Il gigante nascosto. La rappresentazione sociale del trauma dell’11 settembre nel cinema contemporaneo di genere

Abstract

The tragedy of 9/11 is an event which irremediably marked our age and the collective memory of the western world. The imaginary produced by the elaboration of this historical rupture is part of a dimension which is as global as the society that saw and lived the Twin Towers collapse. Later war narrative forms have been repurposed in a fully postmodern way, including leading characters that had already appeared on the Culture Industry scene during the 20th Century. As it happened for Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, death came from the sky for New York City in 2001 too, to reveal the secure systems’ fallibility against new and uncontrollable threats. From the “Cloverfield” giant creature to The Avengers alien foes, menaces to New York in movies embodied the trauma of 9/11 the same way Godzilla did with the memory of the bomb and the persistence of its effects, opening to a new and autonomous film genre. They all speak of the shock that dramatically changed the first decade of the Century adding to the “sense of fear not entirely disconnected from the concern of ecological disaster and nuclear holocausts” (Caronia, 2008) the renewed terror for an enemy which has already shown his capability to strike western countries at their hearts integrating (and concealing) into their social fabric. Thus the intent is to discuss the development of the city attack motif in parallel with the reappearance of the giant monster allegory on the movie screen, through a film selection of international relevance, characterized by the growing level of invisibility of the danger metaphor, in order to analyze symbols connected to the sense of panic and lack of comprehension that rule our time.