Jacques Derrida - Genre
Jacques Derrida proposed that 'a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without... a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text'
(Derrida 1981, 61).
Derrida’s point helps to explain why commentators on September 11th could only understand what they were seeing as ‘like a movie’. This is perhaps what Fiske means by saying ‘we make sense of it by turning it into another text.’ Steve de Souza, the director of Die Hard: “[T]he image of the terrorist attacks ‘looked like a movie poster, like one of my movie posters” (119). Film experts were not the only ones to resort to cinematic examples that they remembered when confronted with the events of September 11.
Already on the day of the attacks, the simile “like a movie” was voiced. One minute after the second plane hit, Jennifer Overstein, an eyewitness to both plane collisions with the towers of the World Trade Center, was asked to describe what she witnessed live on the NBC newscast. She exclaimed in a frantic voice: “It looks like a movie!” And a few seconds later she added: “I couldn’t believe my eyes, watching it right above me” (NBC News Coverage). Overstein, unable or unwilling to believe her own vision, does not retort back to imagery of nightmare, but to film.
(Derrida 1981, 61).
Derrida’s point helps to explain why commentators on September 11th could only understand what they were seeing as ‘like a movie’. This is perhaps what Fiske means by saying ‘we make sense of it by turning it into another text.’ Steve de Souza, the director of Die Hard: “[T]he image of the terrorist attacks ‘looked like a movie poster, like one of my movie posters” (119). Film experts were not the only ones to resort to cinematic examples that they remembered when confronted with the events of September 11.
Already on the day of the attacks, the simile “like a movie” was voiced. One minute after the second plane hit, Jennifer Overstein, an eyewitness to both plane collisions with the towers of the World Trade Center, was asked to describe what she witnessed live on the NBC newscast. She exclaimed in a frantic voice: “It looks like a movie!” And a few seconds later she added: “I couldn’t believe my eyes, watching it right above me” (NBC News Coverage). Overstein, unable or unwilling to believe her own vision, does not retort back to imagery of nightmare, but to film.
Jacques Derrida
“The center is not the center. The concept of a centered structure…is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of desire.”
The center doesn’t exist naturally, but rather because we need it to in order to make sense of the world around us – however, according to Derrida, this need for and perception of a center [sic] doesn’t necessarily mean that center exists. [Film School Rejects]
“The center is not the center. The concept of a centered structure…is contradictorily coherent. And, as always, coherence in contradiction expresses the force of desire.”
The center doesn’t exist naturally, but rather because we need it to in order to make sense of the world around us – however, according to Derrida, this need for and perception of a center [sic] doesn’t necessarily mean that center exists. [Film School Rejects]
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