Too Close for comfort

When Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, my first thought was of Oskar Schell. Not exactly the precocious protagonist of Jonathan Safran Foer’s soul-moving post-9/11 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, whose father dies when the Twin Towers collapse, but the real Oskars out there, the children left dealing with the loss of a parent in a tragedy the rest of the country can only feel at an arm’s distance.

For most of us outside of New York City, the anguish and anger over the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is intellectual. But for the Oskars, it is frightfully personal, loud and close. Foer’s book is now a major motion picture starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock.

Of course, we outsiders have felt some effects. Friends and family have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Our bodies have been subject to TSA groping and our psyches to those Orwellian amber alerts. Our wallets are straining under the $75 billion tab at Homeland Security—additional expenditures cost-benefit analysts say might be justified if they thwarted 1,667 attacks every year. As I write this on Sept. 11, 2011, we haven’t been struck again, yet the country is just as unsure of its relationship to the tragedy as if we had been. Commentators are debating whether we are commemorating too much, while New York officials and New York residents clash over the “Ground Zero Mosque” and details of the National 9/11 Memorial. What a luxury.

My generation, so far removed from the shock of Pearl Harbor and the Grind House gore of JFK’s assassination, was a legion of Oskars, our imaginary bubble of safety lanced with passenger jets and box cutters. Foer’s young creation seems designed to resonate with older, Google-generation readers who know just about everything except what exactly to do with themselves.

Oskar Schell busies himself with a dozen hobbies and interests, and when he’s not studying entomology, creating jewelry or folding origami, he dreams up surreally complex inventions—most designed to protect people or animals from harm.

He’s a precocious chatterbox, filled with so much trivia and ephemera precisely because the deep hole left by his father—the one hollowed out by the grief and longing he doesn’t yet understand—must be filled with something. So why not fill it with everything?

After finding a key in an envelope marked “Black” in his father’s closet, Oskar believes it is one final puzzle game his brainy dad is playing with him and sets out across the city to find the right person with the last name “Black.”

Oskar becomes obsessed with a key that has no lock in order to overcome a grief that has no solution. But maybe the very search for meaning is the kind of conclusion Oskar needs to move on, as if traversing Manhattan is the only way to walk past the pain.

Commemorating too much? Maybe for those flipping between 24-hour news channels, but for the Oskars, every day is a chance to commemorate. Every memory is a memorial.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close expands wide Jan. 20. Read The Movie Filter weekly at 225batonrouge.com.