Document Type
Article
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, FlashForward, 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.
Repository Citation
Muller, Christine. "Enduring Impact: The Crisis Fetish in Post-9/11 American Television." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 11, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol11/iss2/12