Why I Can’t Stop Watching 9/11 Videos
On American performance art, the myth of neutrality, and “being a good person.”
“Evil is like a great work of art. You can never fully absorb it. It has many dimensions. It lives on through time, through different ways.” —Kanan Makiyah
When schizobrained artists like German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen let loose their internal thoughts, the kneejerk outrage of respectable society (read: normies) is so predictable that it is rendered completely mundane and anti-climactic. No one was shocked when the New York Times ran a piece decrying how morally irresponsible it was for Stockhausen to claim, in 2001, that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were “the greatest work of art that has ever existed.”
Such an accusation against a knowingly provocative statement like Stockhausen’s goes without saying. There is nothing remotely artistic or morally valuable about thousands of innocent people being burned alive. But what is unsaid here is the “irresponsibility” of such simplistic condemnations of profoundly loaded statements like this one…so simplistic that they wildly overlook the granules of truth—or if not truth, insight—which might quite possibly merit the dignity of a measured “response” rather than a mere reaction. There’s a name for people whose sole criterion for engaging with art is a simplistic moralism: I call them philistines, Camille Paglia calls them “fascists.”
In the spirit of truth-telling, I couldn’t help but chuckle when I first heard Stockhausen’s comment. Stop reading, write a defamatory Tweet about me, and ruin my chances of future employment if you feel so inclined…no seriously please, the algorithm has not been kind and I need the publicity. But if you find yourself feeling abnormally merciful today, you might be surprised by what you find if you continue reading on, just like if Stockhausen’s detractors would’ve been if they continued reading his comments:
“...That spirits achieve in one act something we could never dream of in music, that people practice like mad for ten years, totally fanatically, for one concert. And then die. And that is the greatest work of art that exists for the whole cosmos. Just imagine what happened there. These are people who are so concentrated on this single performance—and then five thousand people are driven into resurrection. In one moment. I couldn’t do that.”
If you’ve followed me this far, then I suppose you’ve merited my trusting you with a secret: the YouTube algorithm continuously suggests that I watch more clips of the Twin Towers collapsing. I openly admit to my voyeuristic fascination with watching news anchors having to abruptly interrupt scheduled programming and ad lib as they internally process their own horror at the events that were transpiring on that cloudless Tuesday morning, or the New Yorkers who were rushing to escape the wave of smoke and debris chasing at their heels.
Among the many images I’ve indulged in gazing upon is a GIF that pans up from an ad for Mariah Carey’s film Glitter above a subway entrance, toward the burning North Tower. Carey has been publicly ridiculed for attributing the flopping of her autobiographical film and its soundtrack, released on 9/11, to the terrorist attacks. The reality is that the atrocious spectacles of the film and the collapsing buildings share much in common on a deeper symbolic level.
The music video for the lead single off the soundtrack, “Loverboy (Remix),” is a highly decadent, lowbrow camp explosion sprinkled with artificial low-calorie sweetener. We find a greased-up Carey futzing around as a ditzy race car cheerleader as the weight of her overly coiffed hair, heavy makeup, tautly hoisted breasts, and skyscraper-high stilettos cause her to stumble toward her decline from stardom.
Carey’s career, especially during the Glitter era, is emblematic of a particularly American brand of decadence. She’s a performance artist, an insufferable diva who shrouds her natural artistic ability in layers of artifice: mainly foundation, eyeliner, and silicone. Glitter is campy performance art in the way 9/11 is: “It’s so bad that it’s good.” Surely this isn’t to say that anything about either spectacle is morally good. They’re only “good” in the way that a train wreck is: you know you ought not to indulge yourself in watching the wretched spectacle, yet you just can’t seem to look away.
Mariah’s series of public breakdowns under the sinister forces at work in the cutthroat music industry echo the breakdown of the towers, which many deemed to be symbolic of American imperialism and capitalism. Deception stacked upon deception can’t help but topple over at a certain point.
Novelist Ottessa Moshfegh heard about the plane striking the first tower while in the lobby of her Morningside Heights apartment building. She recalls seeing the smoke from over 120 blocks north of Ground Zero. “Since that day,” she admits, “I have watched tons of footage. This sounds really un-American but talk about performance art. Completely disturbing, mind-blowing imagery on our televisions. It totally obsessed people and left them vulnerable.”
Beside myself and Moshfegh, few are willing to admit their dark fetish for rewatching the catastrophe that transpired that morning. Some of us have no qualms with the fact that we are not God but rather that we’re dirty sinners who find pleasure in the abysmal pockets of existence. Rather than vainly attempting to deflect from her morbid fascination with cloying moralisms, Moshfegh allowed herself to delve head-on into a probing and transparent moral inquiry, which eventually bore fruit in the form of her bestselling novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation, whose plot includes the events of 9/11.
In a personal essay, Moshfegh remembers her mother visiting Manhattan on September 10th to buy fake designer watches on Canal Street. She tells her mother that she hates wearing watches as they make her feel like she’s “plugging into the Matrix.” But before going to bargain for a Folex, they happen upon a street artist who clearly “wasn’t part of the Matrix. He was not part of the fabric of bullshit pulled over everyone else’s eyes. He stood there vibrating with life and consciousness, tender and fragile and courageous.” Something about this guy’s paintings, his demeanor and overall vibe struck her as red-pilled–he saw through the veneer of artificiality under which American life is encrusted.
Moshfegh noticed how “shit changed” after 9/11, claiming that the New York she knew–where it had once been possible to do and be anything–had died. “Now it’s a graveyard.” One could argue that the events that transpired that day woke us up to the fact that our cult of artifice, our divorce from the real, our delusion that “anything” and “becoming anyone is possible” comes with deadly consequences. Mariah Carey’s insistence on perpetuating her career through the use of artificial means—from breast implants to autotune–rather than letting the legacy of her earlier years speak for themselves–are a prime example.
Despite dragging her into the pits of depression and suicidal ideation, Moshfegh’s ironic detachment from the matrix allowed her to emerged not only stable and free, but able to offer meaningful works of art to the masses. Carey, on the other hand, is what it looks like to totally immerse oneself into the diabolical matrix and become ensnared by the demons of delusion and disassociation from the real…her veritable talents getting chewed up and spit out by the system, churning out a sad excuse for art.
Helen Whitney’s 2002 PBS documentary Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero offers a variety of takes on what God was doing on 9/11. Kirk Varnedoe, a former curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, gives his hot take on how if only we would substitute art for religion, us humans would no longer perpetrate acts of violence against each other. “Art is exactly not what religion is,” he argues. “It’s not about absolutes. It has to do with the condition of being human which is not ever to be able to deal with absolutes.”
Yet the documentary features a contrary perspective from the Puerto Rican physicist and Catholic priest Lorenzo Albacete. “From the first moment I looked into that horror on September 11th, into that fireball…I knew it…I recognized religion…that same force,” claims Albacete, that same “energy, sense, instinct, passion–because religion can be a passion–that motivates religious people to do great things, is the same one that that day brought all that destruction…I recognized this thirst, this demand for the absolute. Because if you don’t hang on to the absolute, the unchanging, that which doesn’t disappear, you might disappear…”
The great, neurotic, and rather spergy French occultist-turned-trad Cath novelist JK Huysmans was known to utter phrases like “conversations that don’t treat of religion or art are so base and vain,” and “art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.” He spat upon the naive idealization of progress and human “benevolence”–straight out lies that set out to cover over man’s eternal depravity when removed from the saving grace of God. “No one is good,” he aims to remind us, “except for God alone.” Similarly, Paglia once argued against the cancel mob that the drives to create art, to seek divine truths, and to incite acts of violence stem from the same impulse. Remove said impulse, and we “disappear.”
“I used to distract myself,” writes James Baldwin in his 1964 essay “Nothing Personal,” “some mornings before I got out of bed, by pressing the television remote control gadget from one channel to another. This may be the only way to watch TV: I certainly saw some remarkable sights.” Baldwin’s ability to see through and critique the matrix of American artifice bordered on the prophetic. He was alarmed by the variety of products that masked blemishes and the process of aging, “forever and forever and forever.” One is left to imagine what Baldwin’s hot takes on Glitter would have sounded like.
Baldwin traces the tendency to celebrate falsehood back to the days of slavery. Allured by the fantasy of a bourgeois, picture-perfect life devoid of conflict and insecurity, the pilgrims set to work pursuing their “false myth”—as Baldwin called it—of freedom and happiness…“just as the myth tells us that America is full of smiling people….and though I rarely see anyone smiling here, I am prepared to believe that many people are, though God knows what it is they're smiling about; but the relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money.”
Fast-forward to 2009, throngs of protestors took to Ground Zero to display their disapproval of a proposal to build an Islamic center in the still-empty plot of land. In their eyes, “Cordoba House” would be a temple honoring a god of violence, a god of our enemies. In 2016, the construction of the “Oculus”–a transportation hub and luxury shopping mall–was completed in the space that used to be home to Five World Trade. Built in the shape of an all-seeing-eye, the supposedly secular building stands as a temple to the gods of consumption, capital, and the omniscience of hidden elites.
Among America’s mythologizing about slaves constituting ⅗ of a person and Mariah Carey still being able to sing is what William T. Cavanaugh calls our myth of religious violence. Cavanaugh challenges the narrative that violence committed on behalf of the “neutral” secular State is justified, “pure,” unlike violence committed in the name of some god. The real question, he asserts, is not whether violence is done in the name of God or not, but which god violence is done in the name of.
American secularism actually shares much in common with modern Islamism. Both have a semi-gnostic, reality-denying point of departure that skips past the earthly, human dimension and soars into idealism. Their variety of manifestations often overlap: extreme iconoclasm and moralizing, fetishization of wealth and opulence, delusional utopianism, and explosive demonstrations of violence.
The blindness of today’s moralist–who points his accusatory finger with one hand, the other holding a smoking gun behind his back–calls anyone and everyone out for their moral failures, without ever looking at his own, further entrenching ourselves in the matrix with the delusion that we ourselves are somehow neutral, or even “good.”
I (clearly) am not a “good” person. I already confessed to you that I watch 9/11 videos when I’m bored. And yet, I have the balls not to attempt to convince you that my pet vice is somehow morally justifiable. Before jumping to point the finger, I must implore you to reconsider. I may be a deplorable piece of garbage…but are you not also “lying in the gutter”–as Wilde might say–here alongside me? The real matter is not one of being on the “right” or “wrong” side of history. Rather, I’ve come to find that it has to do with being honest enough with myself about the lowliness of my condition, and allowing that “only source of good” to condescend and encounter me at my atrociously base level of existence.
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