Explaining United 93

Everyone’s favorite semi-paleoconservative style guru Michael Brendan Dougherty returns with a suitably elegant looking redesign and a jab at yours truly. He’s not so sure about my response to the critics of United 93—or at least to Matt Zoller Seitz. He writes:

While I won't speak for the other United 93 critics I believe this actually misses Seitz's essential point which may have been expressed poorly, or slightly obscured to Peter by Seitz' little jabs at Darryl Worely. United 93 while succeeding as a film experience, fails as storytelling. 9/11 is not, as it was in Fahrenheit 9/11 a result of Republican foreign policy, nor is it the result of America's decadence as in the telling of some religious leaders and other conservatives, nor is it even an act of terrorism with political objectives, it simply IS. It's not just a lack of political point of view, but a lack of any view. I think this is a failing in one regard but I cannot say that I necessarily would have liked a movie that succeeded in having a point of view - perhaps the enjoyment of the film is entirely visceral and cathartic.

He’s right when he says that the film exists in a sort of political void, at least as far as policy specifics. Greengrass gives no hint of partisan bias, takes no stands on any of the post-9/11 war on terror politics. And from a storytelling perspective, there’s very little in the way of a traditional narrative arc. There’s no real cause and effect, no protagonist, no handy resolutions, and certainly no happy ending. What Seitz and the other critics complained about was a lack of context, but it is that lack of context which gives the film its emotional power as well as its particular worldview.

The film works because it doesn’t try to pin down the causes of 9/11, because it doesn’t indict the Bush or the Clinton administrations or offer anything like the cogent, contained narratives we’re used to in popular storytelling. Like the bombing of the general store in American Pastoral, 9/11 was an act of terrorism that refuses simple explanation. We’re used to stories in which everything fits together, nice and neat, but life isn’t a self-contained puzzle that one can ever really complete, and days like September 11^th will forever defy easy compartmentalization. Greengrass' film rejects a teleological understanding of existence, forcing its viewers to release themselves of the desire to control 9/11’s awful events through the false security of understanding. We cannot control existence, the film says. We cannot reason with it. Things simply happen, and sometimes those things are terrible beyond all understanding. United 93's gut-twisting force comes not only from its jarring depiction of too-painful events, but from its unwillingness to comfort us by explaining them.