SILENCIO: THE SPECTRAL VOICE AND 9/11 Lloyd Isaac Vayo A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY August 2010 Committee: Ellen Berry, Advisor Eileen C. Cherry Chandler Graduate Faculty Representative Cynthia Baron Don McQuarie © 2010 Lloyd Isaac Vayo All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT Ellen Berry, Advisor “Silencio: The Spectral Voice and 9/11” intervenes in predominantly visual discourses of 9/11 to assert the essential nature of sound, particularly the recorded voices of the hijackers, to narratives of the event. The dissertation traces a personal journey through a selection of objects in an effort to seek a truth of the event. This truth challenges accepted narrativity, in which the U.S. is an innocent victim and the hijackers are pure evil, with extra-accepted narrativity, where the additional import of the hijacker’s voices expand and complicate existing accounts. In the first section, a trajectory is drawn from the visual to the aural, from the whole to the fragmentary, and from the professional to the amateur. The section starts with films focused on United Airlines Flight 93, The Flight That Fought Back, Flight 93, and United 93, continuing to a broader documentary about 9/11 and its context, National Geographic: Inside 9/11, and concluding with a look at two YouTube shorts portraying carjackings, “The Long Afternoon” and “Demon Ride.” Though the films and the documentary attempt to reattach the acousmatic hijacker voice to a visual referent as a means of stabilizing its meaning, that voice is not so easily fixed, and instead gains force with each iteration, exceeding the event and coming from the past to inhabit everyday scenarios like the carjackings. In the second section, the move from visual to aural continues, with the focus being placed on sound art and music. As the sound art series, William Basinski’s The iv Disintegration Loops I-IV, results from decaying magnetic tape to create a presence in absence, so too does the repetition of the hijacker voice, intended to silence it, allow it to speak volumes. The song “Fly Me to New York,” by Cassetteboy, functions referentially, using Frank Sinatra samples to narrate 9/11 from the pilot-hijackers’ perspective, acting as a rubble music and providing a critique of narrative omission and U.S. culpability. By virtue of the use of the hijacker voice in these contexts, that voice is able to inhabit the U.S. psyche, remaining a spectral presence that haunts 9/11 and the nation. v To the slovenly Slovene, a paragon of screwball scholarship and beardiness. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks for this project go to Ellen Berry, Cynthia Baron, Don McQuarie, Eileen Cherry Chandler, Rob Sloane, and Erin Labbie for their committee service and advising; again to Don McQuarie, for his wise counsel and assistance in navigating the logistics of the process; and to Lauren, for her unflagging support and sympathetic ear. This dissertation would not be what it is without them. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page PREFACE: A FIELD OF (HONOR) FOREVER…………………………………………… 1 INTRODUCTION: NO HAY BANDA……………………………………………………... 7 PART ONE – THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: VISUALIZING THE SPECTRAL VOICE 49 CHAPTER I. THE EMPIRE, MIKED BACK: THE SPECTRAL VOICE AND FLIGHT 93 ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 50 CHAPTER II. I SEE WHAT YOU’RE SAYING: THE HIJACKER VOICE AND THE LISTENING LOOK……….. ……………………………………………………………… 97 CHAPTER III. STEP BACK (IN THE CU[N]T): THE SPECTRAL VOICE AND ORAL/AURAL HIJACKINGS…………………………………………………………….. 151 INTER/MISSION………………………………………………………………………….. 200 PART TWO – HEARD MENTALITY: LISTENING TO THE SPECTRAL VOICE…… 202 CHAPTER IV. “KEEP REMAINING SITTING”: THE SPECTRAL VOICE AND THE REPERTOIRE …………………………………………………………………………….. 203 CHAPTER V. ON A MADDENING LOOP: THE SPECTRAL VOICE AND ITS DIS/INTEGRATION……………………………………………………………………… . 254 CONCLUSION: VOX AETERNA………………………………………………………... 307 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………. 335 1 PREFACE: A FIELD OF (HONOR) FOREVER1 Something is happening in this field, I think to myself, as the grass sways listlessly in the late summer breeze. The gravel beneath my feet crunches with every shift of my body, but my ears do not hear it or, if they do, are remiss in their reporting. Instead, there is an overwhelming shiver between my shoulder blades, an uncanny feeling that I do not want this, whatever it is, but nonetheless, it happens, is happening, and might never stop. There are ghosts here, behind me, the wrong ghosts, unseen but commiserating, plotting, four, it seems, deciding what to do next when faced with an unexpected arrival. I know that if I turn there will be nothing, just a handful of tourists clustered in respectful silence, sweaty in the afternoon heat, clutching their cameras and longing for the air conditioning of overpriced hotel rooms back in town, and that whatever this is will be forever back there. Turning my head from the distant flag planted among the blades, marking where my eyes should be, the pieces begin to assemble, the benches marked with absent names, the length of chain link fence overstuffed with the detritus of past visitors, the anonymous shack in the middle of the parking lot housing pamphlets and transcripts of what I am now hearing. It is July 2006, this is Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and I am more scared than I have ever been in my life. I should be concerned with the forty, the passengers and crew of United Airlines Flight 93, especially at this, their final resting place, or at least as close as the park volunteers will let us get to the nearly invisible scar by the tree line, but all I hear is Ziad Jarrah, the most human of the hijackers by all accounts. He is not so very different from me, or was not before he turned, not back to Washington D.C., but from his privileged past in Lebanon to the darker future ahead, 1 This title borrows on the motto of the Flight 93 National Memorial project, “A Common Field One Day, A Field of Honor Forever” (“Flight 93…”). 2 and so I am full not of grief for the dead, but of a sort of mutual empathy, projecting myself into his position as he projects his voice into mine, elected from the four to seize control. I wonder what brought him here as I question my own motivation, and in that moment, something clicks, the tape, all we have left of young Ziad, forever 26 as I am nearly 25, the first day of my life the day after his ended, repeats, my mouth a speaker. I want to scream for this, for what I have done, but silence is all that remains, a pregnant pause stuck in that moment, and I cannot talk for an hour, sitting mute next to my mother as we drive home to Ohio. When at last speech returns, it is not mine, and never will be, until I understand what happened in that field. *** This is all several years and hundreds of miles from that Tuesday, in the communal bathroom of my dorm in Ada, Ohio, when a friend told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and I turned back to putting in my contact lenses, negotiating the unswept stubble on the countertops, scraped from youthful faces as Ziad and company had shorn themselves in ablution prior to the day‟s undertakings. It is worlds from Wellness class that morning, when our instructor‟s refusal to let us watch the events unfolding on TV distanced me from the visuality of the event in favor of word of mouth, of rumored death tolls and missing planes, until my tearful Sociology instructor‟s awkward patriotism sent us home for the day, cancelled classes allowing for an afternoon‟s worth of rapt viewership. Somehow, the path from that evening‟s first contemplation, my ears wreathed in muffling headphones, My Bloody Valentine‟s interstitial “Touched” on repeat, forever soundtracking the towers‟ curdling with its own peals of distortion, looped drums, and synth washes, in the extrapolated path of Flight 93 had it come a bit further west from its turnabout in Cleveland airspace, has led me here, to a field in rural Pennsylvania, within shouting distance of Somerset, where my family would always stop at a local diner on the 3 way to my grandparents‟ house, a diner that now sells postcards of this spot, like the one in my pocket. I have lived with 9/11 for almost nine years now, and we have grown close, grown together in the interim, almost consonant in my at times exhaustive (and certainly exhausting) knowledge of the event. 9/11 came to me (or I came to it, or we met somewhere in between) at a formative scholarly time in my life, at the beginning of my sophomore year of college, as I moved from general education courses and delved into the theoretical foundations of my literature program. The event functioned as a ready object of analysis, so much so that my relation to theory, expanding over the years through my graduate coursework, is inextricably tied to it; there is no 9/11 without theory, and no theory without 9/11. In that first flush of fall 2001, I wanted to understand 9/11, to somehow gain a grasp on what seemed to be an unthinkable event, though the further I looked, the more it seemed that only I had not thought about it, and would do so from there on. This looking faltered, the predominant visual renderings already insufficient when read against MBV‟s keening sonics, far more evocative of the event‟s significance than anything I had yet seen on CNN, and so I turned to the aural to find my answers, clinging to the newly released audio recordings of Jarrah and American Airlines Flight 11 pilot-hijacker Mohamed Atta, culled from air traffic control tapes, as well as those placed by passengers and crew aboard the planes and those trapped inside the wounded towers.