The mightiest of all Holocaust documentaries implicitly address these questions as well as the Holocaust itself. I have in mind three films by Ophuls – The Sorrow and the Pity from 1970, The Memory of Justice from 1976, and Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie from 1988 – and two film by Lanzmann, the epic Shoah from 1985 and Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m. from 2001.
       The Sorrow and the Pity was recognized as an unprecedented work from its first appearance, and its reputation has scarcely dimmed. Film historian Marc Ferro has called it “a kind of October Revolution” in documentary filmmaking, since it introduces a novel use for the time-tested device of the filmed interview. I agree. Not only do the interviews in The Sorrow and the Pity serve to confront individuals with the past, and to challenge versions of the past that they cling to for self-serving reasons; besides this, the interviews are so richly structured and artfully interwoven that Ophuls can substitute them for the voiceover narration that had been common in previous Holocaust documentaries. The film’s most important element is therefore not a presence but an absence – the absence of anything resembling a “voice-of-God narration” in the traditional sense. When I interviewed Ophuls for the first time in 1988, he expressed his disdain for conventional narration in both practical and ethical terms. On one level, he said voiceovers are “too easy to do” and reduce films to “illustrated editorials.” On a deeper level, he argued that narration “lends itself to propaganda [and] the legitimizing of all kinds of `isms’ [and] ideology.” It seems to me that the implications of Ophuls’s view are even stronger than these statements indicate. For one thing, omitting “voice-of-God” commentary puts the burden of expression on actual documentary materials, rather than on the filmmaker’s explanations; this heightens the film’s authenticity while enhancing the ability of verbal and visual montage to throw past and present into mutually illuminating relief. For another thing, as critic James Roy MacBean has suggested, it facilitates the collapsing of past and present in a depoeticized way – contrasting with the manner of a Night and Fog – by using “window-on-the-world” discourse to puncture time-honored myths about the film’s primary topics, French resistance and collaboration during the Nazi era.
   7.    Ophuls carried his avoidance of conventional narration into two more Holocaust documentaries, where he also pursued a new tendency in his work: a wish to project his own personality, opinions, and directorial problems visibly into the film. In The Memory of Justice, about the Nuremberg war-crimes inquiry, he includes conversation with his wife and daughter, and a remarkable sequence where songs on the sound track comment mischievously on the more commercial projects that his friends and colleagues wish he’d undertake. He escalates this personalized filmmaking even further in Hotel Terminus, including more ironic music and his own personal, sometimes fierce confrontations with interview subjects. Ophuls may have eliminated traditional narration, but commentary clearly remains in his work, albeit in novel and increasingly personal ways.
 8.     In Hotel Terminus, Ophuls also confronts the main issue that concerns me here: the question of when utilization becomes exploitation in the handling of horrific images. Lanzmann has come to grips with this issue as well, coming to even more radical conclusions. Critics and theorists have written extensively on this subject. Fred Camper has suggested that “the photographing of any cinema image of a part of the actual world [might be construed as] an act of aggression,” since the photographer “wrenches a specific part of reality from the context with which it makes a whole, places that fragment in a rectangular frame, and further delimits it in time.” Camper also notes the filmmaker's “need to exercise control over what is in front of [the] camera” and the tendency of the passive spectator in the darkened theater “to feel that the images are in some sense his [or her] own.” I’ll add that this tendency might be even stronger in TV and video viewing, where the images are seen at close proximity and can be stopped, started, fast-forwarded, and replayed at will. Such considerations must weigh heavily in the minds of those documenting the Holocaust, who don’t wrench, place, delimit, and control just any part of reality, but parts that are directly connected to this century's most overwhelmingly horrific crime. If one grants André Bazin's contention that photographic images are literal “tracings” of reality, the moral ramifications are obviously profound.
    9.      The situation is even more serious if, as Camper further argues, film images viewed in big-screen splendor are “inevitably glorified by the projector's beam” in such a way that they are “charged with a certain aesthetic beauty, or at least a kind of energy [that] is hard to imagine...being utterly controlled by condemnation.” Again, this must be pondered by any filmmaker seeking to depict an event as purely evil as the Holocaust – or the destruction of the World Trade Center – without giving it any hint of aesthetic beauty or artistic energy, however subtly, subliminally, or unwittingly.
     10.     Camper may overstate the case when he says aggression is inherent in the act of photography, regardless of the object being photographed; but in her book On Photography, Susan Sontag makes a similar suggestion that clarifies the issue by referring specifically to the photographing of human beings. “To photograph people is to violate them,” she writes, “by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed....[T]o photograph someone is a sublimated murder....” Sontag makes a related point vis-à-vis the 1977 film Our Hitler, a Film From Germany, suggesting that filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg could not “rely on documents to show how it `really’ was [since] the display of atrocity in the form of photographic evidence risks being tacitly pornographic.” Assessments of Leni Riefenstahl's documentaries often point up this danger as well. Some scholars take a more benign view, to be sure; one is Judith Doneson, who sees the issue of who took the photographs, and under what circumstances, as deciding factors: Since some Jews documented ghetto life with photos, she says, “Using these testimonies today would...comply with the wishes of the Jews to have their history remembered.” Be this as it may, to depict the Holocaust in any way and for any purpose is to depict an event that must be measured entirely on the scale of human misery, human suffering, human death. Photographs or films of human beings must necessarily be used, whether these are authentic Holocaust images or filmed statements by Holocaust survivors, and this raises a moral dilemma if we see the photographed individuals as “violated” by being filmed as objects in the material world. And one must add the even more profound problem of capturing the inhumanly vast magnitude of the Holocaust and its apparatuses of death.
      11.    This is precisely the point addressed by Ophuls in Hotel Terminus and Lanzmann in Shoah and Sobibor, doing so by means of yet another absence, this one even more profound and far-reaching than the absence of spoken commentary: neither contains any trace of atrocity footage from the Holocaust itself, instead seeking to document the Holocaust entirely through the recollections of people who went through it. As with his dislike of voice-of-God narration, Ophuls tends to explain his avoidance of atrocity footage in simple and perhaps oversimplified terms. Such footage “doesn't get the job done anymore,” he told me, since audiences have become desensitized to it by seeing it so often. But his decision to make a four-and-a-half-hour film without a single minute of such material points to a deeper motivation, and clues to this may be found in Shoah, a film that Ophuls deeply admires.
     12.     I want to focus on one of the most memorable features of Shoah: the obsessive return to shots of the front gate of the Auschwitz camp, filmed by a camera moving along the railroad tracks that once carried trainloads of Jews to their deaths. Once it has reached the gate, the camera continues along its trajectory into the camp, but does so by switching to a zoom lens instead of moving physically ahead. “If camera movement tends to suggest movement through space, as of a human body,” writes Camper, “the zoom tends to represent the movement of the mind, shifts in human perception.” On this view, Lanzmann fulfills his film's obligation to take us into a concentration camp--yet by physically stopping his camera at the gate, he acknowledges the inability of present-day observers to truly enter such a place or truly understand what occurred there. He also tacitly acknowledges the “violation” that might take place if his camera were to penetrate the cursed space about which we hear so much from the witnesses he interviews. Lanzmann's refusal to use archival material of any kind, including film footage and still photos, may be understood in the same way: as a suggestion that to use any product of the death camps, for however well-meaning or enlightening a purpose, might be to participate, in however small a way, in the Nazis' enterprise. This is a tremendously meaningful message for filmmakers who’ve taken on the challenge of dealing with September 11, or who think of doing so in the future.
13. So let’s take a brief look at what’s been happening in this arena over the past seven years. When I first wrote about September 11 and the media, not long after the attacks, I was already disheartened by media garbage like – for just one example – WABC radio’s coverage of what it called “Our War Against Terrorism”; complete with rock’n’roll background music and crash-boom sound effects, this shamelessly exemplified how the media instantly turned what was supposed to be a fight for democracy into an entertainment show of the crudest, crassest sort. I knew such stuff would continue to proliferate, and that television in particular would keep exploring and exploiting the disaster in mostly conventional forms – newshour specials with recycled video and commentary, and docudramas recreating traumas of the apocalyptic day. Theatrical movies would take longer to arrive, given the lengthy time between an initial concept and a finished film, but I knew they’d reach the screen as soon as producers felt safe from accusations of capitalizing on the disaster by the rushing in too soon, and it wasn’t hard to predict what their focus would be: terrors faced by victims, heroic acts by rescue teams, and why the cataclysm was not prevented – or, according to conspiracy theorists, why shadowy government figures either Made It Happen On Purpose, the MIHOP view, or Let It Happen On Purpose, the LIHOP notion. As things turned out, the conspiracy angle was far too hot for mainstream or semi-mainstream filmmakers to touch, and even conventional approaches generated fewer films than I expected – mainly because attention was soon siphoned off by the drumbeat for invading Iraq and the debacle that developed there. But even before Iraq took over the headlines, 9/11 projects were hindered by Hollywood’s nervousness about seeming to exploit the tragedy. This apprehension was underscored by one of the first debates to arise – the bizarre debate about whether it was acceptable to include shots of the twin towers in movies already filmed but not in theaters yet. Everyone from Hollywood moguls to independent auteurs weighed in on this issue, which turned out to have little relevance beyond the case of Spider-Man, which was reworked before its 2002 release to eliminate action with a World Trade Center background. But producers were also edgy about large-scale urban violence in general: Exhibit A was the Arnold Schwarzenegger epic Collateral Damage, which Warner Bros. moved from an opening date of October 2001, to February 2002, because of worry over the premise of the story, which is about an ordinary firefighter who goes on a vigilante hunt for the Colombian drug merchants who killed his wife and child when they bombed a Los Angeles building to assassinate a political enemy. It was widely reported that Warner delayed the picture’s release because its depiction of fiery disaster in an urban building might be too disturbing for audiences – but in the view of some skeptics, the movie’s fictional inferno, juiced up with standard-issue special effects, might have appeared not too troubling but too tame after so much TV coverage of the real thing.
   14.    Then came the release of The Sum of All Fears in the spring of 2002, touching off speculation about whether Americans were “ready” for an action-adventure yarn in which nuclear bombs decimate Baltimore; Americans proved to be very ready indeed, making the picture a box-office hit. One short week later the question returned with a different twist, asking whether Americans were “ready” for Bad Company, a rollicking comedy about Chris Rock chasing down a nuclear device smuggled into Manhattan by terrorists. This picture made less money, but few were offended by it. Very soon after 9/11, Americans were clearly ready for anything that provided a sufficient number of entertainment bangs for its bucks at the ticket window.
15. As trivial as these debates seem now – and seemed at the time, for that matter – in their own small ways they tapped into the same questions that Holocaust filmmakers have to face: the question of how to deal responsibly with evil through artistic representation, and more specifically, the question of when the benefits of artistic representation are outweighed by the pitfalls of sensationalism and vulgarity. Looking at more recent films about September 11, the record shows many productions with widely varying ambitions, but few that have made significant contributions to analyzing its causes and understanding its ramifications. The website called 9/11docs.net lists more documentaries, TV clips, and miscellaneous videos than I have time and energy to count, much less watch, with titles that usually suggest their content, which ranges from conspiracy-theory hokum to reasonable discourse – from 9/11 Was an Inside Job Told to Troops in Iraq and Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement to Martin Sheen Questions Official 9/11 Story and Talk by Naomi Wolf – The End of America. Also here is far and away the best documentary I’ve seen on the subject, The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear by Adam Curtis, an indispensable analysis of the tragedy and its exploitation by the forces of neoconservative ideology. Another movie-related website I can’t resist mentioning is conspiracyarchive.com, which features an essay on ”9/11 Synchronicities in Film,” claiming that Hollywood projected auguries of 9/11 on “a subliminal level” long before the event itself. In Gremlins, way back in 1984, a character turns on his car radio and the red indicator sits between 9 and 11 on the dial; in Independence Day twelve years later, Jeff Goldblum sets up a laptop to watch a countdown and, quote, “When the camera cuts to a close-up one of the ticks is 9:11:01”; in The Patriot in the year 2000, Mel Gibson weighs a chair he’s made and says, “Nine pounds, eleven ounces. That’s perfect.” Then he sits on it and “it collapses under his weight,” so he angrily “throws it against a wall where other chairs he has made lie in pieces.” “Coincidence or design?” asks the website. “You decide.” To help us reach our conclusions the site throws out names of some “secretive societies that have a history of machinations against the people of the United States and Britain,” to wit, the Masons, the Opus Dei of Da Vinci Code fame, the Yale Skull and Bones club that figures in Robert De Niro’s smart political drama The Good Shepherd, plus the CIA, the FBI, and the Jesuits. These all sound plausible to me, but my money’s on Mel Gibson.
16. If all this apocrypha has a counterpart in Holocaust-film history, it would lie in films that provide witting or unwitting cover for the pernicious screeds of Holocaust deniers, and these too must be spreading through the democratized channels of the internet. Errol Morris exposed one manifestation of this in Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a brilliant and important film whose one signal flaw is a tendency toward just the kind of aestheticized expression I discussed earlier – a problem that crops in all of Morris’s features, including Standard Operating Procedure, his recent film about the Abu Ghraib torture-and-photography scandals. The definitive documentary about September 11 itself is Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore, a filmmaker whose excesses lie in the areas of tendentious argument and first-person showboating. As problematic as these failings are, they’re outweighed in my opinion by his filmmaking savvy, his skill at reaching vast audiences – at least by documentary standards – and the overall thrust of his politics. Like Moore’s oeuvre as a whole, Fahrenheit 9/11 has pros and cons, but it establishes itself as a priceless and indispensable film in its very first minutes, which show George W. Bush proceeding with a photo-op visit to a Florida school after being informed of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, and staying in the classroom after being told a second plane has struck and the country – his country – was under attack. Showing footage of Bush in the schoolroom, with a book in his lap and a perplexed expression on his face, Moore gives the image his own polemical slant in a voiceover: “Not knowing what to do…Mr. Bush just sat there and continued to read My Pet Goat with the children.” Noting that Bush’s failure to do anything – even leave the room for information – lasted for seven long minutes, Moore goes on to wonder if the vacation-loving president were wishing he’d shown up at work more often, or had a conference with his counterterrorism chief, or refrained from cutting the FBI’s terrorism funding. By the time this part of Moore’s narration is over, the image of Bush’s paralysis has become an unforgettable icon that’s likely to retain its ghastly strength long after the Bush government is – literally – history. Here is a vindication of the first-person narration that Ophuls has abjured, joined to a personal engagement with the subject matter that’s as intense and idiosyncratic as Ophuls’s engagement in The Memory of Justice almost thirty years earlier. In the more rigidly commercial domain of theatrical fiction film, the only widely released movie that equals Fahrenheit 9/11 for moral seriousness is United 93, a no-frills docudrama that compels and rewards close attention. Far less impressive is Oliver Stone’s erratic World Trade Center, which has some interesting experimental ideas – whole portions of it, set beneath a mountain of rubble after the attack, look like a particularly grim play by Samuel Beckett – but dilutes them with sentimental flourishes and a badly miscalculated subplot about a man whose contradictory impulses, toward both charity and revenge, are explored much too superficially for comfort.
17. Returning again to the fundamental issue at stake here – the representation of atrocity, to show or not to show – I need to make it clear that the answers are rarely obvious. This is more of a high-wire act than an either/or proposition – a case in point was television’s need to make decisions about what to show and not to show in initial coverage of 9/11. One network played video of flaming victims leaping from the towers, for example, but withdrew the footage after a single late-night broadcast. Others chose not to display such material at all. The same issue arose with regard to 11’09”01 – September 11, an anthology film comprising eleven short films by eleven major filmmakers; in my view its most courageous segment is the contribution by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu, a mournful cine-poem consisting of a blacked-out screen intermittently displaced by bursts of imagery showing the plummeting bodies of people who leapt from the towers and fell to their deaths below. This portmanteau film was assembled by a large team of international producers, and its failure to find distribution in the United States would be inexplicable if not for the near-certainty that the bravery of González Iñárritu’s chapter simply frightened distributors and exhibitors away. I saw it in conjunction with its appearance in a series sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York – I used to work with them as a programmer of the New York Film Festival – and when I spoke with Gavin Smith about it – he’s now the editor of Film Comment magazine – he was quite uneasy about the González Iñárritu portion, which he evidently found too unflinching for comfort. My own position is that the chronic scarcity of visually outspoken films about 9/11 makes this haunting documentary an essential part of the tragedy’s cinematic legacy – a truly monumental work at a mere 11 minutes, nine seconds, and one frame long. Despite my advocacy of this film, however, I have to keep the history of Holocaust filmmaking in mind and ask why cinema’s most passionate threnody for 9/11’s human cost is one that depicts the carnage in fleeting glimpses – views so abbreviated that they exaggerate the difficulty of seeing such appalling sights and excuse us in advance for looking at them with – so to speak – our eyes wide shut. If America’s visual culture could produce the photographs of Abu Ghraib, it should be able to depict the 9/11 tragedy with an unshielded, undenying gaze. Only after we’ve seen the worst there is to see – the equivalent of the bulldozed corpses, skeletal prisoners, and cremation sites of the early Holocaust documentaries – will the cinema be justified in turning to more understated means of exploration, as Lanzmann and Ophuls eventually did.
 18. In his book What Do Pictures Want? the visual theorist W.J.T. Mitchell opens a discussion of images that most clearly define and summarize our time; as one of these he names the image of the twin towers at the moment of their destruction. “The towers themselves,” he writes, were…widely recognized as icons of globalization and advanced capitalism, and that is why they were the target of attack by those who regarded them as symbols of decadence and evil….The real target was a globally recognizable icon, and the aim was not merely to destroy it but to stage its destruction as a media spectacle. Iconoclasm…was rendered as an icon in its own right….”  Later Mitchell describes the World Trade Center as a symbol of a life form – we can call it “global capitalism” – that both stands for and acts as a symptom of the life form, global capitalism, itself. It was therefore a “living symbol” that had an “organic” connection with what it stood for; and from some perspectives it was also an “offending image,” a symbol of a life form that’s despised and feared. “From certain points of view,” Mitchell writes, “the moral imperative is to offend the images themselves, to treat them as if they were human agents or at least living symbols of evil, and to punish them accordingly.”
   19.    This account of why the twin towers were destroyed, and why the destruction has acquired such iconic power around the world, helps explain why the memory of September 11 can agitate and disturb Americans, and others, to a degree out of proportion to the amount of death and destruction that actually took place, which, as I said earlier, was less than we get from an average month of highway driving. It’s even more interesting if we link it as well to the Holocaust, which did produce a sheer quantity of death that remains unimaginable to this day, and which Mitchell’s words can illuminate even though the Holocaust is barely mentioned in this book. Through centuries of anti-Semitic bigotry, oppression, and violence, Europe and later America produced the Jewish people as “symbols of decadence and evil,” to apply Mitchell’s words about hostile perceptions of the twin towers. Amorphous defamations and foundationless libels, promulgated in uncountable ways through cultural channels of every size and design, constructed “world Jewry” as an “offending image” for bigots and xenophobes to despise, fear, and, again quoting Mitchell on 9/11, “treat…as if they were human agents or at least living symbols of evil, and to punish them accordingly.”
20. My interest in viewing the images of September 11 through the lens of the Holocaust began years before Mitchell published What Do Pictures Want? but it was stimulated by my sense that in the modern cultural unconscious, teeming as it is with “living symbols” and “offending images,” the ineluctable realities embedded in terms like “world Jewry” and “global capitalism” are now inextricably tied to icons of hellish trauma – the death camps of the Holocaust, the fiery towers of the World Trade Center – that the popular imagination finds easier to comprehend and cope with than the intricate actualities on which these images have been grafted by mass-media representation. What pictures of the Holocaust want is to be treated with the dignity and deference they overwhelmingly deserve, even if this leads artists like Lanzmann and Ophuls to the conclusion that propagating them is no longer a fitting way to honor them. The pictures of 9/11 also call out for reverence and respect, but what they’ve received so far has often been the opposite, as forces of aggression and xenophobia appropriate them for reactionary ends, turning the horrific results of self-righteous ideological brutality into excuses for more of the same, with God on our side this time. Nazism lost its war in the 1940s, and thanks in part to visual representations of the Holocaust, this particular brand of fascism has been held largely in check ever since. Terrorism is a more diffuse and multifaceted phenomenon, and too much of the visual discourse surrounding it has been on one hand too reticent – suppressing the images of burning and plummeting bodies, for example – and on the other hand too belligerent, draped in slogans of vengeance, payback, and xenophobia. If the so-called long war is ever to end, if we will ever be able to say the terrorists have lost, the purveyors of simplistic junk like “Our War Against Terrorism” and World Trade Center could do worse than revisit the history of Holocaust representation and take its sophisticated lessons to heart.