“When does information overload become information sickness?” the black-clad composer asks the audience in Roger Copeland’s The Unrecovered. The film revolves around this question, which is at first glance deceptively simple. However, the film takes three hours to unravel, building a provocative argument regarding globalism and mass media.

The film winds its way around three storylines that purposely remain independent of one another: a composer, a self-appointed Evangelist and a young girl all struggling with the emotional aftermath of 9/11 amidst a barrage of visual reminders. Intentionally set outside of New York City, the stories exemplify the media’s reach and its ability to intensify events for secondhand viewers.

The composer is Copeland’s representation of “the artist,” a man who has been rocked by his experiences of 9/11. For this character, art has been overshadowed by life, and he makes it his task to discover a way to catch up. He takes up residence in his white-walled digital video studio, spouting semiotics at an undefined audience, baring his soul.

While the composer’s audience could easily be the filmgoers, the Evangelist’s audience is anything but. He broadcasts an apocalyptic message from a filthy, hidden basement, full of jury-rigged equipment. This message is our only insight into the mind of the character. Later, Copeland investigates the possibility of the Evangelist becoming a conspiracy theorist/bioterrorist through the use of anthrax.

The final character is the only one who interacts directly with others in a “normal” manner. This pre-teen girl is obsessed with finding her father who walked out on her family years earlier. She throws herself into a fantasy of 9/11, believing that her father died at Ground Zero.

Her story’s climax is also the film’s, through her disappearance on Halloween and subsequent bodily possession by a teenage Palestinian girl’s spirit.

What the three characters have in common is their penchant for pattern recognition. Artists and conspiracy theorists respectively analyze art and life to the point of obsession. Everything is imbued with meaning. It is the condition the girl experiences after the possession, where everything holds intense symbolism so it becomes impossible not to pay attention to everything, all stimuli are given the same weight. 9/11 was huge enough to make art into life and life into art, causing artists and conspiracy theorists alike to consider both at the same time.

“Paranoia,” the composer tells us at one point, “leads to hyper-vigilance. But the price of hyper-vigilance is indifference.” With so much media coverage exploiting images of 9/11, the issue becomes: To what extent are we inherently affected by these symbols and to what extent are they fabricated to affect us?

If through this film Copeland hopes to facilitate national healing and artistic expression post-9/11, he may have succeeded. Writing this article opened floodgates for me: I remember waking up to the news on the alarm clock, coming to class to find students crowded around a TV, the disbelief and the detachment.

What Copeland argues for is a taking back of and moving forward with post-9/11 artistic and cultural development so that we do not remain “unrecovered.”