Kids Are Tougher than We Think; Requiem for the Twins

Throughout the awful day that was Sept. 11, you could hear, interspersed among the awed, horrified reports of towers crumbling and civilians dying, stories of how the children of America were taking it. We heard they'd been herded out of classrooms and into gymnasiums and basements, not just to prevent them from being easily killed by another terrorist attack?on Sept. 11, we didn't know if the worst was over or if more planes might fall from the sky?but to keep the awful images on the tv from destroying their innocence.

Those images were horrible, to be sure. As you may know, I'm also a tv critic for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, and the phone messages and e-mails I got from Sept. 11 until about a week ago described the week's coverage in ways I'd never heard before?not as neutral information that could be presented in either a responsible or exploitive way, depending on the messenger, but as information so profoundly upsetting by its very nature that the senders could barely stand to think about it, much less watch the footage over and over. More than one commentator has invoked the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's understandable to want to protect children from such things.

Or is it? The act itself is one thing?nobody of any age should be asked to endure anything as bewilderingly vicious as the attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11. But knowledge of horror is something else entirely. The notion of childhood innocence means something different here than it does in other countries. All cultures respect, or try to respect, the unformed personalities of children; all cultures attempt to shield their charming innate tendency to give other people the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes things get so enormously awful that you can't do that anymore. The truth about adult behavior comes out, either in the home or outside?after which point the goal becomes to preserve the essence of children's goodness while educating them about just how rotten the world can be.

It seems to me that our instinctive rush to protect our children from images of the attack is hurtful in the long run. Obviously, very young children who cannot comprehend the difference between a neighborhood, a city and a nation?or the difference between good and evil, righteous violence and senseless murder?can't process the events of Sept. 11 in anything resembling a comprehensible way. Intentionally exposing them to the news footage would be a form of child abuse.

But some part of me wonders if slightly older children?say, second- or third-graders?might benefit from seeing at least a glimpse of it. (I'm assuming they never saw a frame?a major assumption considering that tv suddenly went from being an entertainment-delivering appliance to a crucial utility in the days following the attack.) It's understandable to want to protect our kids from horror, or images of horror, or thoughts of horror. But I wonder if it's a bad idea to dance around the reality of what happened?by telling kids to look away from all the magazine covers on newsstands, or explaining the event in extremely simplistic terms, e.g., "The bad guys flew some planes into buildings and a lot of people died, and it was bad, trust me." These kids know something enormous happened. They're equipped with survival mechanisms that help them get through it, and help their parents get through it.

My four-year-old daughter was downstairs playing with her toys the entire time that her mother and father were upstairs watching the tv and gasping and weeping. During the ensuing days, as my wife took her on errands and walked her to school through streets that still smelled like smoke, passing fellow Brooklynites who seemed to be sleepwalking, my daughter made what now strikes me as a conscious attempt to stay out of her parents' way as much as possible. She flipped out a couple of times late last week, and the tone of the flip-outs was different than usual; but she's a four-year-old, and four-year-olds flip out anyway, whether the country is at war or not.

Clearly she's not ready to look at moving pictures of burning towers and people leaping to their deaths, because her frame of reference isn't big enough to accommodate it. But I think she'll be ready a couple of years from now. And it might not shock her as much as I think; after all, every newspaper and magazine lying around the house right now contains images of burning buildings, crying citizens, wrecked planes and soot-faced firefighters digging through rubble. She knows something major happened. I bet even infants know it.

Three days after the attack, I talked to a native-born American who recently married a man from Chechnya. Her husband was appalled by the Sept. 11 attacks?everybody was?but some of the news coverage immediately afterward struck him as bizarre; it underlined Americans' distance from the violence in other countries, their lack of experience with violence, their inability to process it; it reminded him of how spoiled we are compared to most nations. A news story about grief counselors descending on schools actually made him laugh. "Do you know what grief counseling is in Chechnya?" he asked his wife. "The Russians come in and start killing people. You grab your kids and take them down into the nearest basement and tell them, 'The Russians are killing us, and we're going to stay here in this basement as long as we need to.' That's grief counseling to a Chechnyan."

All of which makes me think kids ought to be able to experience a bit of what we felt, even if their exposure to the images occurs after the attack, under carefully controlled circumstances. If there's anything we know for sure about kids, it's that they're much stronger than we think. The children of Sarajevo, Tel Aviv and Belfast have seen death; many of them have seen loved ones die in front of their eyes; yet they still manage to play with their toys, chase each other around the playground (even if the playground is rubble) and dream about pleasant things. Children are bonded to their parents not just through genetics, but through shared experiences, and that includes shared trauma. A wall between children and horror is a wall between children and parents. It's not wise to knock down the wall, but it might not be a bad idea to open a small window.

If you feel like meditating on any of this?and if you have better things to do, believe me, I understand?you might consider checking out a couple of film series now showing in Manhattan. The Two Boots Pioneer Theater has "How Did I Get This Way?"?a series of films about childhood, not all of them pretty. Among the most notable is a version of D.H. Lawrence's short story, "The Rocking-Horse Winner," starring Eric Stoltz, filmed by director Michael Almereyda with a grainy, black-and-white, Pixelvision camera that gives the images a fractured, mournful power. I've only sampled a handful of these films, but they were enough to make me want to return for more. The best thing about the selections is that they don't idealize childhood or insist on innocence. The kid in The Rocking-Horse Winner is a lot craftier and less sweet than most children in literature or cinema; like other films in the series, it deals not just with sunny images of youth, but the falsity of that image, occasionally detouring into examinations of the fragility of adult memories of childhood and the frequently prickly relationship between kids and their grownup protectors.

The American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is continuing with its series titled "Social Engineering: Highlights from the A/V Geeks Educational Film Archive." It began last weekend and I wanted to write about it then, but it was Best of Manhattan week; then a little something happened at the World Trade Center, and publishing plans changed again. At any rate, the second half of the series continues this weekend, and it's worth making the trip to the AMMI to see what's left of the schedule. In the lineup: "Cinema VD: Sin, Sex and Sores" (Sept. 29, 2 p.m.), which includes an astounding array of titles cautioning kids to keep their naughty bits to themselves, for fear of catching something awful, ruining their reputations or going mad; and "Drugs, Drugs, Drugs" (Sept. 30, 2 p.m.), which features an astonishing little masterwork titled Case Study: LSD, in which a young woman drops acid and hallucinates a screaming, bloody face in a hotdog.

This is the third time the AMMI has revisited the glories of educational films?you know, those 16 mm gems shown to bored and restless students from approximately the 1950s through the late 70s. But the selection is, if anything, even wonkier than in previous years. Curator Skip Elsheimer, a North Carolina-based education film buff who has thousands of these beauties in his basement, will present the series; smartass comments are encouraged.

Framed

Requiem for the Twins. Anybody under 40 was probably bewildered and hurt by all the commentary in the media describing those towers as "ugly." For post-boomers, the World Trade Center wasn't some boring, oversized interloper that took over New York's skyline; it was New York.

My own horror at the mass death was accompanied by faint but recognizable feelings that a piece of my own childhood had been stolen from me. The 1976 remake of King Kong, in which the big gorilla climbs the Twin Towers, was the first movie I ever wanted to learn more about; in some ways, I credit it with getting me interested in both New York and the notion of movies as things that didn't merely exist, but were made. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to get into the New York Film Critics Circle, which once held its yearly awards dinner at the top of the Twin Towers. The first time I went there, looking snazzy in a suit and tie, my beautiful wife in her beautiful dress beside me, I felt a sense of completion I'd never felt before. We went to the windows of Windows on the World and looked out at all of New York spread around us. I will always cherish the memory of it, and I wish to God I'd taken pictures.

When I was on the A train Sept. 13, after two days of the A being rerouted along the F line, we passed under the World Trade Center again, and I was shocked to see the subway platform still there, along with signs warning the train crew, "Do not open doors." As the train glided through slowly, brakes squealing, I felt nauseated, and I saw other passengers recoiling slightly. It was like that feeling you get the morning after someone you love has died; the sun hits your face, you rise, you look around, and you think maybe you'll see that person again, or hear that familiar voice, and be reassured that it didn't really happen?that it was all just a nightmare. The feeling was punctured when my car, the last car, eased past the far end of the platform and we could see through the windows a lone figure, a helmeted man keeping watch: a National Guardsman with an M-16.

A certain generation of Americans lost something Sept. 11, something that matters not nearly as much as human life, but which is crucial to our sanity nonetheless: a sense (false, perhaps) that what we saw and felt as children was solid, and that as adults, we could revisit it?not the memory of the thing, but the thing itself. Now there is only rubble down on Chambers St. No time now for sadness. The hole in our sky must be filled with something. Let's get started.