The 'War on Terror'

Post-9/11 Television Drama, Docudrama and Documentary

Derek Paget, Stephen Lacey

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783162475
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del siglo XXI

This book explores the ways in which television has engaged directly and indirectly with the new realities of the post-9/11 world. It offers detailed analysis of a number of key programmes and series that engage with, or are haunted by, the aftermath of the events of September 11 in the USA and what is unavoidably through problematically and contentiously referred to as the resulting 'war on terror'.

The substantive part of the book is a series of independent chapters, each written on a different topic and considering different programmes. It includes series and single dramas representing the invasion of Iraq ( The Mark of Cain, Occupation and Generation Kill ), comedic representations ( Gary, Tank Commander ), documentary (the BBC Panorama's coverage of 9/11), 'what if' docudramas ( Dirty War ), 9/11 in popular series ( CSI: NY ) and representations of Tony Blair in drama and docudrama. The book concludes with an extended reflection on contemporary docudrama and an interview with filmmaker and docudramatist Peter Kosminsky.

1WAYS OF SHOWING,
WAYS OF TELLING

TELEVISION AND 9/11

Derek Paget

‘A TEAR IN THE FABRIC’

THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS ‘ur-images of 9/11’ and their subsequent use in docudrama (itself just one aspect of the variety of screen representations of the geo-political game-changing event).¹ Looking after more than a decade at images that originated as news footage, I am surely not alone in being returned to an essentially private, vividly sensory, inner world of recall that exists alongside occurrences in the public sphere. One indicator of the way the gap between private and public telescoped on 11 September 2001 is that some newspaper editors turned to creative writers as they sought something beyond the bare facts. An eloquence that would speak this event, and make space for the pervasive sense of major change engendered, was a felt need. In the Guardian (12 September 2001), novelist Ian McEwan wrote:

For most of us, at a certain point, the day froze, the work and all other obligations were left behind, the [television] screen became the only reality. We entered a dreamlike state. We had seen this before, with giant budgets and special effects, but so badly rehearsed. The colossal explosions, the fierce red and black clouds, the crowds running through the streets, the contradictory information, had only the feeblest resemblance to the tinny dramas of Skyscraper, Backdraft, or Independence Day. Nothing could have prepared us.²

Television images, especially those that become etched on to the inner eye of remembrance, are as deconstructable theoretically as any others. But in a time of trauma inner dreamscapes are so fundamental to being and identity that rational thought does not tend to alter their shape over time. However distant one was from the actual scene, a borrowed element of the experience of witness was made available through the images, and enhanced by writers like McEwan. At the first anniversary of the attacks, the Guardian once again enlisted the services of a cultural big-hitter, Simon Schama, who argued that words had given way to:

images: spools of them, the ones you all know, looping mercilessly. The implausible glide into the steel; the blooming flower of flame; the slow, imploding crumble; the rolling tsunami of dust and shredded paperwork; the terrible drop of bodies, falling with heart-breaking grace like hunted birds.³

The heavily adjectival/adverbial language of both writers demonstrates the yearning for more than just reportage. They seek evocation as much as recollection, sensation as much as consideration. In the matter of 9/11, it can be truly claimed, apprehension trumped comprehension.

Mental images of traumatic events have an ineffable rawness, whether they originate ‘off-media’ (in the real time of our real lives) or ‘on-media’ (via the assimilation of manufactured, mediated images beamed into our personal spaces). Such images can produce visceral sensations, ‘whole body experiences’ that become themselves locked into memory. Although the time-freezing vividness of shock effects inevitably has diminishing returns, the flavour lingers on whenever the images are run again. Vivid recall of this kind goes beyond memory’s connected narrative. This is manufactured in tranquillity, deployed to anchor self-image. The stories we tell ourselves – and, when necessary, others – seek to fix who we are against the flux of time, the inroads of age and forgetfulness, and the (mis)understandings of others. Constructed for its (your/my) operational plausibility day to day, such narratives are subject to continual revision, but some events retain the capacity to trigger that fuller memory lived in body as well as mind. This it is that ‘tears the fabric’, occasioning time-slippages that that ‘take us back’. Even a simple traffic accident without serious injury in which one is personally involved will slow the action of the mind sufficiently to cause a kind of mental image-loop to run through the consciousness. Televised images of public events like 9/11 in some senses imitate the repetitive pattern of the traumatised mind. Television’s immediate response to 9/11 was, indeed, relentlessly to image-loop in ways that caught more imaginations than just McEwan’s and Schama’s. It was as if repetition alone could make the unbelievable believable. Watching on the day itself, for millions of people, this shift into perceptual ‘slo-mo’ contained a kernel of remembrance.

This unusual state – fixing where we were, who we were with, how we felt, the lived when of the thing – was the affect of 9/11. There is a similarity here with the triggers for action sought by professional actors schooled in the mental transference theories of Stanislavski and his twentieth-century disciples. Psycho-physical ‘emotional recall’ as used in actor training, as practised by working actors, is grounded in the belief that performance at its most real, at its deepest, most believable level, can be achieved through such means. For me, and I suspect for many others, embodied memory of 9/11 is revived by the ‘raw’ images. Makers of ‘cooked’ representations of events of the magnitude of 9/11 (such as docudrama) make the most of the capacity television has to oscillate in the real time of broadcast between poles of fact and fiction, evidence and belief, and thus reach that part of a viewer’s consciousness more usually private.⁴

The phrase ‘tear in the fabric’ belongs to playwright Mark Ravenhill. The murder of James Bulger in Liverpool in 1993 constituted a fundamental, indeed a formative, tear in the fabric of his consciousness. Not only did images associated with the murder and its representation in the media resonate in his personal life, and reshape him both as person and as writer, it connected for him with wider changes in British society that followed the 1980s political project of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Ravenhill writes of ‘a sort of public grief projected onto [the Bulger] case – grief and guilt for the decade that had passed. For the greed and neediness, the divisiveness, for the communities consigned to the underclass’ (Ravenhill, 2004: 309).⁵ He argues that, while the images of the Bulger murder are burnt into his consciousness, ‘I realized I remembered nothing of the facts.’ He asks pertinently, ‘Is that what our modern media do to all events – turn them into sensations rather than facts or even narratives?’⁶

SHOWING AND TELLING

In dealing as this book does with a so-called ‘war on terror’ inaugurated by an event widely seen as an atrocity in one part of the world, and as a counter-blow against a world-dominating Great Power in at least some parts of the world of the non-Western Other, it seems important to consider the ur-images and the meanings subsequently made from them in documentary and docudrama. The news media continue, and rightly, to make claims of accuracy without which any attendant claim to ethical behaviour in the face of important events would be valueless. A faith in images of the real, a belief that such images reflect events with a degree of accuracy, is held by a large portion of a viewing public unsusceptible to the nuances of critical theory. The belief that ‘the camera cannot lie’ has been questioned now for at least two academic generations, but the closeness of the mediated image to ocular and aural perception means that it remains embedded in the popular consciousness in ways difficult to dislodge. The ‘reflecting back’ that occurs in news footage always already implies distortion, of course, and the historical project of Media Studies has gone some way to exposing this. Like the mirror and its ‘sideways-upside-down’ image, the ‘showing’ that occurs in news footage comes loaded with the effects both of technical agency and of the personal interpretative action of camera crews and news personnel. Institutional ideologies of the organisations and industry of which they are a part (and which stand behind them whenever they film) should also be part of any nuanced account of media news. But the fact remains that belief tinged with scepticism is the default position of audiences, in the UK at least (Hill, 2005).

If ‘reflection’ asserts innocence, however doubtful, ‘refraction’ is manifestly different. In physics, the bending of light rays involved in ‘refraction’ produces traceable, indeed measureable, distortion. Metaphorically, ‘refraction’ could be said to occur when factual events are treated docudramatically. The argument against docudrama has often been that events are literally bent out of shape by the emotions at the root of performing the real. I have always taken the counter-intuitive view that making a raw event apprehensible as well as comprehensible, taking, and thereby making plain, a situated view, potentially encourages more subsequent activity in an audience.⁷ The ‘cookedness’ of any docudramatic representation is never in doubt, and my twenty-year-old distinction between ‘record’ and ‘report’ was an attempt to draw out fundamental differences in representational processes involving the real (Paget, 1990). Thus, the first repetitive images of 9/11 were direct representation – news footage in real time, images of the moment itself. They constitute ‘record’ of the event. Later documentary and docudramatic representations constituted the indirections of ‘report’. Television representations were especially important, given the fact that they inevitably got in ahead of cinema, that industry’s lead times being much longer.⁸

Although raw news footage can never be objective in philosophical terms (objectivity being an ideal construct), in practice it gets as close to neutral representation as is humanly possible. Even in sceptical times, it is close enough for the bulk of a television audience. For this reason UK news broadcasting is still, largely, trusted. Camera-based, technological witness, having transformed, still moulds cultures. The inventions of still and moving photography and telegraphy inaugurated a revolution in perception (newly complicated, of course, by the digital). Initially, camera and microphone allowed the ‘record’ to claim (if never entirely to sustain) a place prior to human agency that ‘reflected’ events – a claim that still holds up in courts of law. While clearly human agency selects the camera, loads the film, chooses a position from which to film, points and turns on the apparatus, a rhetorical claim to truth can still be sustained. If the camera was there in front of important events, seeing what happens, that can be sufficient for belief and acceptance of proof. As John Ellis puts it, the audiovisual has ‘introduced a new modality of perception into the world, that of witness’ (2000: 1).

The witness, however, has a unique status – that of recorder and reporter. S/he says, effectively: ‘I assert that this happened. I saw it this way.’ Human invention is much more obviously involved in the act of ‘reporting’. In the report, human agency is ostended, to use an old structuralist term – the reporter ‘holding out’ their version of events into an interpretative space beyond bare technological register. The act of report is authorised by an ‘I’ who reports for an audience, a ‘you’ or an ‘us’ that sees and hears in receiving the report. In television news the ‘I-who-speaks’ is accompanied by an ‘eye-who-sees’ (the camera) to which, again rhetorically, they are connected for the purpose both of report and reception. Reporter interpretation is held up for scrutiny, given that the report functions outside of that which is, or was, depicted. The act of ‘record’ incorporates a human agency that fashions what is seen, but this subjective element is (again an old-fashioned theoretical term) occluded in the communicative transaction. Much theoretical ink has been expended on the sleight of hand involved here, because the selection of images that is part of any editing process conceals choices and decisions that theory can (and should) reveal. But what may have been lost during the long campaign by critical theorists against processes of naturalisation is this still fundamental distinction: post hoc levels of choice, decision-making and interpretation in reports are always already higher than when cameras and microphones are pointed towards events in flux in order to record the fact of them happening. Immediacy is the part-product of record, part of reflecting back. Some kinds of report, meanwhile, can only ever gesture towards the originary record.

Crucially, telling not showing is the focus for the report. The teller/reporter may show the material of record, but with the secondary purpose of producing affect in another’s sensibility; hence, news reports are stories. The storyteller-reporter refracts the event, bending it to their perception, and the contingencies of the situation in which they find themselves. If this is distortion, it retains the possibility of being ethically benign. Documentary, and forms deriving from it, made a historic claim towards authentic showing, but the claim was always rhetorically based, and grounded ethically in concepts of ‘good faith’ and ‘fair dealing’ that gesture towards the kinds of truth offered in law courts, and which are still supposed to secure journalistic values. It remains important to be vigilant about any claim of good faith, but without it nobody would believe anything to be true. Good faith, philosophically speaking, is necessary but never sufficient. Docudramas attached to real events and incorporating images of original witness are at one remove from documentary, and therefore contain levels of refraction from the beginning. The less the good faith of the refractor, the more the danger that the events depicted are bent so out of shape as to be unrecognisable (or even actionable). There is always risk in dramatic representation of the real, but what can be gained in compensation is the exploration of emotional and ethical potentialities that lie outside the realm of record. Docudrama lets in by the front door ‘arenas of representation’ (Lipkin, 2010) that can only ever arrive by the back door in news and documentary.

MILLENNIAL ANXIETY AND THE NEW DOCUDRAMA

What lies beyond the realm of the record of 9/11 is the contextual fact of a millennial cultural anxiety pre-dating the attacks. At the end of the last millennium there was a distinct darkening of tone on both big a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Ways of Showing, Ways of Telling
• 2 Embedded Dramaturgy
• 3 Post-9/11 American Television Drama
• 4 The Comedy of Terror
• 5 The Paranoid Style’s Traumatic Speculations of Suffering
• 6 Mac and Monotheism
• 7 Britz, Contemporary British National Identity and the ‘War on Terror’
• 8 ‘It Won’t Be Iraq They’ll Remember Me For, Will It?’
• 9 Panorama ’s Coverage of 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’
• 10 Interview with Peter Kosminsky
• Texts Cited
• Bibliography