this photo really fucked me up
The most salient division between Millennials and Gen Z is those who remember 9/11 versus those who don’t. Will, who is two years older than I am, was living in Rye, New York, at the time and remembers watching the plume of smoke billowing over the skyline. I was 4, and I don’t remember the day. All I remember is the American flags that started showing up everywhere. My next-door neighbors draped a flag over their basketball hoop, and my parents stuck a little one in the wooden fence that lined our yard so I wouldn’t wander out into the street. I remember that that’s how I learned what happened, by asking about the flags. I don’t remember what my parents said.
So I was a child of the War on Terror, with George Bush on TV and bearded men in my father’s newspapers. By the time I was old enough to understand what happened, it was a punchline and a meme. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams. Dick Cheney made money off the Iraq War. A second x has hit the y.
And I was a child of the internet, of live-streamed mass shootings and bestgore.com. The videos of the planes slicing into the towers and the recordings of panicked 911 calls were a gateway to all the fucked up shit the internet had to offer. The Jonestown massacre death tape, the Apollo 1 audio recording, the Jeffrey Dahmer victims photos. I could say that consuming these things is a Sontagian act of bearing witness, but really it is base and voyeuristic, nothing more.
Last week, I was scrolling through r/MorbidReality. Why? I don’t know. I was lying in bed, it was after midnight, I wasn’t tired, I was bored. The sub is mostly bizarre news stories and disturbing historical photos, but a lot of the same photos get reposted all the time. So I was surprised to find a photo of the North Tower on 9/11 that I had never seen before:
I had only seen the towers from a distance or in flames; my first thought, on seeing the photo, was how beautiful the building was. The sunlight glinting off the smoke looks almost dreamy, like the building is engulfed in clouds. But zoom in, and you can see that some people have taken off their shirts from the heat of the fire. Some people look like they’re talking to each other, trying to figure out what happened and what to do. A lot of people jumped. A lot of people fell. And everyone in the photo died.
Of course I had seen Falling Man, but that photo suggests a sort of serenity. At least, that’s what the famous Esquire piece, published in 2003, wants us to believe. It’s nice to think that people “jumped just to breathe once more before they died.” But here they were, before their descent, clinging to the columns, maybe hoping still that there would be some other way out.
They might have had an inkling, but none of those people knew precisely why they were going to die. They couldn’t have guessed the wars their deaths would start. That terror would beget terror. And that thought fucked me up more than any blood or gore I’ve seen.