violent images and trauma...

A few of our class discussions were centered around violent images and peoples’ personal reactions to the 9/11 attacks, and we shared highly personal stories about where we had been, what the attacks had meant to us, and how we felt the media treated such an unspeakable tragedy.  During the course of our discussion, I recalled a study I had once read on the effects of media violence on individuals, which sought to link the exposure of study subjects to violent still and moving images with their ensuing responsiveness (or lack thereof) to their perception of a person in peril.  The researchers’ findings made clear that exposure to a violent film in an interview room made a study subject less inclined to inquire about the taped sound of a woman screaming in a hallway than a control subject who had not been exposed to violent media of any type.  The study essentially implied an inverse relationship between exposure to violent media and an individual’s ability to display altruism.

In thinking about the 9/11 attack, the images of jumpers (which have subsequently been all but eradicated from the visual archive of that day due to their highly personal nature), the live broadcast of the plane hitting the second tower, and other images that we could not possibly begin to understand were occurring on American soil, I wonder if we have been similarly desensitized to violence through our exposure to these highly upsetting images.    I have no answer for this question, and suspect that no one does.

I was not in New York on that day, but watched the second plane hit from the rather surreal perspective of being an American tourist in Milan, walking down a shopping street and seeing an electronics store with black-and-white televisions in the window tuned to CNN and broadcasting the events live.  The result was, for me, akin to watching a bad horror movie from the 1950s, and I could hardly piece together what was happening.  Do these images lose something in translation?  Did I interpret the events differently due to the fact that I initially believed they were all a tasteless (and special effects-heavy) foreign film?  Walter Benjamin would certainly assert that even viewing the events in color would be a poor substitute (or, perhaps, paradoxically, a good one) for experiencing the original, and for once, I agree.