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A review by gregbrown
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America by Susan Faludi
5.0
An astonishingly informative and intelligent and relentless book, albeit one that really changes gears about two-thirds through. The book starts by dissecting the shift in post-9/11 discourse as the media—unable to track down Bin Laden, explain how or why it happened, or find any emotional closure—reverted back to a traditional narrative of women being in danger and men charging in to save them and sacrifice themselves. This doesn't sound all that dangerous, until Faludi goes into incredible and horrific detail about the ways media narratives shifted and bowdlerized themselves to fit this narrative and exalt older ideas of masculinity while reducing females.
We'd expect this kind of behavior from some of the media figures like Mark Steyn and The New York Post. And others, like Christopher Hitchens (and, unmentioned in the book, Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons), were sort of pushed over the edge into a neoconservative lunacy by having to mentally grapple with the attack. But you wouldn't expect this kind of talk from Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter, in charge of a magazine whose purpose is largely to be as boring as possible. Yet he did go there, and quite a few other mainstream commentators did too.
This trend didn't just end with the invasion of Afghanistan and other cathartic measures, continuing up to and through the 2004 presidential election. Faludi even devotes a whole chapter to the story of Jessica Lynch, a damsel-in-distress myth largely concocted up by this asshole but eagerly lapped up and perpetuated by a compliant media. As someone who was 15 when the September 11th attacks happened, this first section of the book was frustrating beyond belief as I confronted my own inability—albeit in high school—to see through these narratives as they were built. And it drives me crazy that they continue to this day (listening to this audio).
The last third of the book almost feels bolted on at first: a historical accounting of how the damsel-in-distress myth became entangled with American identity during the wars with Native Americans. Some of the earliest American works of literature were captivity narratives, the stories of people captured by Native Americans who eventually—through escape, ransom, or armed attack—were able to rejoin their original societies. But while the earliest featured earnest accounts of female ingenuity, they gradually turned into virginal women unable to cope with their vicious captors, only able to hold on long enough for their heroic men to ride in and rescue them. Even real-life captivity narratives that didn't fit this trend were often fictionalized a few years later with few changes outside of diminishing the role of women and changing the names around slightly. Faludi also traces how this narrative slowly metastasized throughout larger and larger circles of American culture, first in the Salem Witch Trials—which she convincingly recasts as a means to terrify independent women—and later in the postbellum south's captivity stories that substituted black men for the original's indian savages.
This last section is different in both sweep and method from the first two-thirds, and doesn't have the sense of urgency and necessity as a critique of our own times. It leads me to believe that this book was originally written differently, with the historical stuff preceding the media criticism. I imagine Faludi (or her editor) rearranged the book to grip the reader faster—or emphasize the present-day narrative to sell more copies. Either way, I think this book would be much more effective reading the last third before everything else, as it seems to lead up to and contextualize Faludi's far more devastating fact-gathering on the present day. My fiancee is even about to read through the book for the first time in that fashion, and will report back whether it really seems to cohere in that sense.
Either way, this is a fantastic book that deserves to be read by everyone, whether you're truly interested in the sociological and historical aspects of this narrative or simply interested in being a good person who is thoughtful about what you say..
We'd expect this kind of behavior from some of the media figures like Mark Steyn and The New York Post. And others, like Christopher Hitchens (and, unmentioned in the book, Orson Scott Card and Dan Simmons), were sort of pushed over the edge into a neoconservative lunacy by having to mentally grapple with the attack. But you wouldn't expect this kind of talk from Newsweek editor Jonathan Alter, in charge of a magazine whose purpose is largely to be as boring as possible. Yet he did go there, and quite a few other mainstream commentators did too.
This trend didn't just end with the invasion of Afghanistan and other cathartic measures, continuing up to and through the 2004 presidential election. Faludi even devotes a whole chapter to the story of Jessica Lynch, a damsel-in-distress myth largely concocted up by this asshole but eagerly lapped up and perpetuated by a compliant media. As someone who was 15 when the September 11th attacks happened, this first section of the book was frustrating beyond belief as I confronted my own inability—albeit in high school—to see through these narratives as they were built. And it drives me crazy that they continue to this day (listening to this audio).
The last third of the book almost feels bolted on at first: a historical accounting of how the damsel-in-distress myth became entangled with American identity during the wars with Native Americans. Some of the earliest American works of literature were captivity narratives, the stories of people captured by Native Americans who eventually—through escape, ransom, or armed attack—were able to rejoin their original societies. But while the earliest featured earnest accounts of female ingenuity, they gradually turned into virginal women unable to cope with their vicious captors, only able to hold on long enough for their heroic men to ride in and rescue them. Even real-life captivity narratives that didn't fit this trend were often fictionalized a few years later with few changes outside of diminishing the role of women and changing the names around slightly. Faludi also traces how this narrative slowly metastasized throughout larger and larger circles of American culture, first in the Salem Witch Trials—which she convincingly recasts as a means to terrify independent women—and later in the postbellum south's captivity stories that substituted black men for the original's indian savages.
This last section is different in both sweep and method from the first two-thirds, and doesn't have the sense of urgency and necessity as a critique of our own times. It leads me to believe that this book was originally written differently, with the historical stuff preceding the media criticism. I imagine Faludi (or her editor) rearranged the book to grip the reader faster—or emphasize the present-day narrative to sell more copies. Either way, I think this book would be much more effective reading the last third before everything else, as it seems to lead up to and contextualize Faludi's far more devastating fact-gathering on the present day. My fiancee is even about to read through the book for the first time in that fashion, and will report back whether it really seems to cohere in that sense.
Either way, this is a fantastic book that deserves to be read by everyone, whether you're truly interested in the sociological and historical aspects of this narrative or simply interested in being a good person who is thoughtful about what you say..