The Spectral Voice and 9/11
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.
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