Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997) - full transcript

Shouldn't death be a swan dive, graceful,

white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?

History dial, history dial,

history dial history.

History dial, history dial, history dial, history.

The airplane is safe.

Tell me, there had been a report

that the hijacker had asked for some sandwiches.

Did he get those sandwiches?

No, sir.

Everything around us tends



to channel our lives toward some final reality

in print or on film.

Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi

and a question becomes implicit in the event.

Who will write the book and who will play the lovers

in the movie?

Everything seeks its own heightened version.

Nothing happens until it's consumed.

There's the haunted time of the novelist, intimate,

pressing, stale and sad.

Every book is a bug-eyed race, let's face it, must finish.

Can't die yet.

He was often lost.

He got lost in the hotel every time he walked out



of his room and turned left to get to the elevator,

which was consistently to the right.

All plots tend to move deathward.

This is the nature of plots.

Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers' plots,

narrative plots, plots that are part of children's games.

We edge nearer death every time we plot.

It's like a contract that all must sign,

the plotters as well as those who are targets of the plot.

It is a curious knot

that binds novelists and terrorists.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

Years ago, I used to think it was possible for a novelist

to alter the inner life of the culture.

Now, bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory.

They make raids on human consciousness.

What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

When he woke up on the hotel bed,

he was in shorts, still wearing his socks and one shoe.

He'd removed his pants, or someone had,

without taking of his left shoe.

Rides to airports made him quiet and glum.

He listened to news updates on the radio,

curiously excited reports about firemen removing

a burning sofa from a tenement in Watertown.

Mister Brill, you are back among

your family now. How was it like?

It was a gamut of very many emotions,

from surprise to shock, to fear,

to joy, to laughter and then again fear at the end,

yes and almost tragedy, yes.

Well, you were together in that little cabin

with over a hundred people for three days.

What was it like living in that kind of an atmosphere?

Actually, it wasn't bad at all.

It wasn't that small, a 727 is fairly comfortable.

They wanted to create a new revolution around the world.

They were going to North Korea for training, they thought,

and then some further education, politically,

and then on to Cuba.

First films of Cuban rebel leader Fidel Castro

and his ragged force in their mountain stronghold,

made shortly before fighting erupted in all six

of Cuba's provinces.

This is the band, numbered at about 1000

that for 16 months has held out in the rugged

Sierra Maestre Mountains, near the island's eastern tip.

And she came in the cockpit and said,

there's a man back here with the biggest gun you ever saw.

And I just looked at him and he pulled out a shotgun

and put it in my stomach, and said, and tell the captain

we're going to Cuba, and I said, you're kidding.

And repeated it again, he says,

to Cuba or I will kill her.

I said, don't shoot, sit down.

We go to Cuba, we did.

They spoke Spanish.

What did they say?

Havana.

Castro himself has become a figure

of legend in the 16 months since he invaded Oriente province

from a small boat.

The rebels' actual achievements were few

for most of that time but by mere existence and survival,

Castro's force has both grown and exerted an influence

out of all proportion to its size.

And they wanted to come back to Cuba with an airplane.

At the cockpit, there was a another one who came down

with a cowboy-looking outfit on and a regular cowboy gun.

He dragged her up in front of the microphone and said,

everybody put your hands over your head.

We're going to Cuba.

And we went.

A 23 year old Angel Luho, a Puerto Rican,

was sitting here in the last row.

The passenger next to him remembers he was very nervous,

smoking even when the sign said no.

And about an hour and a half out of Kennedy,

Luho made his move.

He walked down the aisle, passed three sky marshals

and forced the 20-year old stewardess, Lucinda Rossen,

to take him up to in the first class lounge.

She called the captain, told him the situation

and in effect, Luho had taken over the plane.

Later, they discovered his only weapons were a ballpoint pen

and a metal comb.

January has been the greatest

month for skyjacking.

11 aircraft there, there were 30 last year and we just

come up to the boiling point now and I think,

something serious has to be done to correct the problem.

You think the writer belongs

to the far margin, doing dangerous things.

In Central America, writers carry guns, they have to.

The state should want to kill all writers.

Every government, every group that holds power

should feel so threatened by writers

that they hunt them down, everywhere.

A women who harbors a terrible secret.

A man with a haunted look.

A man who never comes out of his room.

A woman who stands by the letter box for hours,

waiting for something that never seems to arrive.

A man with no past.

There is a smell about the place of unhappy lives

in the movies.

Today, for the first time,

the black people of the West are beginning to look homeward.

They are beginning to look back toward

the Mother Continent of Africa and they are gaining

spiritual strength from these roots.

The African continent is on the rise,

the Motherland is on the rise and our people

all over the Western hemisphere are looking back

at this rising continent.

And for the first time, not only is the black man

on the African Continent seeking and fighting for his place

in the sun, but his fight is putting the same spirit

in the black people in the West.

And we're also seeking and fighting for our place in the sun

and we will not rest until that place has been secured.

Rosario Serone, Rosario Serone,

please meet your party at gate--

There is no moment on certain days

when he is not thinking terror.

They have us in their power.

In boarding areas, he never sits near windows

in case of flying glass.

He carries a Swedish passport, so that is OK,

unless you believe that terrorists killed

the prime minister.

And he uses codes in his address book for names

and addresses of writers, because how can you tell

if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry.

He's careful about reading matter.

Nothing religious comes with him.

And no pictures of guns or sexy women.

That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, he knows in his heart that he's going

to die from a dreadful slow disease,

so you're safe with him on a plane.

Prepare for national sky platform,

please call at 6645 before boarding.

Security expert Lee Roberts says how you pick

your seat can help you avoid contact

with a hijacker or terrorist.

He says don't sit by emergency doors where gunmen enter

and exit but not too far from the emergency doors either.

We would like to see you sit in several seat rows

in front or behind the exit and in the middle

of the seating arrangement.

Sitting on an aisle makes you vulnerable.

That you may be one of the first people grabbed.

Avoid first class, behind the cockpit,

which is where the terrorists go.

When you're on the plane, know how to get out.

Tracy Fulford is a professional airline pilot.

I recommend everybody sit down, look around,

see where the exits are.

Just have a plan.

For example, count the rows

to the emergency exit in case there are no lights.

And think about safety inside the terminal.

Modern terminals are set up like shopping malls

with restaurants, shops, magazine racks.

Terminals have been targets for terrorist's bombs.

The less time in a terminal, the safer you are.

Robert showed me how aerosol cans

can hide a bomb.

You could put a small amount

of plastic explosive in here.

We interrupt this program

for a special news bulletin.

There must be something in family life

that generates factual error, over closeness,

the noise and the heat of being.

Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.

The family process works towards sealing off the world.

Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate.

Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says.

Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful

orthodoxy of the clan.

What a heartless theory.

An Hungarian airliner stands

on a NATO airstrip in West-Germany at the end

of a daring flight to freedom across the Iron Curtain

that was marked by a savage mid air struggle

for control of the plane.

Never in the history of mankind have the nations

of the world reacted with such unanimity and co-operation.

Tonight the lights will burn until dawn

in the United Nations building as the leaders

of the world map a cause of action.

Stay out of this hemisphere and don't try to start your

plans and your conspiracies over here, translation.

Pam Moon Jum, familiar name,

familiar symbol of frustration.

As in the past communist members of the military armistice

commission stymie the efforts of discussion and negotiation.

On this occasion for the return of the Korean airliner

that with 32 aboard that was hijacked and forced north

of the 38th Parallel by red agents.

We understand how reality is invented.

A person sits in a room and thinks a thought and it bleeds

out into the world.

Every thought is permitted.

And there's no longer moral or spatial distinction

between thinking and acting.

Stories have no point if they don't absorb our terror.

Put a man in a room and lock the door.

There's something serenely pure here.

Let's destroy the mind that makes words and sentences.

Gain the maximum attention.

They probably kill you 10 minutes later,

then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy

for the time when it can be used more effectively.

Then the bomb went off.

Instantaneous worldwide attention.

For immediate transmission to hijackers

of jumbo jet 444 of Japan.

Well over 50% are paranoid schizophrenic

and the others may well one day be or have been.

A large number of them are very acutely suicidal.

So, the threat of skyjacker with the possibility of death

is like telling a child if you'll be bad,

I'll give you a candy.

There are certain rather uniform characteristics about them,

including a most unusual aspect of dream-life

in which they dream of being able to fly.

it's rather startling to talk to a 50-year old man

and having him telling you a seven-year old child's dream

and at the same moment, know that this man has committed

a crime on board an aircraft, in which he forced the pilot

to make his dream come true.

There is one little airline that has real short cut skirts

and a real sexy sort of a rig,

and that one little airline has been hit in complete

disproportion with the magnitude of the traffic

that it holds.

But here is a man who has really, no sexual experience

at all and he looks at the hostess as a sexual symbol

and when he takes his gun and sticks it in this

good-looking girl's belly and says, honey,

we're going all the way to Cuba, he may very well be making

the first sexual gesture in his life.

And he often comments with pleasure how happy he was

to see the fear in her eyes.

First time in his life he's ever scared a woman.

♪ I'm every woman ♪

♪ It's all in me ♪

♪ Anything you want done baby ♪

♪ I'll do it naturally ♪

♪ I'm every woman ♪

♪ It's all in me ♪

♪ I can read your thoughts right now ♪

♪ Every one from A to Z ♪

♪ Whoa whoa ♪

For you Westerners, you don't understand.

You have all the Israeli propaganda and you think

the Arabs, you know, the dirty Arabs!

First, we have to fight outside our territory

and we have to bring our case to the whole world

to understand our case.

The people that you helped to release

were responsible for the death of a small child.

What are your feelings about that?

Could I answer this?

You just said the death of a small child.

I want to ask you the death of 30 children of a school

in Egypt, the death of about 70 human workers in Egypt,

the death of people in Erbahir,

the death of many human beings who have been killed

and murdered I could say by the Israelis.

In a sense, when we think about hijacking,

we can make an argument against science.

Because if it hadn't been for science,

we wouldn't have airplanes.

If we didn't have airplanes,

we wouldn't have had airplane hijacking.

And so, we could argue therefore, it would have been better

if we wouldn't have science.

I got wrist watch and some keys,

and a tie clip, belt buckle on, I think that's about it.

Fine, suppose you just proceed through this gate here.

Now, let's try it with a weapon.

Terrorists have made their own bombs

from coca tins and bottles.

There are plenty of headaches in this one.

The first incident was unimportant

because it was only a series of phone calls.

The second incident was unimportant

because nobody was killed.

For you, pure trauma, otherwise strictly routine.

You are nonpersons for the moment,

victims without an audience.

Get killed and maybe they will notice you.

Ah, it made me sick. 25 million dollars

and what utter waste.

My wife slid down and ended on her head

and I hadn't heard her for a minute,

and I had to pick her up and by the time I got her up,

we were both running again and--

Did you run very fast?

I ran as fast as I could!

We were barefooted.

We were all barefooted.

We had to take our shoes off to keep

from damaging the slides, they're nylon chutes.

We just jumped out, slipped down, got up and run.

Were you very, very frightened by all this?

No, no, sir, I wasn't.

Everybody was too calm for anyone to be frightened.

You are not the soft of person who normally

runs across airfields?

No, not at all.

What happened to your feet?

They're pretty cut up on bottom.

We had to take our shoes off,

so we lost our shoes, so no one has any shoes.

Can you tell us what your first experience

was with the guerillas?

Did you have an opportunity to talk to them?

Yeah, sure, they were real nice.

The guerillas are real nice,

what makes you say that?

Well, they're all right, I talked to one of them.

Did it express an interest in your thoughts

about what they were doing?

Oh yeah, they said that, that was their life,

what they were doing, you know, fighting.

Did you feel menaced by all the weapons

around you or not?

No.

You didn't?

Were you frightened at any time

during this experience?

No.

Did you find it exciting?

Did you have a good time,

full of excitement, is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

You were excited by it all.

I had a good time, I guess.

You would like to do it again?

I don't know, I would probably miss too much school.

It is not hijacking, let's say.

You should say, it's trying to tell the people

what's our problem.

I mean, all this 20 years, none of you foreigners

had even known that there exist people called Palestinians.

Two million human beings, they had been thrown out

of their homes, of their land, of their pride,

of everything for 20 or 23 years.

I felt the deadweight of travel,

the apathy and vagueness of being in a place

that didn't matter to me, being invisible to myself,

sleeping in a room I wouldn't recognize

if I had a picture of it in front of me.

Some people make bombs, some people make calls.

Anonymous, bomb threats.

People who make phone calls

don't set off bombs.

The real terrorists make their calls after

the damage is done, if at all.

The next time, he thinks, there won't be a phone call.

I'm asking for fuel.

Our only alternative is to leave here,

otherwise I am quite sure the plane will be exploded.

I'll give you an answer in a minute time.

Please, let the gentleman know that we are prepared

for any other arrangement to be made for the freeing

of the passengers.

You are running, you are running!

The camera's running.

They started kissing each other to say goodbye.

There were tears in the eyes of the girls.

And I realized at that moment that this was it,

that they were going to touch off the fuses

to the explosives.

The way they live in the shadows,

live willingly with death.

The way they hate many of the things you hate.

Their discipline and cunning, the coherence of their lives.

The way they excite admiration.

In societies reduced to blur and glut,

terror is the only meaningful act.

There is too much everything, more things and messages

and meanings than we can use in 10,000 lifetimes.

Is history possible?

Is anyone serious?

Who do we take seriously?

Only the lethal believer, the person who kills

and dies for faith, everything else is absorbed.

Only the terrorist stands outside.

Then there was the finger he had received

in the mail.

He kept it around a while, a ring finger he guessed,

gone mummy-brown, and he used to look at it and wonder

what it meant.

There was a line I kept repeating

to myself that had the mystery and the power I had felt

nowhere else, but in the shared past of people

who had loved each other, who lived so close

they'd memorized each others warts and cowlicks

and addled pauses.

So the line was not one voice but several and it spoke

a more or less nonsensical theme, to remind him that

words stick even as lives fly apart.

I'll give you 10 seconds.

If you don't send the permission to take away

the ground power, I'm going to blow off his head.

Did you get that?

There's no alternative,

we have no alternative with all the people on board.

Did you attend the medical examination

of Baaders body?

He was killed by shots exact in his neck.

Do you believe he could

have committed suicide?

No, I don't believe it.

Amen.

Men have tried throughout history

to cure themselves of death by killing others.

The dier passively succumbs, the killer lives on.

There must have been something different about those crowds.

What was it?

Let me whisper the terrible word, death.

Many of those crowds were assembled in the name of death.

They were there to attend tributes to the dead.

Crowds came to form a shield against their own dying.

To become a crowd is to keep out death.

To break off from the crowd is to risk death

as an individual, to face dying alone.

Crowd came for this reason above all others.

They were there to be a crowd.

The future belongs to crowds.

If the cabin pressure

changes suddenly, the compartment above your head will open

and an oxygen mask will be within your reach.

Extinguish all cigarettes.

Pull down on the mask to start the flow of oxygen.

Place the mask over your nose and mouth

and continue to breath normally.

Then take the elastic band on the mask and place it

over your head.

To tighten the band, pull on the elastic tab

on each side of the mask.

If our complaints have a focal point,

it would have to be the TV set where the outer torment lurks

causing fears and secret desires.

Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger,

grander, more sweeping.

Shouldn't death be a swan-dive, graceful,

white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?

He took it all in, he believed it all.

Pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter,

the baby bliss that falls from the air.

They sometimes bring us airline food,

and they sometimes bring us Lebanese food.

And it's different to us, but it's very delicious.

I'd say on whole the food is OK.

They are feeding the passengers!

They are feeding the passengers!

They are threatening to kill them now.

They are threatening to kill them now.

We want the fuel, now, immediately!

They turned around and the gun went up in the air

and the hand grenade with one fellow.

And then the other fellow just had a hand grenade.

And they started screaming in Arabic.

So, I said to myself this is it, it's a hijacking.

They stole my airplane from me

and the least I could do was to go back and get it.

There's only one thing to say and I say it

from the bottom of my heart, in the name of all the people

of our country.

Welcome home.

They drank Pepsis continuously and they would spill them

on this center console right here

where the radio switches are.

They also smoked 24 hours a day and their ashes

would drip into the spilled Pepsi.

And they were young guys and they had good appetites,

so they ate a lot.

And they would spill their food in there too.

And it just sort of made a kind of a soupy mess

all over that radio panel there.

Ladies and gentlemen, this your captain again.

I've just been talking with flight control

at London Airport, the temperature there is 64 degrees.

Novelists and terrorists

play a zero-sum game.

What terrorists gain, novelists lose.

The danger they represent equals our own failure

to be dangerous.

Terror makes the new future possible.

He is saying, men live in history as never before.

We make and change history minute by minute.

We do history in the morning and change it after lunch.

Everybody down, down, down, everybody down, down!

Everybody down, get your head down.

Get your heads down, down, down!

The type of operations and protection

that you will receive as United States' ambassadors.

Move, up, up,

I want this aircraft up!

It's usual, despite precautions taken to limit

control information for you and your family

to develop patterns of behavior.

Down, everybody down, hands up onto the seats!

Hand up on the seats!

Habits that offer to the trained observer critical

information useful in planning and executing

a terrorist assassination.

Those American bastards, pigs!

In a terrorism sense.

Middle-East, Latin America, Far East.

You, what country?

Britain.

Get down!

What you see in front of you

is the marked ambassador, this is the advance man.

This is the agent in charge of the detail.

This is the body cover.

This agent is your AIC or agent in charge of the detail

is dedicated to you, and you only.

Terrorists be on notice!

You've got the B1B bomber to come over low,

the B52 come over high, you've got the FB11A,

the F4 Phantom Two.

You've got the Northwood F-5 Tiger Two.

You've got the F-15 Eagles and on, and on, and on, and on.

Those people only understand one thing and that's force!

It's time to take names and kick rear end!

You can run but you can't hide.

No weapon is absolute.

We hit him, dead on!

I recalled the weather,

the high clear sky, distance less,

flags whipping on 5th Avenue and a movie actress

getting out of a taxi.

The blast made him jerk half around

but he didn't leave his feet or go back against the wall.

He jerked and ducked, shielding his head with his forearm,

windows blowing out.

He turned his back to the blast wave,

bracing himself against the wall with his elbows,

hands clasped behind his head.

He thought he was on a plane going down.

The novel used to feed our search

for meaning, but our desperation led us to something

larger and darker.

So, we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting

mood of catastrophe.

We don't need the novel.

All you will see is corpse.

Dying is a quality of the air.

It's everywhere and nowhere.

Men shout as they die, to be noticed,

remembered for a second or two.

The dead have faces, automobiles.

If you don't know a name, you know a street name,

a dog's name, he drove an orange Mazda.

You know a couple of useless things about a person

that become major facts of identification,

when he died suddenly, after a short illness,

in his own bed with a comforter and matching pillows,

on a rainy Wednesday afternoon,

thinking about his dry cleaning.

Watch out!

Oh, my baby!

Oh, my baby!

When the first 747 rose into the sky

at Fort Everett, Washington, it was more than just

an airplane taking shape.

It was Pan Am's response to the needs of its public.

It was the beginning of a whole new

system of transportation.

The physical manifestation of a decade of planning.

Now, with 10 years of pioneering jet-flight across

the ocean as part of history, Pan Am was looking

to the future with this super-jet.

The supermarket shelves

have been rearranged.

It happened one day without warning.

♪ Oh ♪

♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪

♪ Do it ♪

♪ Oh ♪

♪ Oh oh oh ♪

♪ Do it ♪

♪ Oh ♪

♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪

♪ Do it ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ Ooh oh oh oh ♪

♪ Do it ♪

♪ Ooh ♪

♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪

♪ Do it ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪

♪ Do the hustle ♪