As far as I know, 9/11 may very well be the first thing I ever saw on television. My father has told me on an occasion or two that I was sitting on his knee, an infant having only known consciousness for mere months, in front of the screen as the World Trade Center crashed into the streets below. I’ll never know if it went exactly like that, but it might as well have.
As children, my brother and I weren’t permitted to watch TV, save on Fridays when we’d veg out after school on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. Luckily, when The Clone Wars aired, it was on a Friday night, where it quickly became a weekly tradition for the three of us. That same day President Bush bails out Wall Street for 700 billion dollars.
When I was born my grandma made for me a time capsule from that year with artifacts: a red-white-and-blue Beanie Baby, a US Mint proof set, an issue of National Geographic. Every time I rediscovered it, the item that fascinated me more than any other was a videotape—along its spine: “September 11, 2001.”
I graduated from college in December and went back to visit my father and stepmother. The top shelf of the closet in a bedroom that is no longer mine still had the cardstock box that grandma had curated for me. I fished out the tape for when I returned from my final winter break.
It was while on a second date—where we first stopped to borrow a DVD from the library—that I saw the perfect opportunity to finally watch the tape on the only VCR around. Images I have lived the effects of that I had never actually sat down to take in in themselves. I inserted the tape into the slot at the bottom of the small box. No matter if wound forward or back, the display only remained blue. Somewhere in between two decades, it had been wiped. Things don’t exist in themselves.
Pandora’s box had already been opened. The images unconsciously burned onto the hivemind of a nascent generation. A digital Ludovico technique early in the stages of psychosexual or prenatal development. And ever since, those same kids have been chasing the cultural contact high of the greatest cinematic event in human history. The Holocaust wasn’t so lucky as to have video cameras, live broadcast, or satellite TV, and is thus ineligible.
The Holocaust was a hole in history, a blindspot. For Godard, the monumental failure of the moving image. The cinema did nothing to prevent the extermination of millions. However, this failure to represent and thus reckon with the greatest human atrocity was only one of cinema’s many trumpeted deaths. It would also later be killed at the hands of the television set.
As it unfolded, the Holocaust did not have the inundating novel forms that would come to epitomize the era surrounding the birth of the new millenium, like massively multiplayer online gaming or reality TV. The big bang of the global century was characterized by the overabundance, the over(re)production, the replayability of the traumatic image and from every angle and at every time slot. In case you even thought about it, they made sure you never had the chance to forget.
And so, while it took several decades for a new tragedy to come along and be added to the pantheon of those worthy enough to never be forgotten, it took exponentially less for the events of September 11 to be scrutinized, ridiculed: its plot full of holes, its shock value diminished. Like any other, it just became one more thing that just was. It was the butt of a constantly running joke, like on a date with a friend of a friend of a friend asked out over Instagram—blissfully unaware that we were really only ever in pursuit of that first hit.
After a certain age, the taboo of TV wore off in my household. My parents were still playing by the rules of their own generation and that of their parents, failing to recognize that the box in the living room had lost its awe for us. The television hardly took center stage at sleepovers either, unless it was Project X or The Wolf of Wall Street or Zoey 101 reruns on Nick at Nite, but even so, we watched them so many times until they dissolved into quotable background noise.
On nights spent with the kid across the street we’d look up pictures of naked girls on our 3DSs or his mom’s iPad 1, and be baffled at why it was so difficult to find any that were our age. Around that time he introduced my brother and I to his friend in the neighborhood across from us. That first time was my introduction to Omegle and Chatroulette: two preadolescents awake before anyone else, me and the boy across the street and a laptop, treading a sea of dicks to ask grown women if we could see their boobs, and somehow with moderate success. My first sexual experience.
Back at my house, we finally bought our first laptops. On the nights spent over there, we ventured into Lemon Party, Meatspin, Blue Waffle, Tub Girl, 1 Man 1 Jar, 1 Man 1 Screwdriver, and gagging at the infamous 2 Girls 1 Cup, intermittently slamming the Lenovo clamshell shut before returning like it was nothing to song parodies and Jerry Springer clips on YouTube or inviting our Club Penguin girlfriends back to our iggys. Just more fodder for lunch table debriefs with my school friends.
As we matured and honed our skills in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber of chatroom cyberspace, the game evolved. One could asl their way into titty pics from some teenage girl a few years older by moving from anonymous online chatting to Kik instant messaging. It felt like landing a fish, and in these cases we really were catfishing. And it often was required to have first swindled a grown man out of his dick pics to lend credibility to the aims of the primary sock account. All’s fair in love and war. It was a sport, played for the love of the game and the admiration of your fellow athlete.
At any gathering of enough boys it’s only a matter of time before pornography makes an appearance. Typing random phrases (like “night vision” or “monkey costume”) into Google then adding “porn” before hitting enter, or flipping channels until stumbling upon the finale hot tub scene of a porn film underscored by a song, sounding like a bizarre parody of Kanye’s “Flashing Lights,” called “Bouncing Boobies.” You can imagine our reaction when we came across the same film channel surfing another night.
In high school, now going steady with my school friends, ISIS beheadings watched in a Discord call on a $2,000 gaming PC were more la prise du jour. I’d had enough of T&A—that stuff was for kids—watching Muslims obliterate town squares or Asians eat bowls of live baby mice was now where it was at. We simply weren’t interested in girls like that anymore.
In less than a decade and a half I’d seen more disturbing things than my father had in his almost four and a half, and with him none the wiser. I never felt any kinda way about it. I remember the big stink one morning when I casually admitted to having just watched Not Another Teen Movie on my laptop. What’s the big deal? I’ve already seen the world.
Yet we pretend like all this did not happen. The latchkey generation don’t want to take the blame, but that just won’t do to satisfy the vindictive bloodlust of the digital natives. As if exhuming the crimes of those who came before will wipe our own slate clean. All the devils are here. In this generational cold war, neither can bring themselves to confess. And at this point, what would even be the point? You can’t unsee what has already been seen; you can’t unrape a childhood.
The moral panic over media violence was always a wash. Neither side can hope to pin down the other. Media figures and industry reps could debate concerned parents and psychologists over onscreen violence all the live long day on TV, while back at home the computer had already usurped each of their social functions, silently replacing both flesh and plasma.
We never stood a chance; there was never a choice. There is no more undiscovered country through which to transgress. The romantic hero of old remains a trace within his memetic variant, the sensitive young man of today, a man no less violently impressionable or romantically inclined or socially alien than a Hamlet or Young Werther, but now plagued by the banal anhedonia of a boy who’s already seen everything there is to see, and in all that expanse, glimpsed nothing sacred.
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