9/11 in W.O.W.

[toomuchcoffee]

http://www.slate.com/id/2123075/?nav=fo

(Scroll down toward the bottom).

[Kieraganion]

The film does evoke 9/11: in the gray ash that covers the hero after the first attack, the posters of the missing, the incomprehension of the populace, the presence of the ships—reminiscent of sleeper cells—underground. What I don't get is why this elicits outrage. Forgive me: I thought movies—even big-budget summer movies—were supposed to confront national traumas. And I don't find even a whiff of exploitation in Spielberg's treatment.

And for those wondering why this stroy was so popular when it was broadcasted on Radio in the thirties:

Those ideas and feelings are not so very different from those on American minds in 1938, when Hitler's armies were gathering strength for their relentless march across Europe. On Halloween night, 23-year-old Orson Welles staged the most famous telling of this famous story on the radio.

In Welles' version, the Martians landed in Grover's Mills, N.J. The story was presented as a news broadcast breaking into to regularly scheduled programming.

The moment coincided -- not coincidentally -- with a musical interlude on a competing and more-popular broadcast. Millions of early channel surfers never heard the introductions and disclaimers at the beginning of the broadcast.

For them the alien invasion was very real indeed.

Thousands upon thousands of Americans, believing the end of the world as we know it was at hand, fled their homes, thus causing injuries and deaths.

For first time, the sheer power of mass media was on display. The next morning, Orson Welles' apology went out to the world.