The United 93 Trailer

I’ve already mentioned my uncertainty about the upcoming 9/11 film, United 93, and now it appears that I am not alone in that sentiment. Slate recently posted a short editorial roundtable about the controversy over the film’s trailer. As I said, it’s difficult to watch, and reportedly, theaters in New York have received complaints. Many want, at the minimum, a warning before the trailer airs, and I suppose I can understand that reaction: Especially for those that lost loved ones that day, the trailer’s use of real life footage of the second plane nearly making impact isn’t merely historical artifact—it’s a documentation of a murder.

The roundtable gets into this and other views. All of the editors bring up good points, and none are so dogmatic as to entirely dismiss the claims of anyone else. But I think I lean toward June when she says that she worries that “we’ve given the 9/11 victims’ families too much power.”

It's hard to imagine anything more brutal and painful than losing a loved one in an act of terror, and the rest of us should listen to the views of the bereaved when it comes to deciding how those acts should be remembered, but theirs can't be the only voices that matter. They don't get to control how terrorism is represented in movie trailers, architecture, or anything else. [snip] There is a lot of upsetting stuff in the world. Why do 9/11 victims—and victims of terror generally—get special treatment?

Admittedly, there’s a case to be made that, on entering a theater on a Friday night to see something relatively innocuous like Inside Man (a film which brushes up against 9/11 but doesn’t address it in a really sustained, direct fashion) one shouldn’t expect to see video of the murder of a personal friend or family member. Certainly, I sympathize. That’s not an experience that I or anyone I know would want to have.

But, for good and for ill, we now live in a society in which documents, often video, are a growing part of our lives. And between phone cameras, personal computers and YouTube, the video invasion—a record of the sound and sight of everything—is likely to continue.

Part of this means is that we have to develop a societal etiquette on who gets to use those documents and in what context. The way it’s developed so far, and I think rightly so, is that there are very few limits on how these things can be displayed. Yes, our mainstream media has chosen not display some of the most grisly footage of terrorist beheadings and other slaughter, but from Cops and World’s Deadliest Everything to 60 Minutes and Frontline, we live in a documentary society.

Thus, disturbing, real-life images are part of our milieu. And for the most part, we accept that. But terror, specifically 9/11 terror, is a murky area. The families of 9/11 victims have more sway in part because their trauma is not entirely personal—it has become a national tragedy as well. Their protests also give us pause simply because there are so many of them. With so many thousands dead on that horrific day, there are probably hundreds of thousands, maybe over a million—especially in New York—who lost someone they knew.

That kind of collective pain, as we have discovered over and over again in the last few years, is extremely hard to ignore. It has spilled out onto the populace, and so we’re not sure how to handle this development of the images from something historical into something commercial. The question that comes out of this is this: Who owns those images? Who gets to say how they’re used? I don’t think there’s a perfect answer. But it seems to me that, tragic and painful as those events were, we ought not to set different rules for those images than any others. Undoubtedly, this will lead to some instances of crassness and offense. But perhaps it will also lead to new understandings and awareness as well. In the wake of tragedy, our goal should be to encourage the creation and sharing of experiences, even if some frictions result.