Original subtitles

Shouldn't death be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth,

leaving the surface undisturbed?

history history history history history history

The airplane is safe.

Tony, there had been a report that the hijacker had asked for some sandwiches.

Did he get those sandwiches?

No, sir.

Don't talk anymore! Shut up!

Don't talk anymore!

Don't talk anymore!

Michele!

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 is 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

. .

.

. .

We are moving to the south end of Minami-no-Hashi.

All plots tend to move deathward.

This is the nature of plots.

Political plots, terrorist plots, lover's plots, narrative plots.

Plots that are part of children's games.

We engineer death every time we plot.

It is like a contract that all must sign.

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

It's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists.

Where 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 his shorts, still wearing his socks

and one shoe.

He'd removed his pants, or someone had, without taking off 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.

Mr. Burrell, you're back among your family now. What 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

100 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 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 1,000, that for 16 months has held

out in the rugged Sierra Maestra Mountains near the island's eastern tip.

She came in the cockpit and said, there's a man back there with the

biggest gun you ever saw.

And I just looked at him and he pulled up 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.

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

Out of the cockpit, there was another one that came down with a cowboy-looking

outfit on.

and a regular cowboy gun he dragged her up in front to the microphone and said

everybody put your hands over your head we're going to cuba and we went

23-year-old Angel Lugo, a Puerto Rican, was sitting here in the last row.

Passenger next to him remembers he was very nervous, smoking even when the sign

said no.

And in about an hour and a half out of Kennedy, Lugo made his move.

He walked down the aisle, passed three sky marshals, and forced a 20-year-old

stewardess, Lucinda Rawson, to take him up into 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've 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 at 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 woman who harbors a terrible secret a man with a hunted 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're beginning to look back toward the mother continent of Africa,

and they're 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 are also

seeking and fighting for our place in the sun and we will not rest until that

place has been secured

¶¶

In the whisper of the palm tree, you can hear the echo resonating from a voice

of pain that calls to love.

Oh, when I contemplate your burning sun, your fields full

of greenery, I think of him.

There is no moment on certain days when he's 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's okay 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 of some dreadful,

slow disease.

So you're safe with him on a plane.

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'd like to see you sit several seat rows in front of 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 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.

We'll be right

back.

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 sailing off the world

small errors grow heads fictions proliferate Not to know as a weapon of

survival. He says Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful

orthodoxy of the clan What a heartless theory

A 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.

Never in the history of mankind have the nations of the world reacted with such

unanimity and cooperation.

Tonight, the lights will burn until dawn in the United Nations building as the

leaders of the world map a course of action.

Stay out of this hemisphere and

don't try to start your plans and your conspiracies over here.

Translation.

Panmunjom, familiar name, familiar symbol of frustration.

As in the past, communist members of the military armistice commission stymied

efforts at discussion and negotiation.

On this occasion, for the return of the Korean airliner, that with 32 aboard,

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 a 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 ten 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.

More 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 to threaten a skyjacker

with the possibility of death is like telling a child, if you'll be bad, I'll

give you 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 have him tell 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's forced the pilot to make

his dream come true.

There's one little airline that has real short cut skirts and real sexy sort of a

rig.

And that one little airline has been hit in complete disproportion to the

magnitude of the traffic that it hauls.

But here is a man who has really no sexual experience at all.

And he looks at a 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 eye. First time

in his life he's ever scared a woman.

For you Westerners, you don't understand.

You have all the Israeli propaganda and you think the Arabs, you know, they're

the dirty Arabs and...

We have to fight outside our territory and we have to bring 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 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 Erbed here, 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 had 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 had

science. Well, I've got a wristwatch and some keys and a tie clip, belt buckle,

and I think that's about it. Fine. Suppose you just proceed through the

gate.

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 non-persons for the moment.

Victims without an audience.

Get killed and maybe they will notice you.

made me sick.

$25 million and what another waste.

My wife slid down and landed on her head and I rattled her for a minute and I had

to pick her up and by the time I got her up we were both running again.

Did you run very fast?

I ran just as fast as I could. We were barefooted.

We had to take our shoes off to keep from damaging the slide.

They're nylon shoes.

We just jumped out, slid down, got up and ran.

Were you very, very frightened by all this? No. No, sir.

Everybody was too calm for anyone to be frightened.

You're not the sort of person who normally runs across airfields. No, not

at all.

What happened to your feet?

Well, they're pretty cut up on the bottom. We had to take our shoes off, so

we lost our shoes.

No one has any shoes.

Can you tell us what your first experience was with the gorillas? Did

you have an opportunity to talk to them? Yeah, sure. They were all nice.

The gorillas are real nice. Why do you say that?

Oh, they were all right. I talked to one of them there. Did they 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.

Were you frightened at any time during this experience?

No. Did you have a good time or were you excited?

Yeah. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Were you excited by it all? No, I had a

good time, I guess.

Would you like to do it again?

I don't know. I probably missed too much school.

It's not hijacking, let's say. You should say it's trying to tell the

people what's our problem. I mean, all these 20 years, none of you foreigners

had even known that there exist people called Palestinians.

Two million human beings, they have been thrown out of their homes, of their

land, of their pride, of everything for 20 or 23 years.

I felt a dead weight 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

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 explosive.

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's too much everything more things and messages and meanings that we can

use in ten thousand 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 a 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 power

I'd felt nowhere else but in the shared past of people who had loved each other,

who lived so close they'd memorize each other's 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

Thank you very much.

Give you 10 seconds. If you didn't send the technician to take away the ground

power, I'm going to blow off his head. Did you get it?

So there's no alternative.

We have to go up the airplane with all the people on board.

Did you attend the medical examination of Baader's body? He was killed by a

shot exact in his neck.

Do you believe he could have committed suicide?

No, I don't believe it.

Men have tried throughout history to cure themselves of death by killing

others.

The dyer 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 Crowds came for this reason above all others.

They were there to be a crowd The future belongs to crowds

When 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 breathe 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.

you

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, 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 the whole, the

food is okay.

They are beating the passengers. They are beating 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 fell, and then the other fell, just had a hand grenade, and they said,

screaming in Arabic.

So I said to myself, this is it. It's a hijacking. They stole my airplane from

me. The least I could do is 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 continually, 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. They

had good appetites. 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 whole radio

panel there.

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 head 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 and control information for you and your family to develop

patterns of behavior.

Down! Everybody down!

Hands up on the seats!

Hands up on the seats!

Habits that offer to the trained observer critical information useful in

planning and executing a terrorist assassination.

There's American bastards pig!

In a terrorism sense.

Middle East, Latin America, Far East.

You, what country?

Get down!

What you see in front of you is the mock ambassador.

This is his advanced man.

This is the agent in charge of the detail.

This is the body cover.

This agent, your AIC, or agent in charge of the detail, is dedicated to you and

you only.

terrorists be on notice.

You've got the B-1B bomber to come over low, the B-52 come over high. You've got

the FB-11A, the F-4 Phantom II.

You've got the Northland F-5 Tiger II. 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 in.

You can run.

but you can't hide.

is absolute.

you

I recalled the weather, the high clear sky, distant lists, flags whipping on

Fifth 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

towards something larger and darker.

So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe.

We don't need the novel.

Thank you.

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 dies 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.

When the first 747 rose into the sky at 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 oceans, a 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.

foreign

Thank you.

Why did you want hostages?

Why did you want hostages?

I saw them. I saw them.

I saw them. I saw them.

Do that song.

Do that song.

Alright.