Invisibility and Trauma Reading

While reading Speaking the Unspeakable: Invisibility and Trauma after 9/11, I couldn’t help but think of how the article, in light of more recent events, now related to the bombing in Boston and the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Randell discusses the fragmentation of trauma in relation to movies but also television programming, which reminded me of the initial coverage of the Boston events as well as the opening scene for Zero Dark Thirty. In the hours after the marathon bombings occurred, my roommate and I were watching CNN hoping for actual information, only to be inundated with the same clips looping over and over. Randell remarks that TV, “dilutes it [disaster] into manageable segments”, which is exactly what CNN was doing, intentionally or not. The more we watched people running in terror, the less real it seemed, and therefore easier to watch. In the case of Zero Dark Thirty, the opening scene is almost exactly the way Randell describes the opening to Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9/11. In Bigelow’s film, the opening screen is black, and audio recordings of phone calls made from inside the towers are played, much like the audio/black screen combo present in Moore’s documentary. It is interesting to me that with all of the really tough imagery covered in the film (i.e. torture, violence, wounds) and the proximity of its release in relation to the 9/11 event, Bigelow still chose this kind of distancing technique. However, I suppose that decision goes back to Randell’s overarching point, which is that trauma is easier to grapple with when seen on television rather than in a movie.