The Collapsed Twin Towers: The Symbol for a Culture Adrift (article)

For many New Yorkers, including me, the Twin Towers had always been like two proud parents who had stood side by side and watched over their city. They were built in 1970 by one of the world’s leading architects, Minoru Yamasaki, and meant to symbolize monumentality and power. When they were destroyed early in the morning of 9/11/01, America went into shock. As I look at a recent photograph of the lower Manhattan skyline without the Twin Towers, the city seems smaller, weaker, diminished. The symbolic value of the Towers was profound. There could not have been a more meaningful target with the exception of the

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White House. I would like to suggest that the collapse of New York City’s World Trade Center Towers now serves as a screen memory for the collapse of authority within our culture and perhaps for the world.

A screen memory is considered to be a memory of something that is unconsciously used to repress recollection of an associated, but more distressing problem. Freud first wrote of screen memories in 1899 to describe and explain the formation of phobias. I believe this process is what Paul Elovitz eluded to when he began to notice that after a year his students’ personal reaction essays on 9/11 were becoming less their own and more a shared cultural memory. This may reflect a mass cultural use of the collapsed Twin Towers as a screen memory of a more insidious terror that has occurred and continues to evolve in our culture.

In 1979, Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism, where he observed that authoritarian control was slowly collapsing. This was the time of the world’s great social revolts that gave birth to the women’s movement, the sexual revolution, gay rights, disabled rights, the drug revolution, etc. He predicted that the electronic revolution through print, television, radio and film unwittingly destroyed every known form of authority including presidents, priests, and parents. This was done with moral verve and a sense of its entertainment value for us. In a footnote, Lasch went on to predict that to be in a culture without authoritarian restraint would force the populace to revert to its own, far harsher, primitive superego controls. Welcome to the world of 2009.

We can see the shift most obviously in films. In 1986 Matthew Broderick in Ferris Beuller’s Day Off played a high school wise-guy who made fools of his teachers and parents. Or go back to 1982 when, in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Sean Penn played Jeff Spicoli, a pot-smoking cool surfer dude who got it over on his teachers. Fast forward 25 years

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to 2007, where in No Country for Old Men, Javier Bardem played Anton Chigurh, a psychopathic killer; Bardem’s performance was so chilling it won him an Oscar. In the 2007 film Funny Games, Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet played Paul and Peter, two psychopaths who kill for the fun of it. Mild conduct disorders have suddenly transformed into malignant narcissism.

Last week I was strolling through Central Park in Manhattan on a beautiful spring day. Four very good looking young males about age 16 zipped by me on their skateboards. They could have passed for young male models judging from the grooming and the builds. As I observed them they slowly spied two folk singers playing for tips from the passersby, with a pile of money in their guitar case. The folk singers kept singing and the skateboard gang closed in to take the money, just for the fun of it. Not a funny game to the singers.

I am beginning to see this same form of malignant narcissism in my practice. These patients from well-to-do upper class families have been indulged and now show total disregard and disdain for authority. They will curse their parents in front of me and in the next breath expect to get their $100 per week allowance.

This trend, which Lasch wrote about in 1979, has been escalating since the late 1960s and continues today. Authority has been dismantled and is in a state of collapse. We are all left with our harsh angry primitive superegos and its unquenchable thirst for more. We are a vicious group and live in a vicious world. We respect no one and nothing. The collapse of the Twin Towers is a perfect symbol of our current state of affairs. It serves as a screen memory of a leaderless world. The heroes are in ashes down at the World Trade Center and we sense that no one is in charge. We look up to

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no one, we respect no one, we are alone. Hope and respect have vanished in the ashes of the World Trade Center.

Barack Obama shows signs of real leadership. His campaign slogan read simply, “Hope.” I hope that we will all find direction and meaning through him but I somehow doubt it. Terror, and the loss that characterizes it, is the legacy of 9/11. The collapse of the Twin Towers symbolizes more than the hatred and nihilism of Osama Bin Laden. It also symbolizes a culture adrift with no one to look up to and no one to guide us. It’s every man for himself.

The last scene in No Country for Old Men is haunting. The recently retired Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, describes a dream he had the night before. In it he and his father are riding horses through a snowy mountain pass. He watches as his father passes him by carrying a horn with fire. He knows that his father “is going on ahead and fixin’ to make a fire” in the surrounding dark and cold. When Bell gets there he knows his father will be waiting. This is the wish that we all have. Someone is out there who cares and that will protect us from the dark and the cold. This is an encapsulated version of Waiting for Godot, with a happier ending. That’s the way it is in dreams: it all ends well. However, the reality is that the Twin Towers are gone and the world is largely without heroes and without leaders. There is really no one out there waiting for us with a warm fire. These are tough times indeed.

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