Beholding Violence: A Conference on Medieval and Early Modern Culture

With the five year anniversary of September 11 in the recent past, a wave of new
programming and films is emerging to take up the representation of the event and the
negotiation of its place in collective and individual memory. At the individual level, it is the
spectral violence of the hijacking action itself and its identification of a cellular gaze which
registers most profoundly, a fact reflected in the wave of Flight 93-related films that
constitutes the first clutch of September 11th related films outside of documentaries.
However, these ostensibly factual renderings do little to examine that violence and its
facilitating gaze, leaving their analysis to fictional accounts removed from the event itself.

Chief among these accounts are the pilot episode of The Unit and Snakes on a Plane.
The former, a program detailing the experiences of a special forces unit in the War on Terror,
offers the viewer a spectral, unacknowledged cell whose panoptic viewing positionality as a
non-unitary unit allows it to contravene the hijacking by doubling it through an
implementation of surgical violence. The latter, a contrived B-film, offers a similar vision
which shares much with actual accounts of Flight 93; the successful “hijacking” of the plane
by the poisonous snakes on board allows the viewer access to their spectral invisibility prior
to their attack aboard the equally invisible plane (save for a radar signature), as rendered
through the distinct serpentine viewing positionality.

Through an analysis of the spectral violence and cellular gaze depicted in The Unit and
Snakes on a Plane, one may see the ways in which their respective attentions to the visual
ramifications of September 11 attempt to identify the new scopic domain unaccounted for in
more factual renderings of the event. As an apocalyptic fantasy, the representation of the
visual violence of 9/11 recalls the eschatological view dominant within the Middle Ages.
Current work by medievalists including Bynum and Holsinger offers the potential for a
juxtaposition of medieval apocalyptic visions and the time of terror, 9/11. The cellular gaze
produced by these filmic renderings further contributes to a concept of history as nodal (or
rhizomatic), and as such defiant of the very teleology upon which the cultural myths of terror
and salvation are based. In this way, contemporary film tells us something about medieval
(self)representation.



	Isaac Vayo (Ph.D. Candidate, American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University) “‘Time is Tissue’: Spectral Violence and the Cellular Gaze in The Unit and Snakes on a Plane” With the five year anniversary of September 11 in the recent past, a wave of new programming and films is emerging to take up the representation of the event and the negotiation of its place in collective and individual memory. At the individual level, it is the spectral violence of the hijacking action itself and its identification of a cellular gaze which registers most profoundly, a fact reflected in the wave of Flight 93-related films that constitutes the first clutch of September 11th related films outside of documentaries. However, these ostensibly factual renderings do little to examine that violence and its facilitating gaze, leaving their analysis to fictional accounts removed from the event itself. Chief among these accounts are the pilot episode of The Unit and Snakes on a Plane. The former, a program detailing the experiences of a special forces unit in the War on Terror, offers the viewer a spectral, unacknowledged cell whose panoptic viewing positionality as a non-unitary unit allows it to contravene the hijacking by doubling it through an implementation of surgical violence. The latter, a contrived B-film, offers a similar vision which shares much with actual accounts of Flight 93; the successful “hijacking” of the plane by the poisonous snakes on board allows the viewer access to their spectral invisibility prior to their attack aboard the equally invisible plane (save for a radar signature), as rendered through the distinct serpentine viewing positionality. Through an analysis of the spectral violence and cellular gaze depicted in The Unit and Snakes on a Plane, one may see the ways in which their respective attentions to the visual ramifications of September 11 attempt to identify the new scopic domain unaccounted for in more factual renderings of the event. As an apocalyptic fantasy, the representation of the visual violence of 9/11 recalls the eschatological view dominant within the Middle Ages. Current work by medievalists including Bynum and Holsinger offers the potential for a juxtaposition of medieval apocalyptic visions and the time of terror, 9/11. The cellular gaze produced by these filmic renderings further contributes to a concept of history as nodal (or rhizomatic), and as such defiant of the very teleology upon which the cultural myths of terror and salvation are based. In this way, contemporary film tells us something about medieval (self)representation.