Course Blog #4 (Derek): Response to 9/11 Performance

A Response to 9/11 Performance, drawing on various texts and personal experience

Derek DiMatteo

Immediately after the events of 11 September 2001, we felt we had to banish theatre and performance, banish comedy and satire, banish entertainment. At least temporarily, during the immediate period of shock. After a short amount of time, we could resume theatre, performance, comedy, satire, entertainment. In general, this was a time when people questioned the appropriateness of theatre and illusion. Why? For one, it was necessary to consume the images of the events that occurred in these two disasters: they were sublime (in the Burkeian sense), and therefore fascinating. How could you watch anything else? How could you tear your eyes away, even if you wanted to? There was the need to make sense of these images. There was a need to consume these images, eventually to digest and make meaning of them. The traumatic nature of the imagery froze us in place, glued us to the television, which burned the sights and sounds of the events into our eyes and into our memories. It was the ultimate example of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, everyone scattered around the country watching and reading the same things—but watching to the 10^th degree, for days on end, as the state and the media repeated and re-presented the images to us, over and over again. It was fascinating and unifying, but it was also horrifying.

The images appeared on TV in “a horrifying Baudrillardian example of the real projected as a simulacrum of an already familiar imaginary” (Carlson, 134). The simulacrum was uncanny (in the Freudian sense), which made us uncomfortable—thus the psychological (and superstitious) need to suspend theatre and illusion, lest we inadvertently conjure up more horrors. Along with this fear was also the sense of impropriety of watching or enjoying any type of entertainment (e.g. sitcoms, dramas, films, theatre) in the face of such horrific events and loss of life, which had been so quickly transformed into national loss. I witnessed the same suspension of enjoyment (really more like a self-restraint or a sympathetic self-deprivation) while living in Japan in March of 2011, as the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster froze the nation and made enjoyment improper. Therefore we felt a twinge of guilt when we went about our normal lives and consumed entertainment, far removed and relatively unaffected by the terrible events occurring within our own borders.

As regular TV programming resumed, often it was accompanied by a prologue or introduction acknowledging the events that had occurred, as if to say that the producers and networks were aware of the ambivalence within the audience: the guilty feeling that they shouldn’t be enjoying themselves in a time of national mourning, yet simultaneously desiring something to distract them from—or perhaps searching for a narrative to help them make sense of—the events and their feelings. An example of this can be seen in Jon Stewart’s commentary when The Daily Show resumed—in order for him to begin performing comedy and satire in the usual ironic vein, he needed to acknowledge publicly that he had been affected by the disaster just as much as anyone else. But there is also something more sinister underlying the need for these prefaces and prologues, these acknowledgements and qualifiers: fear of the pillory or worse.

The fear of being pilloried sometimes lies behind behavior we ascribe to guilt or propriety. But this reminds me of one of the differences between the reaction in Japan and the USA. In Japan, there is no history of McCarthyism lodged in the collective memory of, and haunting the collective unconscious of, the class of entertainers and directors as there is in the USA. Writing of the theatre during the French Revolution, Tracy Davis notes that “both dramatic enactment and spectatorial behavior were scrutinized for political conformity” (138). This was very similar to the atmosphere in the USA following the events of September 11, 2001. Thus in addition to the somber mood which precludes entertainment, as at a funeral, there was an underlying fear that anything you say or do could be held against you in the court of public and government opinion, perhaps costing your job or destroying your career. Therefore, Jon Stewart’s opening commentary (when The Daily Show returned to the air after 9/11) not only served to remind the audience that his irreverent satire is driven by sincerity and a desire to effect social change, but also served as a pre-emptive defense against conservative critics (e.g. Fox TV personalities, Rush Limbaugh, et al) who would use any perceived (or spinnable) display of dissent or unpatriotic sentiment as a way to attack and destroy liberal opponents. In his article on SplitSider.com, AJ Aronstein makes light of this perspective, calling it “cynical”, but in fact that is what happened to people who expressed dissenting opinions, including columnists, reporters, and entertainers. By the end of September, there had already been numerous casualties:

"Several newspaper editors and writers across the country have been fired for writing op/eds critical of government policy decisions made in the last few weeks; Anti-globalization demonstrations in D.C. that were scheduled for the weekend of September 29^th were canceled or scaled back; David Horowitz is criticizing students for protesting the war on terrorism and implicitly accusing them of treason; three black firefighters in Miami-Dade county were lambasted in the media for removing a flag from a fire engine to service the ladder; Clear Channel released a list of songs that their radio station program managers were advised to stop playing, including John Lennon's anti-war classic Imagine; Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show were silent and meek for weeks; The Onion waited until September 26^th before lampooning the 'war'" (DiMatteo).

Perhaps Aronstein was unaware of what was happening at the time, or perhaps he had simply forgotten during the ten years before writing his article for SplitSider. It made a big impression on me, however. The example that I will always remember is Bill Maher’s TV show Politically Incorrect and the controversy about his comments about 9/11 which he made on 9/17, his first day back on air. In response to guest Dinesh D'Souza's assertion that people who are willing to die in service to their cause, whatever else they may be, are not "cowards," Maher said: "We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly." (Huffington). The controversy over Maher's comments raged both in the national media (several ABC affiliates canceled the show almost immediately) and on college campuses, including at Tufts University where I was a graduate student in the Education Department at that time. The conservative paper on campus wrote an article condemning Maher for his comments, and declared that it was time to re-form the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities. Their call to pillory Maher and other dissenters echoed the general atmosphere in America. For the liberal paper on campus, I wrote an op/ed response to their attack on Maher and defended his right to dissenting free speech, noting that attempts to bully people into silence exposes the conservative belief that not all citizens have an equal voice in the USA and that political dissenters should be persecuted. In the end, Maher was fired when ABC canceled his show completely a few months later. The reason was clear to all.

                                                                                                                  

What place, then, for theory within conditions/circumstances like these? Is there any useful contribution offered by Performance Studies or the concept of theatricality? I would argue yes. Perhaps the most important thing that theatricality in particular has to offer is the ability to recognize that we are watching history unfold, as Carlyle does for Davis (132), and that although we may not understand it fully now, we should chronicle what we are seeing in order to later reflect on it more fully, as Taylor found herself doing (Taylor 240-1). When studying the phenomenon of 9/11 (particularly our consumption of media and our performance of patriotism and nationalism), the critical apparatus of Performance Studies brings us the ability to discuss and understand what happened (and what didn’t happen, or wasn’t allowed to happen). It gives us a way to engage with and deconstruct everything that happened. It gives us a way to create meaning. It frees us from our "mind-forg'd manacles" (Blake).

Figure 1. Visualizing the chain of theatricality, from factors to meaning; by Derek DiMatteo.

Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso. 2006.

Aronstein, AJ. "Comedy after 9/11: Sincerity and Irony." SplitSider. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://splitsider.com/2011/09/comedy-after-911-sincerity-and-irony/ .

Blake, William. Songs of Innocence and Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Burke, Edmund. "On the Sublime." The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Ed. Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin. 2003.

Carlson, Marvin. "A Forum on Theatre and Tragedy: A Response to September 11, 2001." Theatre Journal, 54.1, Mar. 2002, pp. 95-138.

Davis, Tracy C. "Theatricality and Civil Society." Theatricality. Eds. Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait. Cambridge: CUP. 2003.

DiMatteo, Derek. "In Defense of Dissenting Opinions and Against Homeland Terrorism." Tufts Observer. 3 November 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. David Mclintock. London: Penguin Books. 2003.

Huffington, Arianna. "Land of the not-so-free-anymore." Working for Change. 2001.09.26. First accessed on 2001.09.26 at http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=12014. Accessed again on 2012.09.08 at http://web.archive.org/web/20030312131545/http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemId=12014.


Maher, Bill. "9/11 comment Bill Maher got fired for." YouTube. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97KllcZidKQ .

Stewart, Jon. "Jon Stewart 9/11 Crying [hard to watch]" YouTube. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boEAKeXDl4A.

Tapper, Jake. "The Salon Interview: Bill Maher." Salon. 2002.12.11. Web. Accessed on 2012.09.08 at http://www.salon.com/2002/12/11/maher_6/ . 

Taylor, Diana. "Lost in the Field of Vision." The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham: Duke UP. 2003.