"Good Morning America, it is Charles Gibson, and it's Tuesday, September"
It is hard to ignore the influence the September 11 attacks had on the world and everything that exists in it. Media, culture, politics, society, security- all were affected and changed beyond recognition. Looking back to this event, now 23 years in the past, it is perhaps the nostalgia or the process of becoming an adult that often makes me think, everything was better in the 90s and 2000s, and perhaps I am just blinded by those ethereal feelings.
Under all the grief and suffering caused by the attacks, there is a sense we lost something, I was only 11 months old when this event happened but I always had the feeling the world lost a certain type of innocence (for lack of a better word) and looking back to old videos from that era, it has always felt that way to me.
In my teenage years I went through a period of music discovery, during my exploration of that medium I found the Vaporwave genre, not only did it inspire some of my attitudes nowadays like, looking back to the past and the admiration of retro-technology, architecture, and other cultural topics but it also made me yearn for a past that never existed, I was aware that things have not always been so perfect as we remember daydreaming about it was a fun exercise. This is also when my introduction of the album News at 11 happened.
News at 11 presents us the grief, dreamlike, and pain people suffered during those attacks and asks the question, what if the attacks never happened? The music, gives references to this specific day but it never mentions it directly, after all, it was an uneventful day, the sounds elevate us and make us relaxed, but also, we are aware that things happened so we are always alert if, maybe, only maybe, things decide to change in an instant.
Fans have been trying to create a visual aid to the songs since the album´s release in 2016. They often utilized VHS footage of the NYC area and some random commercials, helpful guides to what the music wanted to evoke. However, I have always felt something was missing, and I always hoped 猫 シ Corp would have made something for us to view while listening to.
Fast-forward to 2024, and while going on my annual September 11 pilgrimage, I noticed something on my recommendation feed, News at 11: Liberty Edition. Reading the description, I saw that this was a collaboration between 猫 シ Corp and CCTV. I immediately put it on, and my experience was one of awe, sadness, and deep empathy.
This film uses more obscure and carefully curated VHS videos that include recordings and commercials of various natures. A prologue was added which puts us in the position of "Remember 9/11? We are going back in time to fix it," the use of an old Apple commercial with various hours while children learn about Manhattan is the first thing we see, followed by trailers related to time movies. The nature of these videos makes the viewer uncomfortable and yet it's weirdly soothing, like having 12 years old and your parents finding out you failed a test.
The movie then proceeds to show us each song and its themes, Goodmorning America is shown like the intro of a news network, 8:46 AM presents different aerial views of Manhattan until we reach the Twin Towers, and so on. I can understand some people finding it pretentious and boring, but I believe it is an honest example of what grief looks like and how we can overcome it, yet, we always ask ourselves, "What would have happened if this didn´t happened?" and that is a valid way to cope with the loss of life in any scale possible.
Perhaps I am not alone with the following statement but this is the closest someone has ever managed to reproduce what nostalgia feels for the 1990s and 2000s, it feels like a dream, a dream of something we are not quite sure happened or not, but we can feel its warmth and it gives us peace in our hearts. Everything feels with soul, even commercials, and that is what nostalgia does to us, perhaps sometimes we need this type of nostalgia rather than the one given to us by corporations like Disney or other big studios.
I will be putting this on my CRT TV on September 11, 2025, to get that sense of nostalgia I desperately need during the final days of the year. I know this is an experimental film, even a glorified music video, but the themes of yearning, grief, coping, nostalgia, and love make this movie one of my favorite pieces of art that has ever existed and created by the human race, no AI, no machine can pull the strings of my heart, soul and mind like 猫 シ Corp has done with News AT 11.
Final Score - 5/5
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