In the extra's window

You know how, in the movies, when there is a disaster - a bomb explodes, or a UFO crashes into a building, something along those lines - the camera pans a long a series of human reactions from non-characters? These are the extra's roles. It may be a couple eating at a patio cafe, a mother pushing a stroller, children playing in a park. Usually, these extras are women and children, our society's most vulnerable. We see the shock, horror, fear, chaos and confusion in their faces, the human face of the disaster. Then, within 10 seconds or maybe even less, the camera moves on and gets back to the proper story with the main characters as they go about trying to save or destroy the world, as written. We never see those faces again; they were only used to set the stage for the stars.

Do you ever wonder what happened to those people, to the extras, the mood-setters? The camera zooms in on a window into a living room. It is an average house, on an average street, in the kind of city where most people's lives go basically the same way their parents' did and not much ever happens. On a threadbare burgundy couch, a woman sits nursing an infant. She is gazing sleepily at the television, juggling the baby a little to reach her coffee on floor by her feet. (They don't have a coffeetable, despite the woman's constant nagging at her husband to make one.) On the tv, the morning news program chatters on. The older gray haired man banters in the fatherly-yet-flirtatious way with his blond female costar. The background is an image of the Twin Towers in New York City. I wonder if that is really a window, or if it's a picture? the woman muses.

Then, without the breeze so much as shifting, one of the buildings seems to.. crack? fold? There is a fireball there now. Is it a picture? Maybe a preview of a movie? Buildings don't just crack. How does this fit with what they were just saying? I don't get it. The fire is everywhere now, and the calm, kindly older man changes. He taps into some other phase of life where he was a reporter. His demeanor changes completely, and forces the viewer to realize that something has happened in Real Life. Time stands still. The woman's face freezes, except her eyes which flit around trying to make this make sense. She holds the baby tighter, to increase the sense of him, so she doesn't drop him. If she were a robot, this is when she would say "does not compute." As a human, what she says is "oh fuck. I don't...what? oh no. no. oh fuck no."

But it isn't over. These were planes. They hit the buildings. They were intended to hit the buildings. And they did. And there are more planes. Another hit the Pentagon. More fire, more chaos and crying, but still it isn't over. There is a map on the television now, and it looks familiar, even through the shock-induced blur. The image is... here. Another plane is near here. Near home. The television is talking (it doesn't matter now which faces are which... and she will never remember) about possible "targets" for the other plane. Places she knows very well... where she works, a few miles from her, from her home from her family. Still, her eyes barely flit and flicker, and she tries to remember to breathe, at least a little. Then that plane is down, too. Close to home, but not at her home. She breathes a shakey breath, and stands up, just to remember how.

The camera zooms out now, to the main scene, where the action is and where people will remember. In the silence, alone with her newborn, the woman paces in her echoing, empty house a while. Then she starts making phone calls, trying to remember who is where, who is likely safe, and who may have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Things won't be the same, not for a long time and likely not in her lifetime. Something has changed, not only for the people directly affected in the main scenes, but for the extras like her, the irrelevant ones.

I overreact to violent movies and television. I realize this. There is some place where fear and terror and chaos as "entertainment" don't work for me. The camera may go on to the main characters, to the stars of the show. The heroes may even save the world, after a good fight. But for the extras, the woman on the couch, the couple at the patio restaurant and the mother with the stroller, changes happened in those brief moments which won't un-happen just because there's nobody watching. I can't help but remember those faces the camera panned over in those 10 seconds. They feel more real to me than the heroes. I know it's me. It's just me. It's all me. But then again, it's me.