About midnight Friday I found myself watching a film exactly one hour and 11 minutes long with no commercial interruptions centered around "
The Falling Man" whose picture was printed worldwide
Sept. 12 as a composite for those who decided not to give into the terrorists, to reject their plans for them. They stepped into God's hands on their own, defiant.
The photo was printed and then was banished from view in the
United States. I felt angry at newspapers at one point during the weekend, first for self-censorship, then for the way newspapers act -- censoring the news in general with their self-satisfied "news judgment."
Yes, censoring.
Censoring the news. Deciding what we can take and what we can't take. What can be omitted, what can be buried at the bottom of page 20.
I think that's got to be considered in their demise: People were fed up with having someone else filter news and information. And editors telling us what is news, as if someone else knows better than us what we
want to know and what we
need to know. Now we decide what we want to see and know about when and how much and how gritty and how unfiltered, how raw.
I flood myself with information at some junctures. Just because I'm like that. I'm an information freak. I flooded myself with grief and then got angry and decided to write this posting about it.
The film, "
The Falling Man," was truly amazing. Amazingly sad, too. (Find it
here.)
Below is a most poetic and
respectful quote from a masterpiece of journalistic writing -- it is pure poetry, really -- behind the crux of the film, called "
The Falling Man." Tom Junod wrote it. As a reporter, he had the help of a researcher.
The intro to the
Esquire piece notes, above the photograph:
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.You can read the full piece at
http://tinyurl.com/thefallingmanbytomjunod.
I've chosen two powerful passages for you in order to honor the folks who died this way. The first is the opening to the article. The second comes later. They make me want to cry, both passages. Emphases are mine.
Rest in Peace and God Bless.
The Falling Man
By Tom Junod
Esquire
September 2003
"In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.
Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying.
He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion.
He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun.
Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible:
freedom.
There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears. ...
____________________________________________
"They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started.
They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves.
They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building's fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors -- the top.
For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering
the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul."
As I mentioned, I watched a lot of
Sept. 11 films starting on Friday and up until tonight. Flooded myself. I could not look away. I think the story of "
The Falling Man" is one that should have been told by newspapers. We should not have had to look away for so long because a newspaper decides to censor itself.
Newspapers: There's more to their demise than meets the eye.[Please note: Credit for the photo of the falling man is
Richard Drew/Associated Press file photo. Other credits unknown except for
The New York Times cover. The statue is
Tumbling Woman by Eric Fischl -- a piece designed to commemorate those who died on Sept. 11 at the WTC. The statue, at the Rockefeller Center, was censored in September 2002 due to complaints.
Writes Tom Junod: "Indeed,
Tumbling Woman was perhaps the redemptive image of 9/11 -- and yet it was not merely resisted; it was rejected. The day after
Tumbling Woman was exhibited in New York's Rockefeller Center, Andrea Peyser of the
New York Post denounced it in a column titled 'Shameful Art Attack,' in which she argued that Fischl had no right to ambush grieving New Yorkers with the very distillation of their own sadness."]
A close buddy received a very cryptic message from a mid-level manager at the organization for which she works:
