The Terror Dream
Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
By Susan Faludi
Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company
New York, 2007
We reacted to our trauma, in other words, not by interrogating it but by cocooning ourselves in the celluloid chrysalis of the baby boom’s childhood. In the male reverie, some nameless reflex had returned us to that 1950s Hollywood badlands where conquest and triumph played and replayed in an infinite loop.
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The post-9/11 commentaries were riddled with apprehensions that America was lacking in masculine fortitude, that the masses of weak-chinned BlackBerry clutchers had left the nation open to attack and wouldn’t have the cojones for the confrontations ahead.
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The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be only part of our concern. We were also enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore our national myth of invincibility. Our retreat to the fifties reached beyond movie tropes and the era’s odd mix of national insecurity and domestic containment. It reaches back beyond the fifties themselves. For this particular reaction to 9/11—our fixation on saving little girls and restoring an invincible manhood—is not so anomalous. It belongs to a long-standing American pattern of response to threat, a response that we’ve been perfecting since our original wilderness experience.
It’s a man’s world, and never more so than post-9/11, according to Susan Faludi, as Americans move through a dreamscape of cultural myth, part Frontier Land and part Ozzie and Harriet, grappling with a collective case of PTSD in the aftermath of the terror attacks.
Faludi, the acclaimed author of 1991’s seminal Backlash, which examined the conservative post-1970’s attempt to roll back the recent victories gained by the feminist movement, again takes measure of the national terrain in The Terror Dream. As in Backlash, the author steps back for a panoramic view of the American psyche and details the results as it plays itself out in society, all filtered through the lens of her feminist perspective.
This perspective, paradoxically, is both the book’s strength and weakness.
First, the weakness: Being billed–or at least titled–as something of a broad general look at post-9/11 culture sets the book up to meet a standard that it clearly does not. Every trend perceived is filtered through a gender disempowerment lens, and it’s difficult to discern whether this is a marketing position failure or if the author genuinely believes that the toll of all of the accumulated ill effects of living in a terrorized atmosphere has fallen entirely on women. My guess is she doesn’t really believe that, but is in fact choosing to analyze from one perspective among many; the book would have been better served by a narrower title (and I offer a second subtitle for readers to apply to recalibrate expectations: How Women Are Being Shafted in the Wake of 9/11).
Once the narrower premise of examination is accepted, the book is as strong as can be–insightful, surprising and brilliantly written, a big think piece on the primitive assumptions of the American collective unconscious when it reverts to stereotypical gender roles during crisis.
The book’s first chapter offers a startling rundown of studies documenting disappearing female voices in the media in the weeks and months after the attacks. Vengeful, authoritative male commentators dominated, and the few lone females given column inches or microphones tended to be conservatives. Faludi herself began receiving calls from media outlets shortly after 9/11 soliciting her opinion on the failure of the women’s rights movement, and asks: "By what mental process had these journalists traveled from the inferno at ground zero to a repudiation of female independence? Why would they respond to terrorist attack by heralding feminism’s demise—especially an attack hatched by avowed antagonists of Western women’s liberation?"
These two questions guide her throughout as she explores myths, stereotypes, traumatic thinking and cultural reaction under pressure. She offers up a structure to begin thinking coherently about the complex interplay, using the phylogeny/ontology paradigm: We seem inclined to revert to earlier stages of cultural evolution when our world view is turned upside down. In America’s case, this meant recreating—in the media if nowhere else—a narrative of the need to hearken back to "safer," more traditional times, when men were strong, silent saviors and women were eager to be saved.
The oddest aspect of what Faludi turns up is in the discrepancies between media accounts and real life. For example, despite the fact that male victims—and survivors—outnumbered female at the World Trade Center by a ratio of 3:1, a majority of the famous photos from that day show male rescue workers comforting female survivors. In the month or so after the attacks, numerous media accounts reported that hospitals were preparing for a baby boomlet of births as couples (and by inference, usually the woman in the couple) reassessed their priorities and decided a return to traditionalism was in order and domestic/family life required some bonding through reproduction. Yet these predicted patriotic pregnancies never showed up. Nevertheless, an insistence by the media that a re-feminzation and cocooning process was underway stubbornly remained intact.
Madison Avenue gleefully stoked and rode this wave of reported redomestication, rolling out old ads for comfort food on behalf of Sara Lee and Kraft. The clothing industry too followed suit, softening and frilling up fashions, Victorianizing female apparel in the seasons that immediately followed 9/11. From movies to clothes to politics to food to anecdotal "reports" from supposedly serious news outlets, America was subjected to an unrelenting—yet statistically unverifiable—narrative that women were eager to return to the hearth and let men take care of that scary, scary world out there.
Numerous women who did indeed feel the immediate effects of the attacks and the ensuing war—Jessica Lynch, or widows of firefighters and 9/11 victims, for example—were seized upon as breathing symbols, placed upon a pedestal, cycled through rapid story boards (defiant heroine, damsel in distress, grateful rescued maiden) and then discarded and vilified when they strayed from the rigid character roles assigned to them. The Jersey Moms, Lynch herself, firefighter widows who began to move on with their lives ... all were turned upon with a fury so vehement and stunning that it seems clear some deep psychic vein was tapped, both in their glorification and subsequent stoning.
Faludi traces these tendencies to a violation of some of America’s deepest myths—the strong he-men individualists of the frontier, and, most interestingly, early captivity tales from our colonial period. Indeed, she draws out enormously intriguing parallels between our modern fear of terrorists and this country’s early encounters with Native Americans. Both "others" share characteristics--non-white, religions seen as warlike and "savage" in comparison with Christianity, and cultures so different from the "civilized" Anglo norm that caricatured projections seem within easier reach than true understanding. The earlier era also bore its own bewildering sense of unpredictability about the when, where and how of attacks (and both today and during America’s expansion there were very vital resources at stake: land ... and today, oil).
Taken as a work that raises serious questions about America’s uneasiness with recent women’s right gains--and how quickly they seem to be jettisoned when our society receives a massive traumatic jolt--The Terror Dream is a superb book. Wandering the landscape with such a thoughtful guide as Faludi is a privilege; she is able, both as a thinker and writer, to tease out feelings and trends that we may have glimpsed but until now couldn’t quite put a name to. It’s going to take intention, unpopular challenging of overriding narrative and persistent pressure to overcome some of the newer and more destructive assumptions that are beginning to take root in terror’s wake, and Faludi’s book can be seen as one of the first crucial steps in awakening from a convenient but primitive dream.