Dear TV, Your last post raises a number of questions.
The first is that just because L&A said it was a tribute, it was a tribute. If performers, or even choreographers, were the last and final word on programs or performances, there would of course
be no jobs for dance critics, book reviewers, and English professors. There would not be one million out of work comedians telling sad little stories which they think are wildly humorous and witty jokes.
All we can conclude from the fact that L&A said it was a tribute, was that they intended it to be a tribute, not that it was one. I have read interviews they have given, and I believe they are nice people, and if that is what they said they meant it to be, I believe them. Unfortunately, it wasn't a tribute, and they were mistaken.
The second question that your post raises is, by inference, "What is a tribute?" The on line dictionary,
www.dictionary.com defines it this way: "A gift, payment, declaration, or other cknowledgment of gratitude, respect, or admiration." When you are planning to show respect for someone, the first thing to consider is what your prospective honoree, or their close friends and family, would consider respectful and pleasing. The process of honoring the victims of the WTC is then more complex than most tasks, because there were not only about 3000 dead, and their extended families, and the injured and their families, but over 20,000 people who fled the financial district running while paper reports, building debris, and people jumping off the buildings rained down around them. You need also to consider all the traumatized people, especially the children, who were assaulted on TV by these images of fire, mayhem, fleeing people, falling people and dying people. No one in the media claimed that these images were either art, or tribute, only that they were news.
It is clear that repetition of these images three years later is still considered disrespectful by some of the families who lost members in the WTC attack, because they called a news conference recently to rebuke President Bush for including footage of the WTC in flames in a political advertisement for his
reelection.
You may never have lost a friend or family member to a violent crime. If you haven't, you will need to use your imagination. Picture a family member in total terror for their lives. Picture them running every which way to escape death. Picture them in pain, with their clothes shredded. Picture them with their muscles pulled and knotted, running out of breath, the pain in their legs increasing, until finally they cannot run fast enough and death seizes them. Now picture yourself forced to watch this on TV again, and again, for months, and yet again through the wonder of 24 hour endless news. Even if you try to avoid the news channels, you can't do it-someone will be surfing past them, and there the images of people like your loved ones, suffering what you know your loved ones suffered, will be there again.
Now consider, is it respect and honor to make these suffering people go through the experience of reliving their loved ones' deaths one more time? And consider the victims themselves. Is that how they want to be remembered by their loved ones? Do they want their life to be only about their death and nothing more?
It is possible to do a tribute that includes portrayal of a death, if the death happened in an act of heroism. If L&A dressed up as a fireman and a woman, and the subtext is that the fireman is
leading the woman to safety, but they both die, that might be a tribute although a controversial one. Mel Gibson's controversial Passion of the Christ comes to mind in this context.
But that isn't what they L&A to portray. They chose to portray ordinary citizens at the moment of their deaths, running away from a horror. There is no redeeming feature of a heroic subtext. No one of the victims would want to be remembered that way.
And so the program is not a tribute.
Your last two points relate to Goya, and art. This post has gotten long enough and I will try to respond to Goya and art later.
. I've only seen works in Textbooks. I guess I can see where paintings have different impressions when it's infront of you, because of the texture. Bleh, maybe my opinion of Goya will change if I ever see his works in person, but his style, it just seems so sloppy!
. I find it strange that so many are offended by A&P's Liberta, but the relatives of Martin Luther King Jr said they felt touched that they decided to include his speech in a program about Liberty. I also doubt MLK Jr wanted his message to stay American.
