Thursday, September 30, 2010

The Falling Man

WARNING: This video is extremely sad. I just watched it in my Rhetoric of Violent Images class and it made more than one of us cry. But it's really powerful and it's a film people should see, so if you have some time, watch it.

It shows an aspect of what happened on September 11 that not many are aware of because the media and the country chose to exclude the horrifying details of this hidden story when many expressed outrage at its awfulness.

It didn't really give Americans a fair chance to understand what little we could about this part of the immense terror the people in the World Trade Center must have felt - enough terror to jump to their deaths a thousand feet below and become one of many "falling" people.



None of us will ever really fathom the magnitude of a situation like this since we weren't there, but the video gives a little insight into what it was like and lets us put ourselves in their position.

What would you have done? Waited bravely, albeit terrified, for the smoke and the flames to engulf you, or taken control of your last moments in a gut-wrenching instant of courage and spirit?

2 comments:

Jefe said...

I watched this last night amid an insomnia attack. It didn't help much. Really cool to see the evolution of going from focusing on the individual to what it represented in the big picture.

laura said...

you're such a great writer. xoxo