The American Journal of Semiotics. Volume 17, Number 3, Fall 2001.
PRINTED AUGUST 2002. Pages 117-131.
�The
Semiotics of Media Images from Independence Day & September 11th 2001�
Elliot
Gaines
Wright State University
1. Toward a Relevant Truth of Media Images
The events of September 11, 2001 have altered assumptions about how people in the USA understand the context of their lives. Many people watched news coverage of the events on television. While unified by shock, grief, fear and outrage, media discourse surrounding the meanings of events and the subsequent matter of determining what to do, inevitably takes up different political points of view. Because of the complexities of politics, history, and the limits of information available, the pervasive public discourse seeking the meaning of the events is dominated in American media, not so much by facts, but by rational appeals advancing partisan perspectives. As Charles Sanders Peirce stated:
If one�s desire is neither to excite an idea nor to record a fact but to make a rational appeal, the only sort of sign that can possibly answer that purpose is that which represents its object by virtue of the disposition of the interpreter,¾that is to say, a Symbol (1998: 461).
Thus, the veracity of such appeals is limited to the symbolic nature of the discursive sign. Images of the events are also simultaneously symbols and signs of the meanings relating to things that actually happened. The sign functions as an index referring to the actual occurrences (of September 11, 2001) while the symbolic nature of the images evoke connotative meanings. Connotations are understood as the meanings implied as a consequence of something, perceived from within a particular context or cultural understanding. What one accepts as real is often based on beliefs that may or may not be true. Knowledge is an embodied sense of lived experience mediated through cultural myths traditionally conceived to account for the inevitable and inexplicable in life.
Televised images of the events of September 11, 2001 were repeated again and again to become part of a collective, intersubjective consciousness. The images broadcast that day, and repeated since, suggest an intertextual reference to the popular science-fiction, comedy, adventure film, Independence Day (Emmrich 1996). The purpose of my analysis is to apply Peirce�s semiotic to explore those mediated images in an attempt to understand a basic, relevant truth that they represent to the observer.
2. Peirce�s Semiotic and the Nature of Truth in Media
Communication accomplished
through mass media such as film or television is always, by definition, remote
from direct experience of actual events represented as real. Yet, for the
receiver, perception is experienced as immediate and real. The authority and
validity of media news and information is established through conventional
signs, or symbols that represent objects or meanings understood from habit. A
symbol is a kind of sign that is �connected with its object by virtue of the
idea of the symbol-using mind, without which no such connection would exist�
(Peirce 1998, 9). Lanigan points out that communication technology is a sign,
not of the media, but of the spontaneous conjunction of human expression and
embodied perception (1997, 381-387). The semiotic process of a symbol
simultaneously stands for its referent by virtue of its understood sameness (reality)
and opposition (fiction) to an object within a televised system of signs. That
is, a mediated sign can simultaneously represent reality, and be a symbol
denoting something unique to the interpretant. For example, the image on the
television screen is not the real thing that it represents in time and space,
but it may stand for some aspect of reality�a real person or event. Herein lies
the problematic of media and the nature of truth.
Peirce states that there is a �logical necessity�that
a sign should be true to a real object� (1998: 306), yet he defines a symbol
�as a sign which is fit to serve as such simply because it is so interpreted�
(307). The symbol is a sign that �denotes a kind of thing� that may lack any
resemblance, similarity, or existential connection to its referent (Peirce
1998: 9). The social world of communication shares the meaning of a symbol.
�Television creates a form of embodiment that is the essence of capacity
symbolized�captured in the cultural theater of memory. The World is spatially
located and enframed in the TV set in front of which we sit and watch and
listen� (Lanigan 1997: 388). �Symbols grow,� and develop from other symbols,
and thus their significance is shared among people (Peirce 1998: 10). According to Lanigan, �images on
television symbolize persons and a person is a symbol of consciousness
speaking� (1997: 389). The nature of television is symbolic in that the text
and images do not disappear when the television is shut off. Television
discourse is a symbol that ��lives in the minds of those who use it� (Peirce
1998: 10). Thus, because of its discursive nature, media acts as the voice, the
eyes, the ears, the mind, and the heart of a shared cultural reality.
The images of mass media
necessarily take up a particular point of view that is understood to
symbolically represent the world. The significance of a symbol is determined by
its interpretant (Peirce 1998: 322), but is true only insofar as the meaning is
shared. Peirce maintains, however, that truth only exists in the relationship
between the sign and its object, and outside the necessity of the interpretant.
�Truth is the conformity of a representation to its object�its object, ITS object, mind you�.
So, then, a sign, in order to fill its office, to actualize its potency, must
be compelled by its object� (Peirce 1998: 380). This hypothesis suggests
bracketing interpretation in order to recognize the essence of the relationship
between the sign as (first) expression of communication, and its (second)
object or meaning. In so far as this is possible, a sign can stand for truth
when semiosis is limited to secondness and a denotative meaning.
Peirce
distinguishes that which is true from what he calls real, and he is careful to
explain that something can be real and still not exist beyond thought (1958:
419-20). A sign in the mind of an interpreter is real, but as we know from
experience, sometimes we can be mistaken and that notion may turn out not to be
true. Peirce uses the term �Denotation� to express the �Object of a Sign� and
according to his critical logic, the object of a sign is true regardless of
what anyone or any group believes (1958: 421). For example, the �World Trade
Center� denotes a collection of buildings�physical structures where people live
or work in a controlled space. At
the denotative level, the World Trade Center is not yet taken as a symbol.
A
symbol uses the denotative sign to refer to its object and �essentially takes a
part for its whole� (Peirce 1998: 322). Eco further defines denotation as having
a �cultural unit or semantic property� corresponding to its referent, whereas
connotation does not necessarily correspond to its referent (1976: 86). As
arbitrary signs, symbols such as words determine the semantic correspondence
between the sign and its object. Connotation uses the denotative sign, but �not
necessarily corresponding to a culturally recognized property of the possible
referent (Eco 1976: 86). Connotation takes the denotative sign to a second
order of signification. That is, the denotative, or a specific, culturally
agreed upon meaning of a word or any sign, can be taken in a unique and
specific context to add to, or embellish the meaning. Connotation, then, is a
denotative sign that retains its symbolic nature, but adds another, higher level
of interpretant (Gaines 2001). The �World Trade Center� denotes a collection of
buildings, but on a connotative level, they represented specific,
distinguishing qualities of the sign�perhaps interpreted as the awesome power
of world commerce. Depending on cultural perspective, the connotative sign of
the World Trade Center can be read as a symbol of multiple and even conflicting
values. Following Peirce, then, the truth is necessarily limited to the sign/object
relationship, yet the meaning of a symbol is by definition determined through
shared interpretation. Therefore, while a symbol is always real, it may not be actual.
The
purpose of the following analysis is to look for what is actual in the intertextual
relationship between images of the film, Independence Day and the broadcast images of
the destruction of September 11th.
3. Analysis: Independence Day and the Destruction of
the World Trade Center
Two
media clips are thematically linked for the analytical purpose of my analysis.
The first is the broadcast of the events of September 11, 2001 and the World
Trade Center. The second
represents similar events, but is taken from the popular commercial film, Independence
Day. The
events are similar, but the film was enjoyed as entertainment while the
destruction of the World Trade Center was understood as an all-too-real tragic event. The
analysis will test Peirce�s theory that the true meaning of any sign (representamen) is embodied within the
relationship between the expression of communication and the object, or meaning
to which it refers.
Peirce
insists that sign relations always exist in threes; the interpretant relates
individually to the sign, and to the object (1998: 482). The interpretant
necessarily occupies a distinct embodied knowledge that defines its own context
of perspective. So, each potential interpreter inhabits an individual embodied
history and knowledge that makes the meaning of the sign specific to the
conditions of perception. Only in the relation between the sign and its object
is there a potential for objectivity. But of course, Peirce�s triadic sign
relations already assume the impossibility of objective truth. Thus, in order
to avoid presuppositions of any objective truth, performing a phenomenological
epoch� isolates the sign and its object (Lanigan 1988: 29-30). By bracketing
the interpretant, thick description explicates the nature and essential
characteristics of the sign and its object.
4. Abduction, Intertextuality, and the Hermeneutic
Circle
The
events of September 11, 2001 have altered the significance of much in peoples�
lives. Images of the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon were broadcast
around the world. Like most Americans, I was drawn to the TV when I heard the
news, and I was stunned and horrified when I watched the second airliner enter
the image on the screen and crash into the World Trade Center. After a while, I
felt that I didn�t want to watch any more. Partly out of habit, and partly
because I was afraid to miss anything, I put a tape in my VCR and recorded NBC
for the next two hours. Later, several people described what I had sensed; for
many Americans the televised images seemed like they were right out of a
contemporary movie. The popular film, Independence Day immediately came to mind.
This seems to have been a shared perception. During
the broadcast, an NBC reporter Ron Insana, who had been close to the buildings
when they collapsed, was interviewed. He commented that his experience was �like a scene out
of Independence Day (Insana 2001). According to Peirce,
When it happens that a new belief comes to one consciously
generated from a previous belief�an event which can only occur in consequence
of some third belief (stored away in some dark closet of the mind, as a habit
of thought) being in a suitable relation to that second one�I call the event
inference or reasoning (1998: 463).
The significance of Insana�s reference to the film is
that his real experience was �generated from a previous belief� suggesting that stored
away in his mind was the notion that scenes from Independence Day�s fiction narrative could
represent reality. Without thoroughly articulating theoretical distinctions,
this process of abduction or inference also suggests a hermeneutic circle or
intertextuality that necessarily builds new knowledge upon previous experience.
Similarly, Peirce called this process the argument cycle in the application of
logic thought (Lanigan 1995).
Explaining
this phenomenon through intertexuality, the narrative text of Independence
Day established
a sequence of events and images representing a particular quality of
destruction as a visual spectacle. The visual spectacle is heightened by the
symbolic significance of buildings being destroyed in both September 11th
and Independence Day. A paradigm is represented by the characteristics of mediated imagery depicting
famous US landmarks dramatically destroyed by attacks from the air. September
11th thus paradigmatically refers to Independence Day.
Signs
always refer to other signs, and meaning grows from this semiosic process of
abduction [rule + result = case]. The language of film and other mass media
have become conventional, but were introduced only a short time ago in the
context of human communication history. A na�ve audience, uninitiated to cinematic
codes of signification, would necessarily make inferences based upon previously
establish knowledge and beliefs. Consider the situation on December 28, 1895 in
Paris when Auguste and Louis Lumiere showed their films to one of the earliest
audiences in the world to ever see motion pictures. The films were short,
simple recordings of everyday events including �The Arrival of a Train at La
Ciotat� (Barsam 1992: 3). The train was a sign and an emblem for the industrial
revolution, a symbol of progress and the grandeur of the times. Just two months
earlier in October 1895, there was a well publicized news item about a railroad
accident that occurred when a train went out of control and killed a pedestrian
at the station. With no previous experience with the medium, people watching
the film only saw what they recognized as a real train coming directly at them,
and the naive spectators were frightened that the image would emerge from the
screen and overrun them (Barsam 1992: 3-7). A spectator is not �outside� an
event since consciousness only knows itself by perceiving things (Madison 1990:
147-8). Perception of an incident or spectacle in the media is an
intersubjective, situational perspective of the lived body in relation to the
world. So, knowledge and familiarity with media has normalized the perception
of signs that might otherwise be read as threatening. Such a semiotic shift in
the meanings of signs is built upon knowledge and repetition. In the NBC News
report selected for this analysis, six video tape clips of the World Trade
Center towers collapsing were repeated in less than three minutes.
The
following analysis focuses on two video subjects of approximately six minutes
each. In order to look for the semiotic truth within the broadcast images of
September 11th, the criteria for selection emerged from a
spontaneous abductive insight (Peirce 1998: 227). Independence Day serves as the ground of
comparative analysis, because I argue that the mind searches knowledge and
experience in order to understand new phenomena. In this context, the sample
from the film Independence Day provides the narrative qualities that embody the
paradigmatic character of the situation and images of the events of September
11th. The video sample of September 11th was captured coincidentally
around 10:30 A.M. when I decided I could no longer watch the televised reports
and began a two hour video recording of the broadcast of NBC News.
The
semiotic method of analysis of video begins with a concise denotative
description of the syntagmatic narrative. Each paradigm in the story is defined
within its assumed, mediated context, suspending disbelief, and focusing on the
spatial/temporal structure of its sequence of events. The two narratives are
distinctly coded as fiction and reality.
These opposing identities are bracketed so that the essential qualities
of signs from the two samples can be analyzed. In the final interpretation, the character of reality and
fiction are reconsidered.
4.1. Analysis: Independence Day
The
scene from Independence Day depicts an attack from alien space ships. The attack is
timed and coordinated around the world, but the film specifically features the
destruction of the Empire State Building, the White House, and another
prominent skyscraper in Los Angeles. The Empire State Building is struck from
above by the aliens� weapon blast that implodes the top stories causing them to
collapse the successive floors below. With graphic detail from various visual
perspectives, this imaging is repeated with the White House and the Los Angeles
skyscraper. The repetition and alternative points-of-view constitute a visual
parallel to the visual spectacle of NBC News coverage of September 11th,
the World Trade Center collapsing, the Pentagon attack, and the Pennsylvania plane
crash.
The
filmic sequences jump from location to location in order to develop the main
characters of the story. Aside from codes of science-fiction and adventure, comedy is significant in that the
filmmaker is essentially telling the audience to take the film lightly.
Harvey Firestein is specifically developed as a comic
relief character�a side-kick to the hero, Jeff Goldblum�early in the film. His
exaggerated, humorous stereotype is stuck in traffic, trying to make a phone
call to his analyst while the aliens get into position to bomb the city. There
are street sounds from cars and chaos.
Cut
to the First Lady evacuating Los Angeles by helicopter, and adventure music
becomes audible. As na�ve onlookers gaze up at the aliens positioning
themselves over the Empire State Building, the music shifts to dreamy, angelic
voices. Meanwhile, government workers scurry away from the White House and
pulsing adventure music is heard again.
The Presidential party boards Air Force One.
Passengers include the Jeff Goldblum as the hero/science wizard that is out to
save the world. As the adventure music comes to a peak, Goldblum refers to his
computer that has been tracking the alien�s countdown. The music peaks, then
quiets, as a wide-eyed, close-up of Goldblum appears, softly saying �time�s
up!�
At
that point, the alien ships open and fire a destructive, explosive flaming ray
with an electronic hissing sound. Buildings explode radiating flames with wind
and a blast reminiscent of images of atomic warfare. Explosions and fire sweep
through a sequence of images. Eerily quiet hissing and whistling sounds
suggesting that they are so loud that they manifest as a deafening roar. As the
Empire State Building explodes from the top down, debris, cars and bodies fly
through the air. Coded as comedy, Harvey Firestein gets a laugh from the
audience as he looks up and sees the explosion coming toward him. He says, �Oh
crap� just before a flying car appears to land on him. Seen from the
perspective of a couple sitting in a car, another body falls with a thud on to
the hood. Fire tears through buildings and over fleeing people. Slow motion
emphasizes the panic, and especially the spectacle of explosions and flames and
flying objects. The sequence ends with adventure music as Will Smith�s
girlfriend finds shelter from the explosion with her son, and her dog leaps
into her arms just as the flames fly by. The entire sequence was intentionally
crafted with artistic precision to be perceived as an amusing entertainment
spectacle.
4.2. Analysis: September 11, 2001 on NBC
There
are three separate video tape clips selected from the NBC broadcast of
September 11th. The first is a sequence based on an interview with
Ron Insana, a reporter for MSNBC, not long after the collapse of the World Trade
Center buildings in New York City. Insana appeared with his hair and suit coat
covered with debris because he had been at the site of the World Trade Center
at the time of the collapse. Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, and Matt Lauer ask him
about his experience. Insana (2001) describes his story with animated hand and
eye gestures saying:
... as we were going across the street, we were not terribly far from the World Trade Center building, the south tower. As we were cutting across a, a quarantine zone actually, the building began disintegrating. And we heard it and looked up and started to see elements of the building come down and we ran, and honestly it was like a scene out of Independence Day. Everything began to rain down. It was pitch black around us as the wind was ripping through the corridors of lower Manhattan.
Insana�s reference to Independence Day is significant. As a reporter
in front of an international audience, he knows the intertextual reference to
the film will be understood as a commonly known cultural text. In addition, his reference indicates
his cognitive process for making sense of his own experience. He goes onto say,
�It was a very deep gray smoke. It
was, it was, in all honesty it looked like a nuclear winter, the type of thing
you see in the movies with ash all over the ground, on top of cars, on police
cars, on windows . . .�
Again, Insana made reference
to nuclear holocaust film genre in media entertainment. As he begins to speak,
his name and affiliation with CNBC�s Business Center appears on the lower third
of the TV screen. The camera moves to a single shot of Insana and zooms in
slowly for dramatic effect as he speaks. He gestures with his hands, and looks
up as he says, �I looked up!� The image cuts to the smoking south tower, which
then collapses. Insana says, �What that looks like there was mild compared to
what it was like to be at the center!� The immediate sign is his embodied
experience. As he watches the video, his memory and the dynamic sign of the
recorded image, both of them mediated signs, negotiate the final interpretant.
During this short interview,
six edited video clips appear over the voices describing the plane crashing
into the second building with different views of the subsequent collapses.
Brokaw comments, �America has been changed today...� Couric interrupts to read
an �upsetting wire that just came across the wire from the West Bank.� She
continued saying:
Thousands of Palestinians celebrated Tuesday�s terror attacks
in the United States chanting �God is great� and distributing candy to passers
by even as their leader, Yasir Arafat said he was horrified. The U.S.
government has become increasingly unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in
the past year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting (NBC 2001).
Later in the same report, she read the identical copy
to narrate video of Palestinian demonstrators. Graphics on the screen
identified the footage as �Earlier This
Morning.� NBC later acknowledged that it had committed a breach of
ethics by using archive video footage with an unverified wire report. Only
through convention do we assume the indexical nature of an image grounded by
the text of the news. The image was not actually acquired September 11th
as an authentic Palestinian celebration of the attack against the US. The image
was selected from an archive as a global sign to imply Islamic extremism as the
enemy.
Tom Brokaw narrated another
exemplar video clip from NBC, September 11th. He said, �we are not
going to do this in a gratuitous way, but to give you an idea of what happened
we have an astonishing piece of video tape of the second airplane going into
the World Trade Center� (NBC 2001). The image was played in slow motion �so you
can see that is, in fact, an airliner� (Brokaw 2001, NBC). The video was astonishing,
but it was also gratuitous in that the inference of the horror of the event was
re-signified as an entertainment spectacle. So, the aesthetic appeal of images
of September 11th entertainment (Independence Day) grounded the semiotic
process of interpreting images of, and finally the images of September 11th
became an attempted, but failed, entertainment spectacle.
If these video clips were all
reduced to only images out of the context of fiction or reality, could they
reasonably stand as signs that share an essential iconic quality in relation to
their respective objects? Regardless of politics or perspective, they denote
violence and destruction. Playing the video images back to back on the same TV,
the only things that distinguish the character of the signs are the codes that ground our understanding
of one intended as real and the other as fiction.
Repetition does not alter the
sign�s relation to its object. Repetition does engender familiarity, which
further promotes conventional interpretation, but only in a context already
coded for the interpretant. The violence in Independence Day, coded as fiction, constructs
a narrative binary opposition that clearly identifies good against evil. The
available images representing the events of September 11th, using
inferences drawn from Independence Day�s sign/object relations, construct a narrative
paradigm based upon the same themes, but coded as reality. The analysis
indicates a shift in the potential to interpret fiction. While audiences may
claim to understand the distinctions between images coded as fiction from those
representing reality, the events of September 11th suggest that the
pleasure and entertainment value of images of violence coded as entertainment
will henceforth be interpreted from oppositional knowledge of images
experienced as real. The truth of the two images is consciously the same in actual experience.
5. Critical Media Analysis and the Semiotic of Peirce
The comparative analysis of
the media clips reveals several signs of the postmodern condition. First, the
human experience of being in the world, or seeing and hearing the world on
television, are already mediated by memories of other media experience. Fiction
and non-fiction are both mediated popular texts�the convergence of human experience
expressed through technology (Lanigan 1997: 381-387). Ron Insana narrates his
memory of Independence Day, broadcast on television, while watching images of his own
experience on September 11th.
Second, the television image
is a symbol of real human experience, but the iconic qualities of the sign are arbitrarily,
and conventionally signified as true. The stereotypical images of Arab,
mid-eastern-looking people celebrating on a street could be falsely anchored to
a specific people from a designated time and place.
Finally, cinematic techniques
coded as real or fiction, are freely exchanged to represent its opposite. When
Brokaw narrated the slow-motion video of the plane crashing into the second
World Trade Center building, he accomplished the same accent on detail,
tension, and spectacle, as any cinema director making a movie.
In order to confront the
complexities of media analysis from critical perspectives, audiences need to
recognize the structures of meaning embedded in the processes of media communication.
Semiotic methods offer ways to organize and structure one�s observations of the
world. Learning to think semiotically helps one to recognize the
characteristics of perception and experience that communicate meaning. Media
images constitute particular representations of the world. Peirce theorized a
necessary trichotomy of relations that are always present in the process of
communicating meaning. Following Peirce, my analysis approached the nature of
truth as it exists in the relationship between a sign and its object or
meaning. The third component of the sign relation is the interpretant, which is
always situated within an historical embodiment of experience and knowledge.
The interpretant always manifests a potential for multiple interpretations of
meaning. Meaning then, always depends upon the context of knowledge based on
past experience.
The notion of objectivity
suggests the possibility of bracketing such a personal perspective in order to
recognize the essential qualities of the relationship between the expression of
meaning and the object to which it refers. But considering that the
interpretant is situated in time and space, limited by a particular
point-of-view, the truth is obscured by the intentionality of an interpreter.
Media, in contrast, can be used to shift the communicative aspects of time and
space, and image and text. Thus, if we are to explore the notion of truth, the
interpretant must recognize the conditions of individual perspective,
knowledge, and bias. Still, the discourse of media is a sign that represents,
but is not that which it represents. Meaning is the fallible, socially constructed
interpretation of the truth located in the relationship between the sign and
its object, but finally interpreted from an arbitrary embodied perspective.
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