Atomic Housewives: Shutter Island and the Domestication of Nuclear Holocaust
ABSTRACT: Martin Scorsese's 2010 film Shutter Island is one of several post–September 11 cultural texts that use Cold War settings to challenge the trend in US culture to displace social and political fears by escaping to a nostalgia for an idealized postwar society. The film ostensibly replaces the protagonist's wartime trauma with a domestic tragedy while simultaneously undermining that replacement. Its attempt to bury the guilt for war crimes under worries about the collapse of the nuclear family confronts the United States' attempt to justify its actions in the War on Terror through a nostalgic imaginary of the Cold War.
9/11 Culture: America Under Construction
Acknowledgments. Introduction: 9/11 Questions (and Answers). 1. Rumors. 2. Telethon. 3. Snapshots. 4. Rising. 5. Us. 6. Tools. 7. Shout-Outs. Bibliography. Appendix 1: 9/11 in Film and on Television. Appendix 2: 9/11 Music. A Note to Teachers. Index.
Did the world really change on 9/11?
In setting myself the question 'Did the world reaily change an 9/11 7', I tie myself into two discussions. The first is an exercise in camparing and cantrasting perceptions around the pivotal date of September 11, 2007: what was the world 'reaily' like priar ta the attacks an America (as they came ta be cailed) and what is it 'reaily' like naw? The use of the ward 'reaily' here flags the operation of value judgements; any estimation of change around this event is laden with personal perspectives. The secand discussion is the one I deal with first: is there a body of opinion asserting that the events of 9/7 7were world-changing events 7 I propose to offer four examples, centred in the US media, but exported thence to western audiences, which variously assert that the events of September 11 changed the world. lelia Green, School of Communications and Multimedia, Edith Cawan University, Perth, Australia. This paper was the Presidential Address at 'Communication: Reconstructed far the 21 st Century', Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference, Jufy 2002, Gold Coast, Australia. T hese assertions of 'change' are often linked to anniversaries following the 9/11 atrocity. For example, the Newsweek online exclusive on December 12 mark, the passing of the first quarter-date anniversary (three months after 9/11). It appears to frame its claim comparatively modestly: 'Living politics: How we've changed'. However, that framing is just the starting point: According to chaos theory... everything we do here affects the rest of the world. Not just our movies or software. The way we live our lives, the values we exhibit, the gods we warship. This is the global villaqe McLuhan fore,aw. We run the Village, and have to behave as if we de,erve the power and the honor. (Fineman, 2001) Time magazine, under the banner'A different world-how deeply have our lives been changed since September 11 ?', asserts: 'September 11, Did the world really change on 9/11? 2001 was one of those seismic moments, ,; day when the planet seemed to shudder and shift on its axis... [creating] a sense of before and after cataclysm' (Usher, 2001, p. 74). Usher goes on to draw a parallel between the turmoil in the US and evidence of reconciliation in the north of Ireland, before hoping that 'one thing won't change in this volatile world: fundamental human goodness' (p. 74). Business Week, on February 11, 2002, felt ready to draw a parallel: Already that crystal-clear September morning is fast becoming an historical memory, the way some of us still remember a November day in 1963 when the gunning down of ayoung American President seemed to mark the end of one age and the beginning of another. ('A fragile world', p. 24) In the immediate aftermath of the tragedy (September 13), The Globe and Mail on line claims: 'many people [believe] the world has irreversibly changed and that they have witnessed the most shocking news event of their lives' (Mittelstaedt, 2001). In a poll, 87% said the attacks were 'the most tragic news events of their lifetimes'. On the other side of the Atlantic, a Guardian Unlimited special report (2001) included reference to a range of commentaries suggesting that the attacks constituted a 21 st-century 'Pearl Harbour' (Brown, 2001). In combination, these sources suggest little doubt that many residents of the US consider themselves to have experienced something life-changing, with 9/11 a watershed date and the terrorist attacks on the US a watershed event. Does it necessarily follow, however, that the world has changed? Is that true for Australia, for example? THE NON-US RESPONSE TO 9/11 Judging where we stand in relation to 9/11 turns me to the other segment of my discussion: 'What was the world "really" like prior to the attacks on America, and what is it "really" like now?'. Like almost everybody else, my experience and understanding of the world is 'mediated'. Addressing this part of the question, I ask myself what I expect to see in the media, and what I hope to see in the media. Further, how do I explain to myself what I do see in the media? I note here that I am not expecting academics to act as journalists, but-in a pluralistic media society-we need to be able to call journalists to account, or at least to understand Why they are handling the stories of the time in the way they do. Australian Journal of Communication. Vol 29 (2) 2002 2 As an academic, I'm fascinated with the idea of asking how we as Australians are responding, and why we're responding as we are. I'm aware, for example, that my perceptual filters are in place regarding 9/11. I've read articles about the fatherless children, seen pictures of the newborn babies gathered together for the photograph (and worried about the continuing intrusion of the world media into the lives of the victims), and been confronted in many different ways with the emotional implications of the 9/11 tragedy and loss. However, it's almost as if the media have decided that critical analysis of the events leading to and from 9/11 is not only un-American, but potentially antiAmerican. I expect, from the studies of Gulf War coverage, to see a demonisation of 'the enemy': bin Laden, the Taliban, AI-Qaeda. I know what to expect from the media, and find it. Galvin (1994), for example, comments on events a decade ago: Given the sophisticated military and mass communications technology made startlingly apparent during the Gulf War... il: is disturbing that some of the most important issues and events in that war went virtually unnoticed and that media distortions of historical reali~1 occurred which would nomnally have been considered blatant propaganda... One would have looked in vain in most of the Western media during the crisis to have found any sense that the conflict was any more complicated than a straightforward case of a belligerent bully picking on a defenceless and innocent neighbour, and thereby deserving to be thrown out violently regardless of how many lives might be lost in the process. (pp. 184-185) Despite these prior warnings that distorted news reporting is common in times of tension, there is little critical comment or self-reflection from the media about their coverage. I find myself anxious that, as academics, we continually have to reinvent the wheel-pointing out again that the media has constructed an enemy we can all attack in uncomplicated terms, while obscuring the nature of our nations' retaliation in terms of the human cost paid by the poor and dispossessed. Afghani civilians, for example, have already suffered extensively under Soviet occupation, the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban, and now face western-exacerbated famine and allied attacks with the insidious daisycutter cluster bombs. I'm as aware as the next mass communication academic of NoelleNeumann's (1974) 'Spiral of Silence' theory. It asserts that a minority opinion becomes increasingly hard to express as silence on that opinion Did the world really change on 9/11?