Rosenbaum's 9/11 Pony

In today's Slate essay, Hijacking the Hijacking, Ron Rosenbaum attacks United 93 and the American-myth making machine for inserting a “pony” into the 9/11 saga—a triumph, a feeling of uplift that we derive from the heroism of that flight’s passengers. He thinks the movie is just another pointless excercise in futile inspiration and instead argues for a dismal view of the world that is simply, hopelessly "dark."

Rosenbaum’s first premise, that United 93 is somehow part of a glut of films about that plane and its passengers, is pretty easily defeated. He says:

[S]omething makes me wonder: Why is this the third film made about Flight 93? I've watched them all: There was last year's Discovery Channel docudrama The Flight That Fought Back. Then there was this year's A&E cable re-enactment, Flight 93. . . And now the major new Hollywood feature United 93, directed by Paul Greengrass.

Comparing a major Hollywood picture from the director of a Bourne sequel to an A&E documentary and a no-name cable reenactment is hardly fair. The worlds of studio productions and cable movies, especially documentaries, are related in the sense that college hockey and pro-football are related, but it’s not as if United 93 is really in line with those productions. So much for his overkill idea.

But he also wants to challenge the way viewers look at the film:

That's always been the subtextual spiritual narrative of media catastrophe coverage: terrible human tragedy, but something good always can be found in it to affirm faith and hope and make us feel better. Plucky, ordinary human beings find a way to rise above the disaster. Man must prevail. The human spirit is resilient, unconquerable. Did I mention there must be a pony?

9/11 is no different. Flight 93 has become 9/11's pony. The conjectural response to the hijacking has become (even more than the courage of the rescuers in the rubble) the redemptive fable we cling to, the fragment we shore against our ruin.

[Snip]

I did not come away from watching United 93 feeling optimistic about the triumph of the human spirit and the superior resilience of enlightenment values. Quite the opposite. I came away with a feeling that history has been hijacked by a cult of the undead, or the wannabe dead, suicidal mass murderers driven by theocratic savagery. That, if you want a metaphoric fable, we're all on Flight 93, we're all doomed to crash and burn; whatever we do, the best we can hope for is that the existential rewards of local acts of courage will help us hold on a little longer before the end of enlightenment civilization and the dawn of the dead.

I know: I'm dark. If you can find a pony in there, let me know.

Dark indeed. Rosenbaum, like many before him, is positioning himself as yet another gloomy advocate of hopelessness and despair in the hellbent postmodern world. Far be it for me, of course, to disagree. Life’s no beach vacation (or perhaps, given my distaste for sunny locales, endless film festival). And from a purely secular point of view, his dismal, rational outlook on the totality of existence is probably the only reasonable one.

But the inference one has to make from his article is that United 93 should not have attempted to be uplifting, and that his rational, militantly secular defeatism is not only correct, but desirable. It’s “truth hurts” contrarian posturing that’s loopy at best, positively mean at worst, the sort of fashionable despondency you expect from a 19 year old who just finished reading The Stranger and wears fishnets on his arms.

Rosenbaum’s contention is that life and existence and everything is just one downhill ride with occasional pleasures along the way—sparks of goodness and nice sensations on an inextricable path to destruction. Fine. But if that’s the case, then why shouldn’t we find ways to celebrate and glorify the “local acts of courage” that he admits “help us hold on a little longer”? Rosenbaum is promoting his dreary worldview as if it’s somehow better than one in which even the worst days can have some small, heartening moments, but his worldview is the one that says that those heartening moments are the best we have. If that’s the case, then shouldn’t we latch onto them even stronger? If life, as one of the characters in American Pastoral plainly says, is merely “a short period of time in which we are alive” and those courageous little acts are all we have, then shouldn’t they be our focus?

But no. Rosenbaum thinks that we ought to concentrate on the “feeling that history has been hijacked by a cult of the undead, or the wannabe dead, suicidal murderers driven by theocratic savagery,” and that “we’re all doomed to crash and burn.” Call me a pony-lover, but his miserable, anti-redemptive view of existence mainly serves to self-perpetuate, providing less hope and fewer solutions. If we’re all going to crash and burn anyway, why spend the whole trip down being miserable?