It's like a scene from a science-fiction movie said a man shrouded in dust still trying to understand how what he'd seen as a
"It's like a scene from a science-fiction movie," said a man shrouded in dust, still trying to understand how what he'd seen as a dazzling special effect in Independence Day had just been replicated on the streets of Manhattan. What had been a triumph of computer imagery on screen, achieved by prodigious number-crunching and debris-generating software, had been replayed with uncanny accuracy by millions of tons of concrete and steel. The very clich?of cinematic catastrophe – including that stock shot of people fleeing a pursuing cloud of flame or dust – were up there on screen. In the image of the tower's stump – a lattice of distinctive ogee arches – an echo arose of the ending of the original Planet of the Apes. Could something so familiar really lie in ruins? "If someone had written this in a movie script," said one American reporter, "you would have said: 'This will never happen.' "But you would probably have enjoyed the movie none the less. And it was at such points that you felt the queasy intersection of appetite and horror, a dreadful but undeniable overlap between the things we love to watch and things we can hardly bear to see.
Independence Day became a surprise hit not by appalling its audience but by gratifying it. It fed some deep appetite for catastrophe, an appetite that knew nothing of how heartsick real catastrophe can leave you. As we watched those images, two irreconcilable emotions roiled within us – fascination and repulsion. Suddenly, the kind of scene that unfailingly draws a whoop of pleasure from a raucous New York audience – those blossoms of flame and sudden thunderheads of dust – had been made concrete with a terrifying literalism.
The relish for damage had come home to roost.The languages of atrocity and entertainment intersect here – how can we talk of a "terrorist spectacular" unless we acknowledge that at some level there is an evil dramaturgy at work? And the dark master stroke of this assault was unconsciously conceded by every broadcaster present. The "money shots" – the pornographic climaxes of destruction – played again and again in permanent loop, offered up to us not for our clarification but because we wanted to see them again. We watched well beyond the point at which we were glutted, and still we watched. The "new angles" we wanted here were not fresh leads in an investigation but a different viewpoint on those astonishing collisions. And, as we knew they must, they slowly trickled in as videotape reached the broadcasters.
