Review: In the Shadow of No Towers · 575 words posted 09/13/2004 02:03 PM
Three years ago this week my neighborhood was attacked. I did what I do in any situation—took pictures—and, after gathering my wits, went off in search of my wife.
At first I was stunned. Stunned to be a refugee in my own country, leaving Manhattan on foot via Brooklyn Bridge.
Then I got angry. Not so much at the perpetrators (they’re dead after all), but angry at the President (for having the gall to stand on the rubble and talk about courage after flitting from state to state on the day of the attacks); angry at the management of my apartment building (which sued residents for breaking their leases in order to move out of a war zone); angry at an old acquaintance (who thought 5,000 people in Afghanistan needed to die to restore justice); angry at the countless man-on-the-farm interviews that appeared on CNN and NPR (where people in rural America thought they would be hit next); angry at the literary editor of the New Republic (who railed against attempts to make art out of the tragedy and in the same breath described the rubble as deathloam); angry at graphic designers (who thought themselves clever by removing the serifs from the “11” in “9/11” thereby making the date look like the twin towers—ooh, edgy!); but most of all, angry at the murder of 3,000 people.
In short, it fucked me up. I responded by trying to think about it as little as possible.
Art Spiegelman, on the other hand, responded by obsessing over the attacks to the point of paranoia, and the result is a beautiful series of broadsides collected in the new book In the Shadow of No Towers.
Not many works of art move so effortlessly between the personal and the global. When Mr. Spiegelman juxtaposes his frenzied search for his daughter, whose school was a mere four blocks from the towers, against an graphic of Bush and Cheney slitting the throat of an eagle that croaks “Why do they hate us??” the image is utterly unforced.
The book’s most famous—and infuriating—panel shows the artist asleep on his desk, dreaming underneath the leering twin figures of Osama and Bush. Below, the caption reads “Equally Terrorized by al-Qaeda and by his own Government.”
Does he mean that? Can Mr. Spiegelman honestly believe that he (not the people of Iraq, not the people of Afghanistan) is as terrorized by George Bush as he is by al-Qaeda? Maybe not: he breaks up the larger image with a series of small panels titled “Notes of a Heartbroken Narcissist.”
The book’s abiding emotions are rage, honesty, paranoia, and disbelief; if you were there that day, how can you feel otherwise?
Sometimes Mr. Spiegelman gives the impression that he hates the current administration for its cowboy boots as much as its policies, but that’s consistent with the tenor of the times. I cannot believe my friends on the left smirk about seven minutes and “My Pet Goat.” I cannot believe my friends on the right suddenly care about IBM typewriters and superscript. Even if they don’t know it, theirs is the tempting voice of disengagement, the voice that whispers: Please to be stopping the train of history, I wish to step off.
Is that the best we can do?
But ultimately, Spiegelman is only trying to do what any of us who were there that day have tried to do and cannot: make sense of the insensible.
It still fucks me up.
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