The new millennium didn’t begin with the non-catastrophe of Y2K but the real one on 9/11. The toppling of the Twin Towers was a moment frozen in time, viewed over and over on television, a medium whose immediacy endowed viewers with the illusion of being emersed in the actual event.
In the new book Small Screen, Big Feels: Television and Cultural Anxiety in the Twenty-First Century, 9/11 marked the start of a new era, socially and culturally mediated by the entertainment industry. Melissa Ames, a professor of English at Eastern Illinois University, makes many interesting points about the ongoing ramifications of the national trauma that shocked many Americans who believed their country was untouchable by problems in the outside world.
Unlike those cultural studies academics who pick one big theory and stick with it, regardless of how it warps and reduces reality, she acknowledges several theories, some of them contradictory, on the attraction of post-trauma fiction. This is because people (viewers) are contradictory and seldom behave according to one cause or logical system. According to Ames, we are drawn to television programs (and this applies to other media) to manage our moods; to escape from unpleasant reality; to feel superior to the characters on screen; to feel an empathy for fictional others that eludes us in real life; to ameliorate anxiety through humor or cope by projecting it into safe fictional confines. Many of us might mark “all of the above” if handed this on a multiple-choice test.
Of course, while many of us were busy entertaining ourselves, the distractions of small screens (magnified by the ascent of social media) took eyes off the non-fictional world where actual, often terrible events unfolded in real time. Ames examines such usual suspects as “24,” where Jack Bauer dirtied his hands each week to save the world (i.e. America) as the clock ticked toward the next catastrophe. She also unpacks other television genres where the impress of 9/11 is less obvious. In the cleverly titled chapter “Escaping Reality by Watching Reality TV?” she examines escapism through schadenfreude and voyeurism. She also wonders why the good undead of “The Vampire Diaries” and “True Blood” are American (courtly survivors of the Civil War?) And the bad ones are foreign.
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