Reconstruction 11.2 (2011)
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Enduring Impact: The Crisis Fetish in Post-September 11 American Television / Christine Muller, American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
Abstract: Commonly, those who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event – whether that event involves a near-fatal car accident or the live broadcast of the September 11, 2001 hijackings – have responded, “The world is different now. It’s like a whole new place, and things will never be the same.” These entirely disparate events provoke a similar reaction because of the nature of trauma itself. As psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and others have argued, trauma shatters the most fundamental assumptions that govern functional daily living, leaving survivors and witnesses questioning what they really can know about and do in this world. This shattered assumptions model, developed in the context of psychology, seeks to articulate how trauma affects individuals and what traumatic aftereffects indicate not just about the post-traumatic state, but also about the state of “ordinary” life, the state that trauma foregrounds as a shatterable world.
Popular culture serves as a commonly-accessible site through which meanings about human life – specifically, individuals’ senses of subjectivity, agency, and responsibility – are produced, challenged, and negotiated. When an event of large scale, scope, and impact occurs such as the September 11, 2001 hijackings, popular culture provides the medium through which individuals in relationship with their communities can try to make sense of that event and determine precisely what has happened and what it might mean for the future. Post-9/11 television programs such as Lost, Heroes, Flash Forward, V, and Battlestar Galactica each feature prominently, as premises and/or ongoing plot devices, world-changing threats and calls for heroic response, evidencing a sustained fascination with the moment of impact as a crisis of knowledge and power. Unresolved tensions between the possibility of choice and the imposition of destiny permeate these disparate series, exposing fractures within cultural formations along the fault line of the concept of fate.
Keywords: Culture Studies, Media, Television and Film
Setting the Scene for Televised Crisis after September 11, 2001
<1> Scenario One: A commercial airliner en route from Sydney to Los Angeles inexplicably breaks apart somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, marooning the surviving passengers on a remote and mysterious island. Under the shadow of their plane’s wreckage on an unknown beach, these strangers from around the world must now confront fundamental tensions between individual and community, with survival itself at stake (“Pilot: Part 1”; “Pilot: Part 2”). This plight – in effect, what protagonist Jack Shephard characterizes as the choice to “live together or die alone” (Nigro 31) – forms the premise for ABC Studios’ 2004-2010 television series Lost.
<2> Scenario Two: Once enslaved cyborgs known as the Cylons engineer a successful coup over their creators and enemies, the human beings who live on twelve neighboring planets. After the Cylons’ surprise nuclear attack renders these planets unlivable, the last remnants of the human species totter across space searching for a mythical refuge (“Episode #1.1”; “Episode #1.2”). This predicament, conjured by the tagline, “The world is over. The fight has just begun” (“Battlestar Galactica, 2004”), drives the plot for British Sky Broadcasting’s 2005-2009 science fiction serial Battlestar Galactica.
<3> Scenario Three: On an otherwise ordinary day, everyone on Earth passes out for 137 seconds. While unconscious, each person glimpses an excerpt of his or her life in the future, specifically beginning at 10 p.m. on April 29, 2010 (although some do not glimpse anything at all, suggesting they will not live to see that day). When they regain consciousness, they return to a world marred by incredible destruction since the simultaneous global blackout disrupted all human-operated systems, most noticeably air and ground transportation. Civilians and law enforcement investigators alike fixate not only on the past cataclysm that has changed everything, but also on the certain future date that has become both a memory and an anticipation of grave consequence (“No More Good Days”). “No More Good Days,” the title of the premiere for HBO Entertainment’s short-lived 2009-2010 fantasy FlashForward, draws on a little girl’s ominous description of her future vision to endow with doom the deferral between D-Day’s inception and its fulfillment. Like the characters in Lost and Battlestar Galactica, FlashForward’s survivors find themselves materially and existentially adrift in the thrall of extreme circumstances. Why the fascination with life- and world-altering calamity on primetime American television in the first decade of the twenty-first century?
<4> Commonly, those who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event – whether that event involves a near-fatal car accident or the September 11, 2001 hijackings – have responded, “The world is different now. It’s like a whole new place, and things will never be the same.” These entirely disparate events provoke a similar reaction because of the nature of trauma itself. As psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and others have argued, trauma shatters the most fundamental assumptions that govern functional daily living, leaving survivors and witnesses questioning what they really can know about and do in this world. This shattered assumptions model, developed in the context of psychology, seeks to articulate how trauma affects individuals and what traumatic aftereffects indicate not just about the post-traumatic state, but also about the state of “ordinary” life, the state that trauma foregrounds as a shatterable world.
<5> Popular culture serves as a commonly-accessible site through which meanings about human life are produced, challenged, and negotiated. When an event of large scale, scope, and impact occurs such as the September 11 hijackings, popular culture provides the medium through which individuals in relationship with their communities can try to make sense of that event and determine precisely what has happened and what it might mean for the future (Erickson 197-202; Schopp and Hill 13-16). Here, I am examining why and how post-September 11 television programs such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward each feature prominently, as premises and/or ongoing plot devices, world-changing threats and callsfor heroic response. First, I review the features of trauma that occasion the impulse toward compulsive, or fetishized, revisiting of an originary event, while pointing to the aspects of narrativization – specifically, televisual narrative – that both reflect and attempt to resolve through reiteration these post-trauma preoccupations. Then, I focus on particular components of September 11, such as unforeseen and unavoidable calamity for unwitting victims, that concentrate post-September 11 concerns on the ability of individuals to fully understand and direct their own life trajectories. Ultimately, I consider how these concerns crystallize within these television series into a fixation with unsettled questions about personal agency in the wake of extreme events. In this way, I explore how these texts evidence a sustained fascination with the moment of impact as a crisis of knowledge and power. In effect, I examine how unresolved tensions between the possibility of choice and the imposition of destiny permeate these disparate series, exposing fractures within cultural formations – or cultural trauma – along the fault line of the concept of fate.
Trauma, Culture, and Fetishized Crisis
<6> As a psychiatric diagnosis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) recognizes human beings as socially and culturally contextualized by acknowledging that historical events and interpersonal exchanges matter to the onset of and recovery from traumatization (deVries 398-400). Janoff-Bulman characterizes trauma as overpowering fundamental, taken-for-granted presumptions about life and selfhood formed during childhood development that frame how we all later understand the world and our place in it (4-25). She argues that this shattering of assumptions ultimately undermines individuals’ trust in their surroundings and in their ability to act productively and responsibly, without incurring their own or someone else’s harm (49-90). Although she develops her theoretical framework within psychology’s disciplinary parameters, this field’s research (28-45), as well as that of the philosophers of science on whose work she also partly draws (26-28), depict knowledge construction as a social process (26-45), making possible extrapolation to a cultural studies approach that addresses how cultural constructs enable and contour the meaning formations that become elemental and common not only to individuals, but also to whole communities. After a traumatic occurrence, deVries argues, “Cultural customs and rituals help individuals control their emotions, order their behavior, link the sufferers more intimately to the social group, and serve as symbols of continuity.” On the other hand, though, “Such processes of restitution…are disrupted when cultures as a whole are traumatized” (405). In this sense, the notion of cultural trauma comes to signify the violation of deeply- and dearly-held shared conceptions of what we know and what we can do. Accordingly, cultural trauma and its aftermath concern survivors and witnesses not in isolation, but in relationship to their communities.
<7> Commonly, traumatization subjects a survivor to the “tyranny of the past,” or a “fixation on trauma” (van der Kolk and McFarlane 4) characterized by compulsive preoccupation with an experience that has not been accepted and integrated into a person’s understanding of self and life trajectory (5-11). Interestingly, although the term “fetish” has also been associated with psychology, with its roots in Freudian theories about psychosexual neuroses, an anthropological approach more closely reflects how this post-traumatic compulsion might manifest under communal conditions. William Pietz outlines how the fetish, across its interdisciplinary applications, relates specifically to the “problematic of the social value of material objects” (7). First, he notes the “irreducible materiality” of the fetish object, which signals that object as the end concern of attention, rather than as a reference to something beyond itself (7). Second, he describes the fetish object’s role as the integration site of heterogeneous impulses, beliefs, and practices; as a singular node for these disparate elements’ amalgamation, the fetish object also occasions perpetual revisitations to the original integrating moment (7-8). Third, he contends that the fetish object emblematizes the social construction of value, since cross-cultural estimations starkly differ about a given object’s worth and purpose (9). Fourth, Pietz points to the fetish as a locus external to the body that nevertheless has power over the body (10). In effect, a fetish emerges when “a crisis brings together and fixes into a singularly resonant unified intensity an unrepeatable event (permanent in memory), a particular object or arrangement of objects, and a localized space” (12). In this way, Pietz asserts that for the embodied subject, the fetish pins down in time and space and indicates as compelling complex processes of identification and resistance (14). Drawing on Pietz, I assert that a shared trauma can precipitate such a commanding fixation, with its showcasing of helplessness in the face of harm crystallizing in witnesses’ consciousness as an ongoing struggle with the parameters of potential victimization and chance survival. I argue that television shows centralizing crisis in their serialized iterations operate as fetish objects for the originating crisis of September 11, 2001.
<8> Before saying more about September 11, I want to add that narratives, televised or otherwise, have long featured prominently in post-traumatic responses. For traumatized individuals, treatment typically focuses on transforming obsessive memories into more constructive forms of meaning, forms that place the event into a discrete moment within personal history and into a productive role for future personal development (van der Kolk and McFarlane 19). In this sense, then, narrative plays an integral role in recovery from trauma. Stories have produced the culturally-intelligible selves and worlds (Carr) that traumatic events disrupt and reveal as contingent and vulnerable (Herman; Janoff-Bulman). Likewise, stories provide a communally-accessible site for making sense of post-trauma knowledge and experience by serving as “technologies of memory,” or interactive mechanisms enabling individuals to participate in the public narrativization of traumatic events (Sturken 9). Through this narrativization, meanings emerge that can reinforce, question, or unevenly engage the threatened dominant narrative, complexly knitting together – although, at times, also dividing – individuals and communities. In the case of September 11, the initial crisis’ component conditions – vulnerability, exposed mortality, and heroism-at-a-price – seem to dominate television shows such as Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward, suggesting that these narratives might be enacting or fetishizing disaster in ways that complicate their contribution toward therapeutic recuperation and instead simply instantiate the culturally traumatic aftermath of September 11
Choice, Fate, and September 11, 2001
<9> On the morning of September 11, 2001, news coverage initiated immediately after a passenger plane first hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower afforded national, and even international, viewers a live view of the moment when a second airliner crashed into the South Tower and a day of relentless horrors accelerated. By the end of the day, all seven buildings comprising the World Trade Center complex, including most prominently the 110-story Twin Towers, had collapsed; a section of the Pentagon targeted by another hijacked commercial jet had crumbled; and yet another airplane had smashed into the ground in rural Pennsylvania (“September 11: Chronology of Terror”). Nearly 3,000 people died that day (National Commission 311), many of them visibly as they jumped from where they were trapped at the World Trade Center’s highest floors (Junod). Hundreds of first responders from the New York City Fire and Police Departments, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and other agencies who were laboring to evacuate civilians from the towers were killed when the buildings suddenly fell (National Commission 311). Since then, even more of these celebrated “heroes” have died of health complications stemming from the noxious environmental conditions pervading the rescue and recovery effort (“9/11 Health: Rescue and Recovery Workers”).
<10> This rapid, devastating, and irreversible unraveling of what began as an ordinary, in fact beautiful, Tuesday morning poses daunting problems of meaning not only for survivors, but also for those who witnessed events from the distance of the news media. After all, this uncontained progression of unexpected destruction raises questions about how to live with the possibility of a final harm that we cannot foresee or control. While such a possibility always persists in daily life – after all, who can foresee or control the more commonplace misfortune of a fatal car accident? – the September 11 attacks singularly exposed millions of people to the same threat and its consequences at the same time, creating a shared touchstone for what ultimate helplessness is all about. Indeed, a recent health study reports a twelve percent jump in miscarriages across the United States in the month of September 2001, substantiating the notion that what happened in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC produced considerable stress even in witnesses from afar (Perone). At the same time, counterterrorism researchers and policy advisers have described the kind of terrorism introduced on September 11 as a menace endemic to our new reality (Jenkins; Treverton). A San Antonio, TX news report in 2006 evokes this lasting pall, noting that even five years later, many in that community had unresolved feelings about September 11, complicated in the time that had passed by political, military, and other responses (Stoeltje). In a sense, then, September 11 has incited a cultural struggle not only to make sense of the original crisis, but also to determine when that crisis ends, if at all.
<11> Sociologist Anthony Giddens has argued that modernity generally, as a historical period distinguished by rapid, comprehensive change (Consequences 6), features a daily “sense many of us have of being caught up in a universe of events we do not fully understand, and which seems in large part outside of our control” (2-3), a sense that countermands modernity’s investment in rational control over life trajectories that have not been predetermined (Modernity 75-80). This contradictory impulse is emblematic of an era imbued with uneasy balances between “security versus danger and trust versus risk” (Consequences 7; sic). In this formulation, Giddens defines risk as the possible unwanted outcome of our own choices (30-31). He points specifically to the persistent hazard of “low probability high consequence risks” (133), which at the time of his writing at the end of the Cold War essentially meant nuclear war between nations, a peril now also attached to non-state actors and coded within the calamitous catchall terms “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (WMD). From this persistent hazard emerge notions of fate (133), or pervasive feelings of “angst or dread” about an inescapably unsafe future (100; sic). Ultimately, Giddens contends, crisis or periodic upheaval is familiar to modernity, as is the existential anguish that results from the relentless shadow of a likely remote but nevertheless catastrophic unforeseeable and unavoidable future (Modernity 184-185). In this sense, “death is unintelligible exactly because it is the point zero at which control lapses,” and therefore poses the kind of “fateful moment” that renders modern subjects who ordinarily understand themselves as autonomous agents most susceptible to finding recourse in fate as an explanation or interpretation for the inevitable event (203).
<12> Of course, the concept of fate is not new to modernity. The question, “Why me?” often appears as an appeal to purpose or reason when circumstances of great impact occur over which we have neither adequate control nor satisfactory knowledge of origins, causes, or meaning (Gelven 5-8; see also Solomon 436). When fate or destiny is proposed as an answer to this question, such an answer acknowledges human finitude, both in the short-term sense of a lack of omniscience and omnipotence, and in the long-term sense of ultimate mortality (Gelven 27; 184-193). Theological frameworks within more traditional cultural structures could offer divine intention or even divinely-sanctioned human free will as a more organized alternative to the apparent whims of fate (18-19). However, the modern age that Giddens assesses has developed a view of human action and agency independent of any transcendent providential force. What remains discomforting when at the mercy of the unknowable and uncontrollable, then, is not only the undesired experience of misfortune and suffering, but the uncertainty about why – not just why me, but also why me; what significance, if any, does my misfortune and suffering provide (Solomon 438-441)? In the 1990s, destiny-oriented apocalyptic and millennial movements intervened in a post-Cold War period of swift social transition to offer coherent, ordered, and compelling worldviews (Stewart and Harding 289-290). In the wake of the September 11 hijackings, the media dwelled both on fate’s caprice through stories of happenstance escape and survival (Frank 646-647; see also DiMarco, Fink and Mathias, and Murphy) and on heroic rescue’s price through stories of endless funerals and memorial services for the deceased and presumed deceased firefighters and police officers, along with ongoing reporting of the Ground Zero recovery effort. In effect, after September 11, preoccupations with fate resurfaced, but often in tandem with questions of choice, in a seeming negotiation of the limits of human power given the potential for utter helplessness.
Lost: “Live Together, Die Alone”
<13> Lost premiered on ABC in the United States on September 22, 2004 (“Lost”).The two-part pilot begins with an extreme close-up shot of the opening eye of a man in a business suit, who recovers consciousness while lying on the ground in a wooded area. After he gathers himself enough to get up and stumble onto a beach clearing, he (and viewers) starts to hear chaotic sounds, which intensify as the camera pans to pursue his perspective and reveal a commercial airliner’s wreckage. After overcoming the momentary shock of what he is seeing, the unidentified man rushes into the melee of panicked survivors, debris, and the bodies of the injured and the dead to help. He performs, essentially, heroically: as the burning and unstable airplane remnants continue to pose a danger, he responds to those most urgently needing aid, from a man trapped under a piece of the plane to an alarmed pregnant woman, even taking over a seemingly lifeless woman’s resuscitation when a man identifying himself as a trained lifeguard fails to administer proper mouth-to-mouth technique (“Pilot: Part 1”).
<14> Viewers soon learn that he is Jack Shephard, an expert spinal surgeon. His characterization, as well as other survivors’ character development, becomes a centerpiece of the show’s exploration of how an island with mysterious properties and inhabitants affects and transforms a collection of stranded individuals with troubled pasts and uncertain futures. Yet this initial scene in disaster’s immediate aftermath has already showcased these transformations’ fundamental components, and almost all we need to know to frame what will happen on this island has already been told. In a September a mere three years after a real-world plane-centered catastrophe (Nilges 150), Lost dramatizes the complexities of individuals’ and communities’ post-crisis responses given the highest stakes imaginable: navigating the tenuous divide between life and death (Nigro 31). In the pilot episodes, viewers see exigent circumstances; calls for help; individuals too confused, scared, self-interested, or inexperienced to act effectively; individuals willing and able to act readily, effectively and selflessly; characters who do not speak English amidst otherwise entirely English-speaking travelers; characters with incommensurable backgrounds such as a con artist from the American South or a former interrogator for the Iraqi National Guard who harbor deep suspicions toward one another; and the arbitrary, unexplained and inexplicable distinctions between the living and the dead (“Pilot: Part 1”; “Pilot:Part 2”). Yet once these particular emergencies subside, these disparate passengers connected only by the coincidence of having boarded the same doomed international flight still must face a basic, commanding question that will loom over the rest of the series: what do we do now? Essentially, viewers encounter versions of vulnerability, exposed mortality, and complicated heroism that echo contemporary difficulties for real-world witnesses and survivors. This scenario, while not mirroring September 11, 2001 in any direct way, summons that day’s horrific dilemmas as well as its most enduring, pressing and unsolved concerns about risks that derive from and affect global community collisions and formations (Nigro 31-32; Nilges 151; Blauvelt).
<15> Later in Lost’s first season, as the remaining passengers begin to realize that the island itself is dangerous and that rescue is not coming soon, Jack provides an answer to that commanding question of “what next?” In a stirring speech about survival, he says,
It's been six days, and we're all still waiting. Waiting for someone to come. But what if they don't? We have to stop waiting. We need to start figuring things out… Every man for himself is not going to work…We need to figure out how we're going to survive here…Last week most of us were strangers. But we're all here now. And God knows how long we're going to be here. But if we can't live together—we're gonna die alone. (“White Rabbit”)
This vision, of strangers brought together only by chance uniting to save one another in their mutually desperate circumstances, offers an inspiring approach to the environmental hazards they all face. Indeed, throughout the series, this island-formed community develops, fractures, and perseveres as its individual members wrestle with their commitment to the “live together, die alone” credo. However, this credo, while underscoring the extremity of their situation, addresses only how survival might be possible for most of these people. Ultimately, whether individual members actually do live or die always ends up raising the more profound question of why, of what Solomon, as noted earlier, termed “significance” (438-441) – whether an individual’s endurance or demise matters materially and metaphysically. As Solomon has also argued, fatalism often relieves this burden of wondering why, since it stipulates with certainty that it simply had to happen for that person’s life to make sense (450). As the show’s central thematic thread repeatedly foregrounds, significance typically wavers on the pivot of agency, between characters such as John Locke who view the way forward as destiny beckoning and those such as Jack who tends to see only hard choices with no guarantees. In effect, Lost continually interrogates without finally determining the extent to which human beings can freely choose the direction, outcome and meaning of their own actions. In this way, the series focalizes ambivalence about fate in its dramatization of crisis-provoked practical and existential quandaries.
<16> Tensions between fate and choice permeate all of the characters’ preoccupations with how their past failures have shaped or even prefigured their future prospects. Indeed, the final season reveals that numinous island guardian Jacob has indirectly and anonymously influenced the main characters’ lives since their childhoods to draw them to his island (“Lighthouse”). Such intervention, however oblique, indicates that the very fact that these people came together at all depends upon a complex interplay of their conscious intentions with the necessities imposed by forces beyond themselves. Specifically, though, I concentrate on Jack and Locke, whose rivalry is rooted in an explicit dispute about destiny that undergirds the entire narrative arc. Jack initially takes the island’s perils at face value, as unwanted challenges to be overcome or at least endured until rescue for everyone can be secured. For Locke, however, who after years of paralysis instantly and mysteriously regains use of his legs on the island, the crash survivors clearly have some transcendent purpose for being there…he just never fully comes to understand what that purpose might be. The pair’s polar positions, summed up by the second season premiere’s title, “Man of Science, Man of Faith,” constantly lead to arguments about how to handle the island’s hazards. Their separate stances create a crucial turning point at the beginning of Season Four, when Jack convinces some of the survivors to make their way to a freighter that could rescue them, and Lock convinces other survivors that they should stay on the island (“The Beginning of the End”). This divergence directs the remainder of the show’s plot, placing characters on paths that only the series finale entirely clarifies. By that time, John Locke has long been confirmed dead, his last thoughts in befuddlement as he is murdered without having fulfilled what he thought was his destiny: to save the island (“LA X”). But interestingly, in the final episode, Jack dies having willfully sacrificed himself for that very same goal, a goal he once derided as reckless fantasy: fulfilling a destiny of saving the island (“The End”). Such a denouement threads a careful course between choice and fate, suggesting that rather than being opposed, one commitment to some extent invokes the other. In this way, by instantiating as unsettled the boundaries of vulnerability and heroism under mortal conditions, the six-season serial proffers a fetish for a post-September 11 era in which such concerns remain both vital and in doubt.
Battlestar Galactica: “The world is over. The fight has just begun.”
<17> Battlestar Galactica debuted in the United States as a mini-series on December 8, 2003 on the Sci Fi Channel (“Battlestar Galactica, 2003”), since rebranded as SyFy. The mini-series re-envisioned a science fiction show that had lasted a single network television season, from 1978-1979 (“Battlestar Galactica, 1978”). According to this newer version of the story, human beings had long ago created Cylons as sturdy robots that could perform military and labor functions that people wanted to avoid. However, the Cylons rebel, leading eventually to a truce that enforces separation between Cylons and people. During this time apart, Cylons evolve into a more advanced, life-based form – cyborgs with bodies and behaviors effectively indistinguishable from those of human beings – that could reproduce with humans and feature a shared, renewable or downloadable consciousness across similar networked models that essentially nullifies death. In this more durable, formidable condition, they determine to wipe out humanity (“Episode #1.1”; “Episode #1.2”).
<18> Battlestar Galactica premiered as a regularly-scheduled Sci Fi series on January 14, 2005 (“Battlestar Galactica, 2004”). Since that time, popular press and academic criticism has consistently regarded the series as a thought-provoking exposition of the social and political concerns dominating American life in the wake of September 11 (Marshall and Potter 1). Arguing that “Science fiction is meant to be provocative; it is meant to make us question aspects of the world in which we live” (9), Marshall and Potter note that Battlestar Galactica raised such questions by showcasing exigencies in which main characters must negotiate the parameters of fraught contemporary issues, including terrorism, torture, and religious fervor (5-8). In effect, Ott contends that “science fiction is inevitably about the culture that produced it” (16) and this show “furnishes viewers with a vocabulary and thus with a set of symbolic resources for managing their social anxieties” (14). Similar to what happened on September 11, the series begins with a pivotal, destructive moment in the history of a people (17) whose aftermath response is determined not only by this fundamentally changing event, but also their continued engagement with its perpetrators. With this premise in mind, Battlestar Galactica’s plot unfolds with explicit attention to contemporary concerns as well as a fixation on fate and choice manifested through debates about the extent and limits of any individual’s or community’s control over their own circumstances and future (Casey 237-250).
<19> Over the two nights of the mini-series, viewers watched as the Cylons almost entirely obliterate humanity by nuking the “Twelve Colonies,” or the twelve planets that human beings inhabit. Characters regard this devastation as unimaginable, unforeseen and unprecedented for a civilization complacently prosperous from a long period of peace, as evoked by frequent references to “the end of the world” as well as – for contemporary viewers – the eerily reminiscent scene of Gaius Baltar watching chaotic newscasts of the attacks on his vertical, oblong, twin-paneled television screens. Yet as Commander William Adama presages in the calm of a ceremony before the onslaught, we – certainly the collective of the Twelve Colonies but also perhaps viewers as well – can never truly avoid the consequences of our actions. Indeed, with personal memories haunting him and the other protagonists, and aesthetic traces of the original series haunting the new show’s sets, costumes, and props, the past seems inseparable from and formative for the present, however extraordinary the present might seem (“Episode #1.1”; “Episode #1.2”).
<20> As the show progresses, viewers learn that the Cylons had developed a deep faith in a single God that not only countered human beliefs in multiple gods, but also justified for them their decision to exterminate what they regarded as the faithless betrayers of this one, true God. Yet, on the other side of the coin, among the few human survivors who now wander through space seeking shelter, religious conviction proves an equally compelling concern. On the side of faith resides Laura Roslin, a relatively low-level cabinet appointee who becomes the Twelve Colonies’ president after the Cylon attack kills all the other candidates above her and who has just prior to that attack been diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. Her leadership and very life status seem to depend on sheer chance, unless of course there is a higher purpose guiding these developments, and she is open to trusting that a mythical planet called Earth, long revered within their belief system but never historically validated as a real place, is their destined home. At the same time, hardened personalities like the fleet’s new military commander-by-default Admiral Adama long doubt not only that Earth exists, but also that cultivating hope in its promise can be productive. These elements – cataclysmic destruction, summed up by the tagline, “The world is over. The fight has just begun” (“Battlestar Galactica, 2004”); conflict between the once exploited and their former exploiters; and high-consequence investments in divergent worldview certainties, from religious to secular absolutism – provide parallel, though not necessarily mirror, reflections of real-world, post-September 11 anxieties about unprecedented destruction, its causes, and its implications for the individual wondering what influence he or she, or any other guiding force, has over these life- and world-altering events (see also Edwards; Gilmore; Ryan “Even in the Darkest Times”; Weiss).
<21> Like Lost in many ways (see Gilmore; Havrilesky; Weiss), Battlestar Galactica persistently echoes the same preoccupations with the notion of fate. All characters in Battlestar Galactica, like those in Lost, wrestle to some extent with existential uncertainties about how they ended up where they are and where they will be going. However, as noted earlier, disagreement over the relevance and force of destiny fuels an ongoing dispute, reminiscent of that between Locke and Jack, between President Roslin and Admiral Adama about how to safely direct the fleet preserving the last of the human race. For Roslin, like Lost’s Locke, some transcendent power supports and guides these endangered individuals toward an ideal fulfillment, a redemption that will render meaningful the suffering they have endured. For Adama, like Lost’s Jack, responsible guardianship of the endangered individuals in his care means not presuming there can or will be any deus ex machina to solve or compensate for the threats they have faced. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” a dark episode in the final season of a dark series, showcases the despair pervading the dwindling survivors when choice guided by destiny seems to lead them to a literal dead end, a barren, uninhabitable Earth marred by an ancient nuclear war. In this instance, Officer Anastasia Dualla stages her resistance to such dependence on cruel fortune by enjoying a last, joyful meal with her love Lee Adama and later savoring the memory of that joy as she takes her own life. Her choice of suicide from the heroic posture of self-determination poses a problematic defiance of fate. Yet, like Lost, Battlestar Galactica concludes with an ultimate recognition and acceptance of fate as both initiating and ending the characters’ journeys, both physical and metaphysical – with the sense of eternal recurrence, or the plot of destruction as endlessly reiterated, consciously articulated by the characters of Battlestar Galactica, whose scriptures have stipulated that “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again” (“Sometimes a Great Notion;” “Daybreak: Part 1;” “Daybreak: Part 2”). And so, Battlestar Galactica’s serial re-presentations of this fundamental tension between fate and choice under life-, even species-threatening, circumstances afford a fetishized crystallization and repetition of September 11’s component horrors of vulnerability, dubious heroism, and looming mortality.
FlashForward: “No More Good Days”
<22> FlashForward’s single season premiered on ABC in the United States on September 24, 2009 with an episode titled, “No More Good Days” (“FlashForward”). Like Lost, the series begins with a close-up shot drawing viewer attention to a man’s face. He comes to consciousness on a pavement littered with broken glass in a silence soon broken by the troubling distant sounds of car alarms and screaming. This man, the show’s protagonist, FBI agent Mark Benford, then scrambles to emerge from an overturned vehicle to gain an unobstructed view of total, baffling urban chaos. He eventually learns that while he was pursuing a terrorist suspect with his partner Demetri Noh on the L.A. roadways, he, and everyone else in the world, inexplicably blacked out for two minutes and seventeen seconds. During that time, each person glimpsed a two-minute, seventeen-second clip of their life on the same day, April 29, 2010. Each person, that is, except for a few like Noh who saw nothing at all, and are later understood to have died before that future date (“No More Good Days”).
<23> After regaining consciousness on this otherwise ordinary but beautiful, clear-blue-sky September morning, characters feel they have returned to a changed world. Planes crashed into skyscrapers and cars driven off bridges during humanity’s incapacity are among the most visible, immediate emergencies. But equally compelling become the blackout visions themselves, which present each character with a personal future that they either welcome or fear. For example, while misgivings plague those like Noh who are presumed to be deceased by April 29, Dr. Bryce Varley foresees a rendezvous with an as-yet unknown love interest, giving him a reason to live just as he was about to commit suicide. As a result, as the FBI begins investigating what caused the blackout and all main characters begin questioning whether what they have seen for themselves is inevitable, they all become concerned about whether or not the future can be revised. Individuals want to know whether the fortune or misfortune they have foreseen is guaranteed, and investigators want to know whether the blackout itself might recur (“No More Good Days”). For the blackout’s survivors, seeing the future has imbued the intermediate days with a sense of predestination. For those who do not like what they have seen (or have not seen), that sense of finalized fate feels like the doom of “no more good days.”
<24> Co-creator David S. Goyer explicitly roots his vision for FlashForward in his own memory of September 11, 2001. He recalls being in France and encountering an “outpouring of sympathy…I thought, obviously, it was horrendous, but it was also, for this one moment…this profoundly kind of connecting experience for a lot of the world.” In this way, by focusing the series on that “one moment…[that] brief period of time” (qtd. in Topel) that produced substantial global consequences, Goyer states directly that this show is engaged in reproducing such a scenario and the communal and existential implications it poses (see also Singh). Often compared to Lost and Battlestar Galactica as a science fiction or fantasy consideration of contemporary, real-world events through the lens of at-risk individuals and communities (Bellafante; King; Ryan “Will Time Be Kind”), FlashForward showcases the crisis-generated fixation on fate that it shares with those shows (the shows also share actors: Sonya Walger and Dominic Monaghan appeared in Lost and James Callis was Battlestar Galactica’s Baltar). However, unlike those series, FlashForward foregoes prominent rivalries based on polarized positions to highlight individuated angst, with all characters struggling similarly between the extremities of absolute choice and absolute destiny without embracing either with total surety. This pervasive ambivalence about a potentially self-fulfilling future, as well as the overall plot concern with whether other blackouts will occur to cast anew these individual existential crises, infuses the series with a sense of compulsive, or fetishized, fascination with an unresolved state of constrained choice and personal insecurity.
<25> FBI agent Al Gough’s actions present the grimmest example of this struggle. In an episode featuring the bureau’s investigation of the “Blue Hand” movement, an underground community whose clubs accommodate the extreme, flirting-with-death indulgences of those seemingly fated to die before April 29, the show centralizes the question of whether anyone can escape the flashforward-revealed future. While the apparently doomed “already ghosts” of the Blue Hands embrace fatalism with abandon, Gough becomes committed to finding “a way to change the game.” In a note to the presumably ill-fated Noh, Gough insists, “There is always a way out.” Afraid of a future in which he has accidentally killed a young mother, Gough himself turns to suicide as the only way to ensure this does not happen. After spending an evening carefully preparing and relishing his favorite homemade meal – a gesture reminiscent of Officer Dualla’s pre-suicide celebration of life – Gough shows up for work the next day only to jump off the roof of his office building. As one among many characters carrying a gun, in a series that begins with another character attempting suicide with a gun, the choice to jump seems somewhat unusual (“The Gift”). Yet this ultimate sacrifice – through an action troublingly reminiscent of the very public, disconcerting deaths of those who jumped from the World Trade Center towers on September 11 – demonstrates the complexity of negotiating choice versus fate. After all, he feared that any choices he made while alive would fatefully lead to the young mother’s death, so he decided instead to remove himself entirely from any possibility of choosing wrongly. Does his ability to circumvent a predicted future evidence free will? Or does the fact that he felt only death could prevent him from fulfilling his destiny make the case for determinism? In light of his act’s resemblance to what many people had chosen to do on September 11 to escape certain death by smoke and fire, such questions pose particularly relevant contemporary quandaries. Although the show was canceled after only one season, the finale ended with another blackout fostering more flashforwards (“Future Shock”), suggesting that the similar philosophical impasses that permeated every week of this show would never fully be resolved, perpetuating a fetish that incarnated repeatedly core September 11 quandaries of helplessness, imperfect heroism, and inescapable mortality.
Enduring Impact: The Crisis Fetish in Post-September 11 American Television
<26> Mainstream audiences and critics have often regarded science fiction, like the fantasy genre that might more accurately apply to Lost and FlashForward (although the boundaries can be fuzzy), with skepticism, if not outright scorn, for depicting unrealistic settings and situations. Yet as Nancy Franklin argues in a 2006 issue of The New Yorker, “If you switch to the term ‘speculative fiction’…the genre seems more interesting.” Such an imaginative, alternate-reality framework affords greater leeway for fiction to draw mainstream audiences into pursuing questions like “‘What if?’ and ‘What then?’ and ‘Who are we?’” to their most expansive and possibly controversial limits (Franklin; see also Havrilesky; Ryan “Even in the Darkest Times”). In its 2006 debut season, the series Heroes sported the tagline, “Save the cheerleader. Save the world” (“Heroes”; see also Stabile 88; Stanley; Owen) while dwelling on the kinds of questions regarding fate and choice (Shores 66-78; Johnson 110-122) that have preoccupied the three series considered here. And in 2009, V’s premiere explicitly invoked a preoccupation with the fallout of a certain day after which the world will never be the same by prefiguring the fictional appearance of alien spaceships over major international cities with references to the real-world crises of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and September 11, 2001 (“Pilot”). These shows are only a few among many interested in the “What if?” and “What then?” and “Who are we?” questions under the highest-stake circumstances that aired on television in the wake of September 11 in the first decade of the twenty-first century (see also Zurawik).
<27> Wilson has argued that televised narratives occasion a hermeneutic circle of meaning formation, through which viewers move back-and-forth between the parts, or the individual episodes, and the series as a whole, and from their personal life-world horizons to the show’s horizon of meaning, to actively construct and revise their own interpretations in negotiation with the series’ dominant or preferred readings (51). For this reason, although a show must involve a sufficiently conventional set of plots, themes, etc. to be intelligible to a broad audience, the dynamic composition of such a broad audience ensures that meaning will never fully be contained or restricted to a specific, stable reception (21). He adds that production techniques that generate in viewers senses of alienation, distance, and/or defamiliarization from what they might otherwise consider to be recognizable and commonplace promotes critique of the televised exigencies’ real-world corollaries (182-191). Moreover, a series that features contentious, unresolved moral dilemmas creates space for viewers to formulate their own particular judgments and responses (97).
<28> Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and FlashForward emblematize a fascination within popular culture with the nature and fallout of extreme crisis. They also emblematize popular culture’s ability to occasion for mainstream viewers engagement with the most crucial and disturbing dilemmas that extreme crisis raises. Their reiterations of the core horrors dominating September 11 – utter helplessness, unavoidable mortality, and heroism-at-a-price – effectively fetishized catastrophe by repeatedly foregrounding without resolving the tensions between choice and fate, between incidental survival and inescapable death, without purporting to offer any clear therapeutic value. Indeed, each show ultimately concludes with an only ambivalently happy or decisive ending: Lost ends with its characters reunited, but in a post-death limbo perhaps preceding reincarnation into another shared life (“The End”); Battlestar Galactica finishes with its characters reaching their mythological destination, Earth, but only after a few more deaths and with survivors facing the hazards of survival under prehistoric conditions (“Daybreak: Part 1;” “Daybreak: Part 2”); and FlashForward ends with the apparent death of protagonist Mark Benford while everyone else on the planet succumbs to another round of angst-producing flashforwards (“Future Shock”). Such stories suggest it might sometimes be all right that things are not all right or not put fully to rights. Instead, as I have argued here, these three television series airing in the mid- to late-2000s have served as extended engagements with the particular dilemmas of existential insecurity and doom showcased by the public deaths of September 11. In this sense, they have signaled emergent structures of feeling that imbue the first decade after September 11 with a pervasive unsettlement I characterize as cultural trauma.
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