Was it not something of a similar order that took place in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the ‘desert of the real’-for us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots of the collapsing towers could not but be reminiscent of the most breathtaking scenes in big catastrophe productions. Žižek weaves the hollywoodian comparison further, and argues that those who experienced the event on television felt something akin to what is presented in the movie The Matrix (1999) when “the hero awakens into ‘real reality’ sees a desolate landscape littered with burnt-out ruins,” what the movie exposes as “the desert of the real” 1 (15): The plane becomes “the ultimate Hitchcockian blot, the anamorphic stain which denaturalized the idyllic well-know New York landscape” (14-15). 1 The reference to “the desert of the real” in The Matrix is to Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Sim (.)ĢAs Žižek explains “the endless repeated shot of the plane approaching and hitting the second WTC tower” can be viewed as “the real-life version of the famous scene from Hitchcock’s Birds” in which Melanie’s head is hit by a bird.
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