viz.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

When my friend Lauren pointed out to me the following TED video on “photos that changed the world,” I thought that it would be good material for viz.  What I hadn’t realized was where Jonathan Klein’s claims would take my thinking.  In his talk, Klein talks about the potential political effects of what he refers to as “iconic” images:  “We're looking for images that shine an uncompromising light on crucial issues, images that transcend borders, that transcend religions, images that provoke us to step up and do something, in other words, to act.”

H/T: Lauren Gantz

While I did question how an iconic picture like “V-J day in Times Square,” also included in his talk, has changed the world, this argument seems to hold up better when he points out how photographs of Earth have helped encourage the environmental movement.  As someone who has spent the last year writing about the power of images, I am willing to agree with this point.  However, this discussion reminded me of a viewing experience that I meant to discuss on viz. after spring break, but had forgotten to recount:  the new Robert Pattinson movie Remember Me.

Remember Me tells the story of a young man named Tyler, whose relationship with his father has suffered in the wake of his brother’s suicide, and a girl named Ally, whose mother died in a robbery when she was young.  The two end up in a romantic relationship while struggling to reconcile themselves both to their fathers and to their tragic pasts.  However, just as the audience begins to anticipate a happy ending, the moment of reconciliation is interrupted by tragedy:  namely, the events of September 11, 2001.

The movie does set up this difficulty from the beginning:  the movie opens with viewers taken back ten years before the story’s major events to actually see the young Ally with her mother, and shows her being shot in front of her young daughter by the thieves who take her purse.  Also, it’s not long into either the film or its trailer that Tyler frames our experience with the following insight:  “Gandhi said that whatever you do in life will be insignificant, but it’s very important that you do it; I tend to agree with the first part.”  The movie’s overall message seems to be that life is unpredictable and that one must be able to recover from disaster to live life—however, as this lesson culminates Tyler’s death, it unsettles the audience by associating the characters’ private tragedies with a national one.

Perhaps one reason why I didn’t write about this movie initially was because I did cry at the end as I realized what was coming.  The movie makes the 2001 setting clear in the beginning, but only once you see the date written on a blackboard towards the end does the audience begin to anticipate what might happen.  Tyler’s death becomes clear as the camera moves to his profile in his father’s office to a wider shot of the World Trade Center.

Image Credit:  Screenshot from YouTube

Predictably, there was much controversy about this movie’s ending.  As summed up in a post by Bryan Reesman, “many critics and some audience members have found the use of the World Trade Center attacks to be offensive and exploitative, while many people … found the ending moving as the central themes of the films are coping with grief, making amends with those close to you, moving forward with life and learning to embrace the simple joys and to live in the moment.”  Even other responses were possible:  my ten year old sister was unaffected by the ending that I found so moving.  I actually was in more shock that she could be so blithe, and found it hard to explain my reaction to her.  The best I could come up with was a situational context:  while I experienced 9/11 as a girl attending college in Virginia two hours south of DC, she was only two years old when it happened.

Newsweek’s coverage of the controversy explains why this disjointed reaction might be the movie’s intent:  “Now we have the biggest star in the tween world building a memorial dedicated to September 11. When it's taught in classrooms, September 11 is presented as a historical atrocity. The key word: historical. … Remember Me exposes a new generation to what happened in American nearly—can you believe it?—a decade ago. The title isn't a request. It's a command.”  In other words, Remember Me attempts to make that tragedy a part of a shared American past for the growing generations who did not powerfully experience it.

It also carefully does so to avoid exploiting the events:  note the picture that opens this post.  The skyline behind the words “Remember Me” is clearly New York; an aware audience can be aware that the words cover the place where the Twin Towers once stood.  The image thus suggests without explicitly making clear its content.  Similarly, the movie avoids actually showing the attacks beyond a shot of Tyler’s dad, played by Pierce Brosnan, coming out of his car and seeing ash falling around him.  As someone interested in visual rhetoric, it’s a careful choice not to show this event onscreen.

Jonathan Klein points out in his video why this might be:  “Some very important images are deemed too graphic or disturbing for us to see them.”  Clearly, the producers and writer of Remember Me seem to agree with this sentiment; my friend Shelley Manis in her dissertation, "More than Memory": Haunted Performance in Post-9/11 Popular American Culture, discusses how popular media works like Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul, the musical Wicked, and the television show Lost deal with representing the tragedy and the mourning and melancholia that followed in its wake.  For example, Wicked begins with a song declaring that “No One Mourns the Wicked,” who in this case is the Wicked Witch Elphaba, treated unjustly as a terrorist by the Ozians and not by the audience.  Listening to her defend her dissertation yesterday helped me understand how to think about Remember Me.  This movie serves to help its audience reevaluate the event outside of heated political debate and teaches them to learn to mourn those events over again.  While the viewing experience was painful, my tears provided some measure of catharsis unavailable to me at another point.  I wonder now whether my first reaction that the movie was inappropriate relates to a restricting political debate about what kinds of reactions to 9/11 are “appropriate,” and that we should encourage artists to take up the question of 9/11 in popular media more than ever today.