Hello all,
This lecture was aimed at discussing why and how New York City has been repeated destroyed throughout American Popular Culture of the last two hundred years or so. What it all comes down to seems to be a matter of Love and Hate.
Hate is easy enough to understand, if you hate something it makes sense that you would make a film or write a novel depicting the graphic end of that object. The reasons for the hatred of New York are many and complex, revolving around the city’s seemingly inexhaustible supply greed and vice. It is a place of foreigners and of new ideas, neither of which tend to resonate positively with some ultra-conservative and at times ultra-liberal apocalyptic thinkers. New York is thus a center for corruption and immoral proclivities – “sin central.” Destroying New York becomes a way of combating its evils be they Wall Street Executive or “unclean” immigrant.
Love is a slightly more complex theme. What the urban apocalypse offers in a view into a terribly frightening world in which our city is under siege by some kind force, be it internal or external. New York is destroyed as a consequence in some fantastic way. There is a great deal of violence but you can appreciate the beauty of New York all the more after you see it crumble before you. To take it one step further, the destruction itself can often be beautiful, what Page calls the “aesthetics of destruction.” Page insists that “No place looks better than New York being destroyed.” This is hard to argue with, when looking at films such as Armageddon or Cloverfield it is hard not to appreciate the terror filled scenes as they unfold. We are drawn to watch this brutality, much in the same way so many stood transfixed but the events of September 11th. Page argues that there is a inherent kind of beauty in the horrific way the towers fell.
But why New York? Why not any other American city? Page asserts that is it so “unimaginable for Americans not to have New York” that thus it becomes our greatest target. New York‘s destruction is a powerful tool and one that resonates with all Americans. Remember six months after the terrorists attacks of 9/11. There seemed to be an unspoken agreement among entertainers to avoid our City when showing any kind of urban apocalypse. Microsoft Flight Simulator went so far as to prevent players from flying into the Twin Towers, an action Page admits (as I can also testify) was his first urge when he purchased the game. Yet, where is this sentiment today? It has since disappeared. Somewhat paradoxically New York City is simply too powerful a symbol not to destroy.
Page also remarks that what frightens us so much about the loss of New York is not the destruction of its buildings but of what they represent – the people, the social life. Combine this to Page’s assertion that “to destroy New York is to attack at the heart of America.” Essentially, the loss of New Yorkers is the loss what gives life to our country. That is why the annihilation of New York’s population is such a tarrying concept; it is the death of life force of our country. I can only assume that this why the loss of 2,300 Americans on September 11th took such a terrible toll on the United States, it was a strike against the core of what makes of America. That is why New York City is such a popular target for destruction and why it will continue to act as such for terrorists and moviemakers alike.
Hey Jesse. I figured this news story would enhance your thesis, and possibly our lives. It demonstrates just how devoid of morality consumer culture in the US is.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html
Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede
A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an “out-of-control” mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store’s front doors and trampled him, police said.
The Black Friday stampede plunged the Valley Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde.
When the madness ended, 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnant, were injured.
CAUGHT ON CAMERA: WAL-MART CROWD MOMENTS BEFORE DEADLY STAMPEDE
“He was bum-rushed by 200 people,” said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43.
“They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.
“They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,” Overby said.
Damour, a temporary maintenance worker from Jamaica, Queens, was gasping for air as shoppers continued to surge into the store after its 5 a.m. opening, witnesses said.
Even officers who arrived to perform CPR on the trampled worker were stepped on by wild-eyed shoppers streaming inside, a cop at the scene said.
“They pushed him down and walked all over him,” Damour’s sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said. “How could these people do that?
“He was such a young man with a good heart, full of life. He didn’t deserve that.”
Damour’s sister said doctors told the family he died of a heart attack.
His cousin, Ernst Damour, called the circumstances “completely unacceptable.”
“His body was a stepping bag with so much disregard for human life,” Ernst Damour, 37, said. “There has to be some accountability.”
Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Wal-Mart’s doors in the predawn darkness.
Chanting “push the doors in,” the crowd pressed against the glass as the clock ticked down to the 5 a.m. opening.
Sensing catastrophe, nervous employees formed a human chain inside the entrance to slow down the mass of shoppers.
It didn’t work.
The mob barreled in and overwhelmed workers.
“They were jumping over the barricades and breaking down the door,” said Pat Alexander, 53, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “Everyone was screaming. You just had to keep walking on your toes to keep from falling over.”
After the throng toppled Damour, his fellow employees had to fight through the crowd to help him, police said.
Witness Kimberly Cribbs said shoppers acted like “savages.”
“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since Friday morning!'” Cribbs said. “They kept shopping.”
Hi Jesse, I enjoyed this lecture quite a bit and also your response to it. One of the fascinating issues that Page brought up and that you write about here involves the “aesthetics of destruction.” There is a long history of aesthetic theory involving the Sublime, which is the word 18th century writers, most notably Edmund Burke, used to describe the antithesis of Beauty. According to Burke, Beauty points to order, harmony, and stability while the Sublime entails terror, destruction, and overwhelming force. I disagree somewhat with Page on calling the scenes of destruction of NYC beautiful in this regard. It seems much more in keeping with the Sublime in that traditional sense. That said, it is worth considering whether certain artists try to complicate the traditional dichotomy between the 2 concepts, which is worth doing in terms of innovation in art and our tendencies to think through binary constructions, or whether they rejuvenate the standard distinctions–and for what ideological purpose.