Speaking the Unspeakable

 As others have suggested, the Randall essay “Speaking the Unspeakable,” is particularly poignant in the wake of recent acts of terror which have been far too close to home. Randall’s notion that these films of terroristic events help in solidifying a sort of engrained societal remembrance that works along with yet separately from Moore’s non-collective approach is evident in my own collections of thoughts about these events. I think Randall is right in saying that these forces work in tandem, and the fact that films of this nature are produced after the majority of the media’s response has sounded down reflects ‘our’ attempts to remember. I specifically remember asking my dad about his reaction to the Vietnam War, and he recalled being sick the week the U.S. pulled-out, as a 12 year old, he remembers laying on his couch and watching helicopters leave the jungle. Growing up, I watched many WWII and Vietnam War films with my dad, of the hundred Randall points out, yet I’m sure my remembrance and his are entirely different. It seems that my dad’s (or anyone of his generation) reflect on every film instance of the Vietnam War with the personal baggage, the stuff Moore was trying to pull-out, so that their perception is in some ways heightened by the personal attachment they have to the event. It seems then, that while films about terror and trauma have the effect of solidifying the remembrance socially and recalling personal connections, their ultimate goal is to attempt to make the personal experiences of those who experienced it in some way a part of our (someone who doesn’t have a previous personal experience with the event) personal experience, and thus part of the collective memory (the engrained social remembrance), but also part of our consciousness so that it becomes as much ours as theirs. I don’t know if this has effectively been done in every film, in reference to my own experiences, in part because as a child I was not viewing these movies from a critical standpoint, meaning that many of the negatively portrayed veterans Randall points out may have shaped my conscious thought, however, my exposure as a child to similar things that my dad would have seen at a similar age, I think, helped align my closeness with the event in some ways, so that, perhaps our remembrances aren’t so different after all.