(no subject)
Yesterday we were flipping channels and came across the 1998 movie The Object of my Affection (heavily bleeped, I might add) playing on the "W" channel. We watched the latter half of it as a way to put off doing housework; it was nothing worth recommending IMHO. However, there was a scene that I found sort of shocking, for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the movie. There's a scene where Jennifer Aniston and the Object (Paul Rudd) are talking in the foreground with the Manhattan skyline behind them. It's a beautiful, clear sunny day and the twin towers of the World Trade Center are framed perfectly between the two actors as their scene plays out. I stopped listening to whatever the dialogue was and just stared at the towers with a sense of unreality. There they were, big as life, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, one with its radio tower thingy on top just like I remember from the helicopter shots of it on 9/11.
I had this weird jolt inside of, "Oh. That really happened." Because I think there's a part of me that still doesn't believe it.
And I was weirded out by the thought that no one in the movie I was watching even knew about it yet. Not the actors, not the film crew or director (I had a irrational thought that it was a rather tasteless choice of shots, considering what was going to happen to the towers in 2001 -- as if he was supposed to somehow know about it). There's Jennifer Aniston, and this other actor, not knowing. There are the towers, probably full of people who were still working there on the day the buildings fell. It was like opening a time capsule into a world that is so much like the world we live in now, yet totally different. No one had heard of the Patriot Act back then. We didn't worry about our civil rights being taken away. We didn't have to worry about Fortress North America.
It was spooky to sit there looking back in time like that.
After the movie was over, I started to cry. There's a part of me that doesn't want to admit how much our world has changed, and perhaps believes that this is all a nightmare that we might just suddenly wake up from. I don't want to believe that it's real, that THAT really happened.
I had this weird jolt inside of, "Oh. That really happened." Because I think there's a part of me that still doesn't believe it.
And I was weirded out by the thought that no one in the movie I was watching even knew about it yet. Not the actors, not the film crew or director (I had a irrational thought that it was a rather tasteless choice of shots, considering what was going to happen to the towers in 2001 -- as if he was supposed to somehow know about it). There's Jennifer Aniston, and this other actor, not knowing. There are the towers, probably full of people who were still working there on the day the buildings fell. It was like opening a time capsule into a world that is so much like the world we live in now, yet totally different. No one had heard of the Patriot Act back then. We didn't worry about our civil rights being taken away. We didn't have to worry about Fortress North America.
It was spooky to sit there looking back in time like that.
After the movie was over, I started to cry. There's a part of me that doesn't want to admit how much our world has changed, and perhaps believes that this is all a nightmare that we might just suddenly wake up from. I don't want to believe that it's real, that THAT really happened.