Hero

Phil Collins’ video Hero turns tables on a New York journalist who, like so many other ‘lifestyle’ columnists, found himself having to cover the reality of the lives of those caught in the aftermath of 9/11. Every so often Collins’ arm enters the frame with a mug of whisky, from which the genial hack is obliged to drink, like some terrible reality TV forfeit or an endurance piece of performance art. In the background we can intermittently hear an instrumental version of the Mariah Carey 9/11 hit Hero. Oddly, what begins as an inchoate ramble becomes more cogent as the video proceeds, since segments of the footage have been reassembled in reverse order. In hero the techniques commonly used by the media to manipulate interviewees and viewers becomes the work’s content, along with the journalist’s soliloquy: the off-screen loosening of an interviewee’s tongue with alcohol, the colouring of the sentiments of a story through soundtrack and the strategic distortion of a sequence of events through the editing process. A real drama’s collision with its communicative effects through the media coverage were the events of 9/11. In Phil Collins’s early and rarely shown video hero (2002, DVD, 40min) a New York reporter stands in front of the camera delivering his own personal version of the events of September 11, 2001 – as if “freely associating” or undertaking a “talking cure,” albeit assisted by alcohol. Together both soy mi madre and its counterpoint hero make reference to the late 1990s in the USA and the following Bush years and their reflection in the media.