Remembering September 11th on Film

I’ve been busy with deadlines and screenings and work (you know, all that real-life stuff that irritatingly takes time away from blogging--someone needs to do something about that) but I’d like to make a belated September 11^th entry regarding Daniel Mendelsohn’s New York Review of Books essay on this year’s September 11^th films.

I generally agree with his criticisms of World Trade Center. He points out that film’s sharp divergence from the always interesting, if not always excellent, Stone canon; he heaps praise on the movie’s most redeeming sequence, its subtle, quiet opening (Mendelsohn nicely calls it “the sense of ordinary life, spread across classes and boroughs, that was soon to be brutalized”); and finally, he disparages its small-screen-like predictability and conventionality.

But, like so many critics, Mendelsohn seems to miss out on what made this year's earlier 9/11 film—Paul Greengrass' United 93—work to such devastating effect. He spends a good portion of his essay dealing with the film’s decision to use real air traffic controllers and officials in the cast.

Using the real-life people in the movie is a showy but ultimately hollow gesture; it advertises a certain kind of solemnity, even piety, about "authenticity" that has great currency in an era in which, in so many popular entertainments, a great premium is placed on getting as close as possible to "reality"—although in such entertainments the reality, of course, is an artfully constructed one.

[snip]

There can, therefore, be no useful aesthetic value in the decision to use real people, only a symbolic and perhaps sentimental one: by emphasizing such authenticity and realism, the film reassures its audience—which may well be anxious about its motives for paying to see a film about real-life violence and horror—that what they're seeing is not, in fact, "drama" (and therefore presumably mere "entertainment"), but "real life," and hence in some way edifying.

What Mendelsohn sees as a false bid at authenticity, though, seems to me to be something else. In a sense, it's a blessing on the film given by 9/11's survivors and heroes, not to recreate some artificial reality, but to let audiences know that this is their story and they are taking ownership of this representation of the events. Greengrass chose to use them not strictly for their dramatic effect, but to let these real people share in authorship. Just as modern artists make statements by their choice of mediums and materials, Greengrass gave voice to those involved in 9/11 with his choice.

Mendelsohn also complains that United 93 is too unstructured and "messy" to have "larger meaning." But this is Greengrass’ point, and one of the film's strengths: The goal was not to sell audiences on a particular message, or to even-handedly dissect current notions about 9/11's ultimate meaning. Instead, the film captured the terrible helplessness, the sense of world-shaking chaos, the messiness and meaninglessness of that specific moment in time when, for a few hours, reality seemed to have exploded. Five years later, we’ve developed a slew of competing narratives and meanings for 9/11, and its significance is a matter of what seems like unending cultural and political squabbling. But on that day, during those ill-fated hours, there was only devastating fear, sadness, and confusion. Greengrass’ film doesn’t just remind us of what happened; it leaves us with a record of how it felt.