The Falling Man

Nothing I write about this documentary can compare to the photograph at its heart. It has almost certainly already arrested your attention long before you turn to read the frail words beside it. A man falls to his death from the conflagration atop the World Trade Centre. Its ‘can’t look; can’t look away’ nature instantly polarises any audience. There will be those who peer closely and those who pull back, the drawn and the disgusted.

Like the photo, the documentary, ‘The Falling Man’, confronts us with our severely different attitudes to death. The American production, airing on the ABC in the run up to September 11, now widely available on DVD, begins as a search for the identity of the man captured in the loneliest ten second journey conceivable. It finishes by asking what the image tells us about ourselves.

The program reveals that America was largely unable to accept the witness of this terrible image. More than two hundred people fell from the sky the day the planes crashed into the Twin Towers. “Some were blown out by the initial explosion, some might have slipped,” the narrator quietly notes. “But it was clear that some were being forced into an impossible decision.” Hemmed in by fire and the void, normal people were being forced to consider how they would deal with death. Part of the power of this image is that it forces us to contemplate our own preparedness. America responded with a spectacular and almost universal act of self-censorship and this picture was dropped in favour of the more heroic images of rescue workers.

It was not an easy decision to publish this image. Days of prayer and debate went into the decision. For some, the image of the Falling Man is the ultimate invasion of privacy. For others, it represents the ultimate insight. I can’t say I’m comfortable with either extreme. I reject the sort of voyeurism that reduces it to merely artwork. Like the incredible vision of hunting cats tackling their prey, it’s sometimes hard to remember that there is real blood involved. It is probably one of the greatest travesties of modern entertainment that we have managed to desensitize ourselves to the pain and suffering integral to what the Bible describes as our ‘last enemy’. But neither can I accept the reasoning that this image raises questions too difficult to be discussed openly. I wonder if the anger that arises in some people from an image like this has more to do with the ripples it introduces into neatly sorted worlds.

I can understand why America collectively chose to look away. Humanity has always viewed death as a defeat. It is the last obscenity in the human language. If you don’t believe me, try discussing it in any meaningful, personal way with non-Christian friends. Feel the discomfort, even resentment rise. Even believers have a hard time talking about it, preferring to skip over to the Heavenly conclusion, like bewildered parents struggling through a sex talk. It seems that both topics are definitely off-limits for children. Is it any wonder that we are so easily appalled by death when we have done everything we can to cocoon ourselves from it?

It is a sad fact that not everyone will be born, but everyone will die. C.S. Lewis described society’s inability to deal with this truth as a satanic tactic aimed at deadening our senses to the danger of an eternity separated from God. “How much better for us,” says his demonic character Screwtape, “if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie and nurses who lie, promising life to the dying. And how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war enforces. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.”

I believe the pictures of 9/11 chronicle the beginning of a personalised war the likes of which this world has never seen. Whatever your perspective on the Falling Man, we would have to agree with the producers that the image is significant. The photographer has captured a man in the moment he faces the most critical event of his life. However, a potential relative of this unknown victim dismisses the need to discover his identity. “I hope we are more trying to figure out who we are from watching it.” If this picture has a truth to tell, it is that death comes to us all. How we deal with it will depend largely on the thought we put into it now. We are all in a sense falling, though for most of us our peril isn’t as obvious.

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