Wired Mesh

Mesh,

Haven't seen the film, liked the review, but am troubled a bit by your post. Please, please, please take the following questions as honest and not entirely accusatory, and please recognize I'm not trying to give you some BS politicized stock line:

Why is it that a work of art depicting the death of innocent Americans just like us (one element of the closeness you describe) such a profound cry of despair but the present reality of death in a place like Darfur, death which is and will be happening today, yesterday, and tomorrow, fails to do the same thing? And why do we need to be reminded "how murderous our enemies are" (and they _are_ murderous)? To strengthen our will as participants in "geopolitical ineptitude and erratum"?

Death, in all its inevitablity, does not make me despair. The privileging of certain deaths over the deaths of other just as innocent people does.

I'm not f*cking Ward Churchill here, saying that the deaths on United 93 were somehow justifiable. Categorically and absolutely not.

Allow me to do something completely unfair and compare the language of this review with your review of _Hotel Rwanda_ of a year ago. Granted, two different films neither of which I've seen, but you remark on the importance of context in both:
"without the context of an individual’s life in which to ground our knowledge of his or her death, graveyards become “nothing but stones.” When at the conclusion of Hotel Rwanda we are told how many lives were saved by Rusesabagina, we are left with nothing but numbers."

I don't think this is a problem of film-making; I think it's a human problem. Why does the Tutsi 937,000 become a number for you and me when the 3000-some who died on September 11th are far more than that?

I can't even articulate this properly, and I'm sorry. But I hope you understand what I'm saying.

Well, I'm not sure how you came to read my comments as a dismissal of the deaths in Darfur: I wasn't writing about those deaths, I was writing about these deaths, since that's what the movie featured. It may well be that we need more movies about international atrocity, to get our gazes off our navels, but that seems to me an entirely different point.

Stalin famously said that one death is a tragedy while a million deaths is a statistic. Stalin said it; I didn't. And I didn't say that Hotel Rwanda leaves us with "nothing but numbers" either, because I didn't write that review. I've never even seen Hotel Rwanda. (That admission probably isn't helping my case here, but there it is.) I disagree with both those sentiments, actually, but something in the former may help explain why United 93 is so hard to watch: the movie strips away all layers of distance between the viewer and the dying, and isolates us with individual victims. This is an incredibly difficult thing to see. And when it's the only thing you see, it's nigh to unbearable.

My experience of the movie had little to do with the nationality, race or religion of the dying, except so far as I easily sympathyze with people who look like me. I have a difficult time imagining myself feeling any less wretched after a movie that focused on an African child being kidnapped by warlords, torn from his mother, watching his family being hacked to ribbons and then being forced to pick up a gun and kill more people. That would be unbearable too. (The only difference that I can envision is that I would be distanced to some degree from that story by guilt, which creates barriers of its own.)

I have argued that there might be some good in reliving our own disaster, if only to clarify what dangers we face. (This is not the same thing as justifying our initial reactions to those dangers.) The same can be said, and should be said, for experiencing other people's disasters. But I don't know that this was what I was talking about. I was mostly talking about the inescapable fact of our own mortality, and how it is not a pretty thing when you look at it too close. It may be art, it may serve a cleansing purpose, but it's cold and hard.

Anyhow, this may fail to address your chief points, and please let me know how I can talk with you and not at you. I'm certainly not offended -- though you must have realized by now that we approach certain issues from rather different perspectives -- and I value your questioning.

I apologize for not looking closely enough at the by line, but like I said it was an unfair move to begin with. I feel really stupid. Maybe we should watch it together.

Last night, when I made my comments, I was trying to get at this very simple point in a very conflicted way: that we easily sympathize with people who look like us and that becomes an unconscious site of ideological replication. There's the fact of it, which I'm not going to dispute. But the fact is it also leaves us susceptible to a failure to sympathize with the death of others who don't look like us; in other words, we dehumanize them. And this, in turn, effects the very practical and real world decisions we make, whether on the level of national policy to what organizations we support, to where we buy our food and from whom.

Let me put it in the boldest possible terms: the death of Iraqi civilians in war are not as real to us as the deaths of the victims of 9/11. And what bothers me about a film like this is that it seems to add fuel to that already blazing fire and we don't even realize it.

Here's the problem, I think; while you were talking about _these deaths_, you quickly moved to talking about "death" in general. Nothing wrong with that, per se, but I think it reveals another nuance to this issue: certain deaths are able to be universalized and certain deaths are not. Certain deaths reveal the danger we face while certain deaths become the "unfortunate cost" of eliminating that danger. Certain deaths become cautionary tales, while certain deaths fade into the background. A hurricaine with political backlash overshadows a tsunami that made the former look like a spring shower.

I'm not just griping at you, man, and I respect your writing and thinking, and, ultimately, what I'm saying doesn't directly apply to your article or your post. It would be more appropriate to say your writing sparked this thinking in my mind (and its an issue I've been gnawing on for a couple of years now.) I apologize again for kind of going off in my first comment; I'm not sure what was happening and maybe this issue is too complex for this medium. Past experiences in discussions like this have had bizarre results (evidence 1: chime in to defend pacifism and end up defending war.)