Home on Home Box Office: Sound, home, and disaster in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and David Simon’s Treme

This article focuses on the ways two HBO productions, David Simon’s television series Treme and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Three Acts, rely upon sound to construct senses of loss, home and place. Drawing upon personal experience, textual analysis and interviews, the article examines the conditional possibility for television and film to function as ‘reckoning texts’ in relation to Hurricane Katrina.