Why did the 9/11 'falling man' image disappear?

It’s a wonderful documentary, and has some very interesting stuff to say about the relative palatabilities of the stories of the fireman and other emergency responders who died and the stories of those who jumped.

The deaths of the firemen are horrible, but they’re within a narrative that helps us to withstand them - they died bravely, knowing they were in danger, knowing they were doing good, knowing they were doing their job. They were the ones who were running into danger when others were away. Still sad, but you can extract something tolerable from it.

The people who jumped though - what can you say? That they were scared enough of burning to death that they jumped out of a window. There’s no way to construct a reassuring narrative from that. Though in fact…

It’s the most horrific moment but there is a calmness to the image.

The documentary talks about the eerie and beautiful calmness of this picture, but it also admits that this calm is not present in other frames from the same sequence - that it’s just an illusion. There is no reassurance to be had - it’s just unremittingly bad. Which in essence is what the whole movie says - that this is a story that is hard to tell in a way that people can be comfortable hearing.

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[quote=“ixx, post:13, topic:32575”]
Journalists, editors, newspeople, were also (obviously) people affected by the tragedy - they just all couldn’t do it. [/quote]

As with any extreme statement (all, always, never) this one is inaccurate.

They decided it was too much, based on gauging their own raw personal response to it.

Oh, now is that what they decided? All of ‘them’? You’re quite the mindreader.

Whenever I see ESP and future-telling on display in a short comment, I wonder about the veracity, or self awareness, of the one leaving the comment.

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As someone who loves language and totally supports your OTHER off-brand use of the word, it just doesn’t work in this sentence. :stuck_out_tongue:

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It truly gets better and better because not only do we have gerrymander and gerrymangle, but now thanks to you we have the concept of words as drugs: pharmacolexicography. Tight tight tight!

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What strikes me the worst is that there was not even a single attempt by any of the jumpers to retard the fall somehow. No attempt to use clothing as improvised parachute. Not anything else. Just… dumb jumping.

And there are enough accidents in aircraft mishaps and parachuting to provide evidence a high-altitude fall can be survived with some luck and some effort and some injury on impact.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation using equations for model-rocket streamers shown that a few meters length of an office carpet torn off the floor could slow down the fall speed quite significantly. I am not sure how well the equations scale here, and would not mind if someone with more aerodynamics knowledge pipes in.

I doubt that people trapped in a burning building would think that far. I also doubt that office carpets can be torn off from the floor that easily. The few times I removed glued on carpet it was messy and hard work and quite impossible if one didn’t have a knife/cutter and a spatula.

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I didn’t realize victim blaming was cool again.

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Not sure if driving trollies or serious…

Sometimes it’s really hard to read irony, and if I’ve missed it here, I’ll delete this post.

If I had to choose between being burned to death in the next several seconds vs. jumping to a clean death some hundreds of feet to pavement, I know I would choose the latter every time.

If I had the time to improvise a parachute, I don’t think I could ever work up the nerve to jump, at least not from above the tenth floor or so. I would have been one of those on the roof waiting for helicopter rescue when the building collapsed.

The only thing worse than burning to death would be to jump and somehow slow the fall just enough to barely survive, horribly mangled at the base of building, wishing to die, but being unable to move because I had broken every bone in my body, only to see the tower fall on me after the fact.

I don’t think I’m prepared to declare the choice any of the jumpers made to be “dumb.”

Desperate, highly personal, and not subject to second-guessing would be more like it.

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I call myself wrong and retract the argument.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImprovisedParachute - the “Real Life” section at the bottom, Sadly, no more details.

True, though you do hear about dental-floss tycoons. Or used to, anyway. (Yes, I’m paying attention too.)

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It didn’t disappear, it just happened 13 years ago. I was there so it does seem to me like it was yesterday, but it should now be taken in a historical context. It’s interesting to know that kids graduating high school today were only 4 or 5 when it happened and likely have a completely different perspective as to what happened.
I actually couldn’t last the first minute because it was the same shots that were played on tv over and over and over again, and I’m relieved that they are no longer being shown.

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I just watched it too, and found it worthwhile in a lot of ways (and it’s 70 mins long, not 90). A lot of those images are still chilling, and also, I think, ways of remembering that day that a lot of Americans would rather forget.

To me, that was the most interesting thinking going on in a very thoughtful doc, about how history is (of course) really a construction, but also about why we construct it in some of the ways we do. Why we, or most of us, emphasize certain parts, and more or less delete others…

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The bottom is where the rescuers are, where there are (still unblocked) roads and ambulances, where the help resources are already amassed. If you can make it down and survive, further help is seconds away. If you have enough attitude control, sacrifice legs as crumple zone to absorb the energy. If you have a trajectory control, aim for a roof of a car or another deformable target; anything is better than hard concrete.

And then I get the flak for not being sufficiently emotional about what’s fundamentally an engineering problem. Sigh. Is there any chance of a serious discussion of chances of survival of an improvised escape from a high-rise building, if we HAVE to build such deathtraps? Such discussions could save lives in the future, in addition to address a problem that is bugging me for years.

No situation is horrible enough to warrant throwing in a towel (though allowances are to be done, panic is a bad master once it sets in - and getting busy with improvising a way out is a way to keep it in bay). I for one would prefer to die trying and failing than waiting.

I kind of remember that after a few days these photos were voluntarily removed from circulation to protect the privacy of the victims in their last moments. There was a moment or two of sanity in the press that week.

Yes, there is, but this thread was never about that. Start a new topic if you really want to engage dispassionately.

I fervently and sincerely hope that neither of us ever have the “opportunity” to test our posited responses to the problem the jumpers faced. I promise not to second guess your choice. Will you do the same for the jumpers?

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I hope as well (and as hell) that I won’t have to test the hypotheses.

The best way to honor the dead is to analyze the causes and their behavior and learn the lessons, so the living can live longer. That applies to my inevitable death as well.

Actually, you can find out the answers to a lot of your questions here:

If you started in the top third of the building, you’d reach the bottom within 10 seconds and at a speed of about 100 mph. I don’t think a car roof would save you, so you’d better aim for the snow covered pine trees instead - they’ve worked more than once before. Any improvised escape would presumably have to be completed within a few minutes and you would have to account for your lack of experience in carpet gliding and the complex wind currents caused by the tall buildings and a huge fire a few floors beneath you. Good luck!

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What the wha?

Oh, I was trying for a Lord Colgate joke, but it was rubbish.