Making sense of the senseless

It was one of those moments that will remain etched in the memories of millions. And we revisit it again and again, writes JEREMY REES.

No matter how many how times I see it, I've got to see it again, said the man nodding at the screen.

In the shop window, the television was playing it again. Watch this, he said.

There it was, something extraordinary, a "CNN Exclusive". An aeroplane, powerful and beautiful, flying purposefully into a tower, cutting through the steel and glass like soft tissue. For a second it disappears inside. Then all hell breaks loose.

This is our image of the moment, and it will pray on our brains from now on, as instantly recognisable as the debris-littered snow of Erebus, the blur of Kennedy's death, a burning girl in Vietnam.

The faceless men who bombed the World Trade Center and the Pentagon loosed on the world something as devastating as fire and steel, maybe more brutal: a picture.

And in the food halls, outside banks, at home, in offices, in the pub, people have stopped to watch again and again something unthinkable.

Why so powerful? Because the terror is ours.

We know aeroplanes and cellphones. We know towers and take-offs. We know ordinary days like last Tuesday.

You can see the inside of the plane in mundane detail: the seat uprights, the overhead lockers, the toilets at front and rear. As New Zealanders, we know what it's like to fly.

Then the picture jars. The aeroplane loses height, changes course. Who's in charge here?

It's powerful because we tell ourselves we cannot possibly imagine those last moments on board, but in fact we can.

We imagine too well the human sweat. We can't see the people but we know they are there. In offices looking out or staring from the plane at a looming, pitiless wall.

Maybe we would have settled back in our chair and closed our eyes resigned to what was happening. Maybe a frantic call home, fingers scrabbling at the cellphone and a few last words. But what to say as mirror glass looms?

The image won't go because we have seen it before, somewhere.

After the aeroplanes crashed, witnesses fumbling for words talked about the movies. It was unbelievable, like a movie.

The hit on the Pentagon was like Independence Day, said one. The plane crashing into the tower was like something with Bruce Willis in it, said another.

It's our urge for stories, says University of Auckland sociology lecturer Nick Perry.

To organise what we think, we look for things we have seen before. When the unthinkable occurs we go back to the movies, to what we know.

"It looked so extraordinary, so unreal, we used the language of the movies to describe it," says Perry. He, too, has watched it over and over.

There are other reasons the picture lives. When something so traumatic happens, so devastating that it changes what we think, we are drawn to it again and again, says Dr Jackie Hunter, of the University of Otago's psychology department - like a child to a bruise we keep wanting to touch it.

After the catastrophes on Tuesday, America told itself repeatedly, "Things have changed," as if to convince itself that, this time, things had. Same with the plane.

"Maybe we had to get used to it," says Hunter. "We had to turn the disbelief into belief."

Then there's size. We watch again to remind ourselves of the magnitude of what we see. A tower, the largest in New York, one of the biggest in the world, with maybe 50,000 people inside and a missile as big as a plane.

Back in 1972, the deaths of 17 people shocked the world at the Olympics in that Black September. Now the toll is thousands.

Think of the person who drove the plane. We understand about driving. We drive every day. But we could never drive our car at full speed into an office full of people.

We can't see who guided that plane down so we watch, as with awful inevitability, they do it again. Maybe this time we'll understand.

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