"Dad, what movie is that?" (Andrea Nieto/Getty)
I cannot recall the year now; I ought to be ashamed. But my grandfather had died in his back garden in Hackbridge on the southern edge of London. Grandma called us and nervously I biked over from Streatham to be with her. But I was also a touch excited: I had never seen a dead body. This may make me seem detached or unfeeling, yet I loved my grandfather dearly. I had read to him in his last year and brought records for him to listen to. We were close, and closer because he could not really speak. He’d had throat cancer and an operation had taken out his larynx. You had to listen to his whisper or the passage of wishful air. Then he smiled at being understood.
When I got there he was seated in his chair in the garden as if it was any nice afternoon in July. It was a hot day. Grandma had put a white teacloth over his face, as if she couldn’t bear to see him. She stayed in the house but told me I could go out and look at him. He’d have wanted that, she said. I was as close to her as I had been to him.
I lifted off the cloth: I was silently afraid. But it was him, and he looked calm, or patient. I was surprised to see how still a face is when breath has stopped. I found this comforting and for several minutes I studied his face. I could look at it, and the abandoned self. I was 17, I think, caught in the expectation of being grown up soon, and about to do big things.
On the other side of the hedge beyond the garden a couple of kids passed by. It was still hot. They were talking and chuckling, and of course they didn’t know about our garden and what had happened there. If they looked over the hedge in passing, they might have seen an old man sitting in a chair. They wouldn’t have realized, and if I’d called out, “Look, my grandfather is dead”, they could have said, “Oh, that’s sad, so sorry” — that sort of thing — and kept on going with their afternoon. It wasn’t their loss or disaster. Nor mine, really. That belonged to Grandma who was sitting in the house as still as her husband in the garden. She wasn’t weeping, or evidently upset. She wasn’t going to break down. But it wasn’t possible to see her without imagining her distress. People die all the time, and it may be an unforgettable moment in others’ lives.
This was not what you’d call a disaster, though I don’t think Grandma ever got over it. It’s nothing like Gaza. Do you still look at that, or has it been going on so long now you almost take it for granted? I’m talking about the scenes of a city where so few buildings are intact. It is a collapsed place — it looks like rubble or kindling — and if the bodies have been taken away there’s no escaping how many have perished: from the blasts, the fire, the aftermath of illness, the hopelessness. How many? There’s no need to guess: Gaza’s Ministry of Health says 73,386 Palestinians have been killed there.
Those numbers are appalling, but we make them theoretical, as a handling device. Would Gaza be worse if there were 75,386 dead? Can we feel the difference in 2,000 lives? Is there a total at which point everyone will say, Enough. Stop It. Start Again? Are we so calculating, or so adept at managing outrage? Is there a death limit, like 55 m.p.h? Are there cops on that highway, their cars hiding behind bushes, with waiting tickets?
Do understand, I am not simply regretting the Israeli onslaught in Gaza. Nor am I forgetting the ruthless provocation in the mass murder of October 7. It’s not a matter of taking sides, or excusing anyone. Gaza is a devastation that only a terrible distortion of meaning or consequence can justify. (Unless we consider the chance of our own abdication — I mean stepping down from the principle or the hope that we matter.)
For several years now the television news has panned over the wreckage of Gaza, and waited for outrage to take effect. But that hasn’t quite worked, has it? We hardly saw what the Somme looked like in 1916. But we have grown up a lot since then: we have seen the overhead views of Dresden and Berlin ruined. We know the wasteland of Hiroshima. We are connoisseurs of damage. We keep on looking, depressed but hardly motivated by the experience. It’s almost as if our helplessness is groomed by the watching. After all, throughout our decades-long history of anti-war films (that is the wishful label on the genre), from All Quiet on the Western Front to Black Hawk Down, we have also been satisfied, or thrilled, by the scenes of attack. So afraid in life, so brave in watching? And somehow the anti-war plan hasn’t transpired.
But I’m interested in what looking at the pictures does. There was a day, 25 years ago this week, when at breakfast in San Francisco our life was broken in on by TV views of Manhattan (those towers reminded me of Metropolis, that’s 1927). When a toy plane — it must be that — struck a skyscraper. Our six-year-old son, Zachary (raised in a film-watching household), getting ready for school, asked, “Dad, what movie is that?” in the spirit of a child who enjoyed a bit of battle on the screen. This wasn’t just what a kid wondered. Walter Murch (the editor and sound designer) has told me how he came out of his hotel in New York, saw his colleague Anthony Minghella (the director) looking up, and they had said in unison, “What movie is this?” Of course, they “knew” it could not be a movie, but they could not subdue the feeling that it must be contrived, or a show.
By Gaza standards, 9/11 (a slick title?) was hardly vast. The number of people who died that day (in New York, Virginia and in Pennsylvania) was 2,977 (not counting the 19 suicidal killers in the planes). In presenting that as shocking, I realize that the average total of daily deaths in New York is only 150. Of course, most of those losses go unnoticed by the current of News. They occur in gardens or apartments, with just a few onlookers trying to feel what it all means. But what happened at the World Trade Center really was a movie, not just an unmediated error or mischance that Murch, Minghella and my son had wandered into. The damage that day was designed, cast, budgeted, foreseen — it had a creative vision — like a “magnificent” or “stunning” frontal assault from Paths of Glory or We Were Soldiers. It was intended as a movie. And so these terrible occasions are more easily digested as something we are meant to witness. We tame them just a little by identifying as spectators or an audience. Or does that taming diminish us? Is the process of movie turning us into a crowd who are detached or not exactly there — as if we have been nullified?
The story of how we have reached this point is complicated — not least because of the “fun” we have been having. How else can we contemplate the extensive but sometimes rather jolly massacres in which computer-generated figures are deleted? And that is disturbing because we do not like to think ourselves so unworthy. But there are pivotal realizations along the way. The one that strikes me the most is what I’ll call the Great Ignoring. Let me try to explain.
In the early Forties — not so long ago, some of us were alive then — in Germany or nearby parts of Europe, the great crowd of refugees or prisoners trudged along and we did not know how to notice or respond. As if they were not there to be seen and felt. Even in the gloom of dark morning, there might be a stink in the air because the natural traces of cooking are stubborn or lasting. So “down the road” was a no go area, or not for thinking about. One of those places that we (it’s not just they) were determined not to be disturbed by. Oh yes, we might say, there were rumors about what was happening, about the trains that kept arriving, and the occasional faces seen staring out of their carriages. There were anecdotes about people who had been here a few days ago and were gone now, as if on a sudden holiday. Or there were even a few who said they had escaped from there. But they seemed so crazed, so out of their minds, they could hardly be relied on. One of the reasons for that odd term “concentration camp” is how hard you must work to ignore the inner meaning of what is being said. When people are murdered in “impossible” numbers, the function of the state is to insist on the impossibility of what is being asserted. So it was in 1945 that we could act surprised. We were ready to cry out, “Oh, how extraordinary — we never knew about that”. So sorry. And this is not just German. It is in our nature now as watchers. It could happen here. It does, every time we stroll past Gaza, talking to our friends.
There is a temptation in the apparent factual emphasis of movie to say, look, we are looking — we are paying attention. And the impact of that may produce nausea. But more unsettling still is the underlying worry that every time we see a death we see an actor lying still and holding his breath. Could it be that we too are not quite alive? How hard must we concentrate to see that our mattering was a masquerade or a hope?