The Unrecovered   The Unrecovered For Theater Professor Copeland, Ideas Take Root and Film Takes Wing by Anne C. Paine November 25, 2002 Last September, theater Professor Roger Copeland happened to be reading a book that had a reproduction of The Tower of Babel, a painting by the renowned 16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel, on its cover. When he saw the televised images of the ruins of the World Trade Center on September 11, it immediately struck him that "those steel trees, as [Minoru] Yamasaki [the WTC architect] called them, looked remarkably like the painting," he said. Over the next several days, a number of ideas began to coalesce in Copeland’s mind, inspired by Bruegel’s painting and the idea of the towers as trees. The biblical story of the destruction of the Tower of Babel, he thought, was a good starting point for thinking about globalization, arguably one of the root causes of the terrorist attacks. The word root connected back to trees. Babel and globalization connected to notions of fundamentalism, the apocalypse, and the anti-Christ, themes that are found in other Bruegel paintings. "I realized I was thinking and making links in a way that only two kinds of people do—artists and conspiracy theorists. Artists find connections between things that aren’t normally connected to one another, but they realize that their images are metaphors. Conspiracy theorists believe these links are objective properties of the real world, and that there are no coincidences," Copeland said. His gut emotional response to the attacks began to take expression in his mind as a film. "I was strangely obsessed," he said. "I spent the next three months taping material related to 9/11." Thus began a year of work on a film, tentatively titled The Unrecovered, in which Copeland tells the story of three fictional people—a composer, a teenage girl, and a Christian fundamentalist conspiracy theorist—as they come to grips with the September 11 attacks. "What happens over the course of the film is that the thought patterns of all three of the main characters start to converge. By the end of the film there are eerie similarities in the thought processes the characters experience. In times of high anxiety, we can all begin to think like conspiracy theorists," Copeland said. When Copeland needed a metaphor to tie the pieces together, he thought of the butterfly effect, a term coined in the early 1960s by mathematician Edward Lorenz to describe the essence of chaos theory. In a scientific context, chaos refers to an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless obeys particular laws. Order is present, but it is difficult to perceive, because even small changes in the system can have major consequences. The butterfly effect—the idea that a flap of a butterfly’s wing in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas—captured the uncertainty of making predictions for complex systems. For Copeland, the term became a metaphor for the modern world, where events in the Middle East have had horrible consequences for the United States. Another eerie connection for Copeland: in Bruegel’s painting, The Beast of the Apocalypse, a representation of the beast described in the biblical Book of Revelations, the beast is a monster sprouting butterfly wings. Copeland offered a winter-term project titled Art in the Aftermath of 9/11, which evolved into a spring-semester course titled Art and the Imagination of Disaster. As background for the film, Copeland had students research such topics as bioterrorism, conspiracy theory, fundamentalism, globalization, and the relationship between Islam and the West. To say the film is low-budget is an understatement. Copeland recruited friends and students to be actors, costume and scene designers, sound technicians, videographers, and editors. He borrowed props and equipment from the biology department, the library, and the theater and dance program. Filming, which took place last spring and summer, was done at Oberlin High School, Warner Concert Hall, the Lorain County Airport, a local Seventh-Day Adventist church, and Copeland’s own home. The opening scenes of the film are shot in his living room, and his basement, "at some considerable expense, was turned into a survivalist’s bunker." A $10,000 grant from an anonymous arts philanthropist in New York allowed him to hire an editor over the summer. The Unrecovered is the third work on film that Copeland, a leading critic of the arts in America, has put together. His film Camera Obscura won the Festival Award at the Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers Arts Festival in 1985, and Recorder, a film adapted from his stage work The Private Sector, was shown televised nationwide on PBS stations in 1989. The author of two books and more than 150 articles on dance, theater, film, television, and still photography, Copeland won one of just 3 awards from Stagebill in 2000, for his writing about the show Cabaret in American Theatre magazine. Copeland estimates that when completed, The Unrecovered will run between 90 and 180 minutes. Not surprisingly, he uses roots and wings as poetic images throughout the film. The project that started as a near compulsion is nearing completion. Editing and sound work remain, and Copeland needs to raise another $30,000 to fund that work. Several campus showings of the film are planned throughout the year. "It’s going to be a difficult film. It asks people to make difficult connections," Copeland said. "I hope it will paint a portrait of the complexities of living in a globalized world—how the effects of something that happens in the Middle East can have terrible ramifications elsewhere in the world. I want people to understand and feel the psychological effect of terror on the human mind. The film is very much an examination of that kind of thinking."