Real Life Explosion Rocks Manhattan
Posted on July 19th, 2007 at 4:40 am in News |
A steam pipe explosion in Manhattan caused 26 injuries and one death yesterday. People reported that the ground was shaking, and the resulting crater was several dozen feet wide. Hissing sounds could be heard for blocks.
Will there be any onus to perhaps change Cloverfield (whose title should finally be revealed next Thursday at Comic Con)? Unlikely. Hollywood has often treaded lightly in the wake of real life disasters as to not act insensitive to the victims of such attacks. However, New York city has a history of calamities both because it has been a target of terrorism over the years, and also due to the density of the population. Hollywood has already tackled the events of 9/11, as well as the earlier World Trade Center bombings, and the people of New York haven’t responded in outrage.
Furthermore, while the wounds of 9/11 were still relatively fresh, Spielburg certainly didn’t pull any punches in his recent remake of War of the Worlds. The destruction in New York in his film was brutal, and terrifying. I have little doubt that the events of 9/11 inspired Spielburg to finally tackle the project he has talked about for so many years, and in doing so, set the movie firmly in New York city.
In the wake of real life tragedy, these movies suddenly take on a new meaning, not insensitive, but rather perhaps a healthy and necessary way to examine our feelings on the matter through fiction. Dress up the villain the guise of aliens or monsters, and you sweep away the political confusion and focus solely on the base emotions of insecurity and terror. In the end, your final product is now suddenly more than a series of special effects, and mindless popcorn-munching fun. It becomes a powerful tool for us to dig deep into emotions we rarely seem to explore or discuss.
Japanese manga, animation, music and movies have often featured reoccurring imagery of nuclear blasts destroying Tokyo, and even more so, fictional monsters doing the same. There is obviously a culture there that decades later is still impacted by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. How long will we similarly be touched by the events of 9/11?
Thankfully, most Americans were far removed from the actual carnage and destruction on the events of 9/11, but for a naive nation, it effected us all. Suddenly we all felt vulnerable, and very much connected to the victims of that day.
When real life explosions hit New York, like the steam pipe explosion yesterday, I’m sure many people’s minds immediately turn to terrorism and fear. In that regard I’m grateful that we can safely deal with the subject matter in a simpler tone. Much like the contrived happy ending in War of the Worlds, I’m sure the monster in Cloverfield will somehow be defeated, and there will be survivors who offer a sense of hope.
And in immersing ourselves in such fiction, the real monsters of the world seem a little less scary.
11 Responses
Comic Con doesn’t start until July 26th, by the way.
Oops. I thought it was Thursday as in today, not Thursday as in next week. I’m all turned around. I edited the post to reflect the proper date.
Very nice entry, T.J. As a native New Yorker, allow me to add my perspective. My father, and one of my best friends were running from the dust cloud on 9/11. Thankfully, not only were they ok, but they somehow managed to get ahead of the blitzkreig that NYC put on the phone systems, and let people know that they were fine.
Now, I don’t live in the city, I’m in the suburbs. Still, it was the defining moment of my generation, and I think about it often. I knew that the 80’s and 90’s were quite simply a little too callm, and that something was brewing. I didn’t know if it would be the radical Muslims, over Israel and other things, the Chinese over Taiwan, or the drug cartels really seeing how much they could get away with. Obviously, we have our answer now. What I’m trying to say is that it’s an area that I’ve paid even closer attention to because years before it happened (and probably because of the first botched attempt on the towers in 93), I saw it coming for years.
Along with writing and video games, one of my great loves is Table Top RPGs. The genre of “interactive fiction” that Dungeons and Dragons originated. My favorite game by far (for more reasons I can mention here) is Werewolf:The Apocalypse, by White Wolf Game Studios. The stoyrline is basically that Werewolves exist, not to hunt and kill humans, but have been guardians of the planet since before mankind tamed fire. They still perform their role, but both the self-destructive nature of man, and evil spirits give them much more than they can handle.
Animism is a huge theme in W:tA. Everything that is alive has a spirit. And everything that makes an emotional impact with a person (or people) becomes alive in the spirit world. In reference to the spirit landscape of NYC, one would find an abundance of rat, cockroach spirits, and lesser pattern spirits, that reflect the huge complex systems of New York that have built up upon themselves to create order. Broadway would probably have lively, artistic based spirits, crackhouses would have spirits of madness and depravity… and Wall Street would be the throne of the All Might Dollar Spirit.
Similarly, I wanted the online fan base to help me cook up a fitting tribute to the local and national effects of 9/11. I wanted to examine, and pay tribute to the heroic men and women of 9/11 somehow. I wanted to introduce a game mechanism to reflect the accumulation of sorrow and fear that gripped the nation for the following months. For example, I consider it a testament to how profoundly horrific and unforgettable the holocaust was that Werewolves (according to the official storyline) cannot dwell the spirit world at Auschwitz or Dachau, for fear of certain death at the hands of the powerful spirits who still haunt those camps to this day. Similar importance was given to things like The Exxon Valdez Tragedy, the rise and fall of Soviet Russia, the Indian Removal Acts, and the Manhattan Project. So it wasn’t just about exploiting a situation, it was about educating people too. Anyway, my ideas weren’t greeted warmly. Although it was probably close to a year afterwards, it was just too soon for the people of that message board.
Conversely, I refuse to ever see “United 93″, and probably “World Trade Center” as well. Even if they do a great job with those films (I sense that they, in fact, did not on the latter film), it will probably always be too soon for me. I can’t explain it, it just rubs me the wrong way. Again, I’m in the minority. Most New Yorkers are fine with those films. They are considered works that honor the event, not exploit it.
The point is that, while everyone measures these things differently, when it comes to the “entertainment value” of revisiting themes from September 11th, New York is mostly cool with it, and has been for years (as long as it’s done with respect). In regards to how long we, as a society, will be fascinated with that sort of devastation in our films and stories…. probably for another few generations, easy. We, like Japan, are still quite fascinated with many of the events of World War II. The world changed quickly, and irrevocably. It was an extreme time. The bar was raised as far as drama and tragedy because something happened in real life that a year earlier seemed kinda far fetched even for a movie. We, like Japan, may be forever changed by it. So I would expect plenty of movies over the next decade where buildings fall, and dust clouds coat a city like a snowfall. And for the most part, I wouldn’t expect too much outcry, unless there is something else about the story that takes a cheap shot at 9/11.
So yeah, still excited about Cloverfield. :)
I’m very familiar with the WoD games. I have almost all of the books, and for years I was a Storyteller in the Camarilla, the huge global official chronicle. I imagine an event like 9/11 would have huge repercussions in many WoD games including Werewolf, Wraith, Changeling and Mage. The individual deaths and destruction should not be trivialized, yet they were part of a larger wound that affected the entire nation. Our beliefs, and perspective on reality greatly shifted. In games/settings that rely so much on belief paradigms and spirits, these would major events.
In real life, my best friend was in Brookhaven working on a super-collider. Another one of my friends joked that since Steve was going to smash subatomic particles together that he’d end up blowing up New York. That was September 9th. He was actually in Manhattan the morning of September 11th, as phones were down, we couldn’t get a hold of him that day.
Luckily Steve was alright, but I will never forget that day. I saw the early video footage of children dancing in the streets of Palestine celebrating the deaths of Americans and singing that it proved God loved them. I heard conflicting reports of whether or not the Pentagon was bombed, and who might be responsible.
It was terrible chaos and a frightful day. Religious groups were claiming this would be the last stepping stone, that the US might cease to support Israel, and in doing so, the Middle East would unite against Israel bringing about “End Times”. There were anthrax scares, and no one knew if the attacks would continue. I’m not sure this country will be the same for a long time to come.
I don’t think I could watch United 93 because I know how it ends, and I’m sure watching that movie will be like being punched in the gut. It is just too real for me to deal with. It is actually safer and more enjoyable to pretend that such destruction and terror only exists in the works of fiction, and that the monsters of the world are so easy to deal with.
Wow. Freakily small world, man - not just in having love for White Wolf, but I live ten minutes from Brookhaven, and I have a friend who works there too. You’re not the guy who runs the 1-18-08 livejournal, are ya? I think he’s from around these parts too. Weird.
Nope. My buddy Steve worked on the STARS project at the Brookhaven National Labs. That was basically his graduate program. He didn’t take classes, he worked there for his university, and developed a programming language to interface with robots to work inside the super-colider, and the study the physics of what was happening.
They were trying to create the Big Bang on a small scale, which funny because he worked for a Jesuit University.
Hehe. I remember reading about that. That was where they got the temperature in a small area to exceed that of the core of the sun, or something? It’s fun to compare the satellite image of that place to the design of the super-collider structure. It’s like “Oh, that must be it”. =)
That would be the project. It is a small word. 6 billion of us, and we all seem connected in weird ways. It is almost like a JJ Abrams show, “Six Degrees.”
I digress.
Gents: I can feel the love all the way down here in Virginia!
Sounds good.
very good info indeed.