The Long Shadow Of 9/11

Source

Title: The Long Shadow Of 9/11

Author: Will Brooker

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Year: 2011

Useful Quotations

1. "The narrative that Americans constructed to help make sense of 9/11 no longer seems as straightforward and uncomplicated as it so often does in the movies" - (Pg, 146)

2. "It was cinema, and popular culture in general, that helped cast the disturbing events of 9/11" - (Pg, 146)

3. "Films are not simply reflections of events and conditions but participate in shaping audience judgements" - (Pg, 146)

4. "It is now difficult, and rightly so, to talk of 9/11 as a singular, monumental, unprecedented, and unmatchable event - an event so unique and unnameable that it lies beyond works and can only be gestured to through numbers" - (Pg, 146)

5. "It is harder now simply to repeat the mantra 9/11, like a recurring nightmare or a conjuring spell, over and over again as if its singularity were so absolute that it could not be matched" - (Pg, 145)

6. "The single date is no loner enough to capture the complexity of the United States' relationship with terror over the past decade" - (Pg, 145)

7. "The simple story of us versus them has become muddled" - (Pg, 146)

8. "Many observers described as feeling like a movie" - (Pg, 146)

9. "Director Robert Altman blamed Hollywood for setting a template for the terrorists of September 2001 to follow. claiming that these people have copied the movies" - (Pg, 146)
 
10. "These narratives place their viewers in the grey area between polar antinomies of good and evil, right and wrong, 'us' and 'them" - (Pg, 147)

11. "Many of the other stories considered here also recognize the repetitive nature of trauma prompted by the events of 9/11, and the experience of being caught between past terror and the fear of greater terrors yet to come" - (Pg, 147)

12. "The trauma of September 11 was rooted not so much in a past aggression as in the unpresentable future and the sense that the worst could still lie ahead" - (Pg, 148)

13. "Binary oppositions and hierarchical pairings can be exposed, destabilized, and unbalanced" - (Pg, 148)

14. "The terrorist acts of 9/11 were, in turn, countered by a war on terror that attempted to justify its own violations by instilling and perpetuating a culture of anxiety and impending threat" - (Pg, 148)

15. "Film and television narratives under consideration here work to question these assumptions. Not only do they force their characters, and by extension the audience, into a morally gray zone, they also show the interchangeability of the opposed positions on either side" - (Pg, 148)