We seem to live by media representations of our lives & our memory seems to be recorded by machines, so I wrote about 9/11 in cinema for this anniversary of the moment when America began to live by fear, when our elites decided to teach us to grieve.
First, at Acton, I wrote about the most patriotic 9/11 movie, Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center. It seems so unexpected that Stone wouldn’t make another mad conspiracy movie like JFK or Nixon, or a condescending one like his later W, to say nothing of his movies about Vietnam & the agony of the citizen-soldier at the moment the draft was eliminated. But WTC reveals much more clearly than his movies about the hidden evils of the state or the suffering of patriots that Stone loves America & mourns the loss of the confidence & decency that make America admirable.
World Trade Center was something of a success back in 2006, making around $160 million worldwide, but it wasn’t celebrated, even though it showed a worthy picture of America to audiences both home & abroad. There is an injustice in this fact & a missed opportunity. The anniversary of 9/11 is a good opportunity to remember the movie &, without spoiling the action, finally to realize its importance & the public spirit that gave birth to it. At the same time, since 9/11 sometimes seems forgotten in the rush of crazy new events, the movie can help us remember & thus finally fulfill its task as a work of art.
Most surprising of all, World Trade Center, is a wonderful portrait of America at her best. It’s a story of blue collar patriotism, moral virtue, & sacrifice, proof that a terror attack cannot break national character. Moreover, it’s a true story following Port Authority policemen. Nicolas Cage plays our protagonist, Sgt. John McLoughlin, who assembles volunteers to respond to news of the North Tower being hit by the first plane.
Next, a less impressive movie which is nevertheless much more revealing, United 93. It had the kernel of greatness in it, but it completely reversed the natural order, preferring to exculpate elites & officials while rendering citizens defenseless, abusing the common shock that brought the nation together, & resulting in paralysis. I wrote about it for Law & Liberty:
The first major movie about 9/11 was United 93 (2006). Director Paul Greengrass, famous for Bourne thrillers, got an Oscar nomination as Best Director, won a BAFTA as director, and got another nomination for the script, along with a nomination from the Writer’s Guild Award. Critic Associations around the country added their accolades; the American and British Film Institutes named it among the films of the year, as did many major newspapers. The movie opened at the Tribeca Film Festival & grossed $76 million worldwide.
United 93 is still today the only prestigious artistic statement on the defining event of the 21st c. so far, the biggest success in a small genre. What can explain it? The movie tried to document the events on that flight & at air control in real-time, over 100 minutes. It’s quite moving, because we know the terrible outcome & we get to see how confused everyone was, civil & military authorities both. It’s also competent technically, but it’s not a great movie, certainly not deserving of such accolades, & unequal to the national crisis.
Finally, at FUSION, I wrote a broader review of a dozen movies or more, revealing the major falling apart of elites & people in the two visions of 9/11 in cinema as either therapeutic, about petty lives made more interesting by unwarranted grief, or fantastic, about American destiny in heroic terms.
Sometime recently we came to the end of the era of 9/11 movies. Our politics have changed, the generations, the preferred technologies for entertainment, & we are ready perhaps to forget that there was an attempt, so this is the right moment for a review of the one moment in the 21st c. when art & politics could come together.
Even among the impressive artists in America, even at the peak of American glamour, the moral power of that moment was squandered because the major moral & aesthetic ideas were therapy & fantasy. It’s worth looking at the way they distorted, so to speak, the American mind, because we are living with the consequences.
"...how confused everyone was..." Hardly. It was engineered to look that way, similar to the "mistakes were made" narrative about the "pandemic." The Center for 9/11 Studies has long been exposing the gaping holes in the official narrative. Redacted News is doing a week-long series based on interviews with pilots, analysts and 9/11 scholars. https://rumble.com/v5eae1p-proof-these-planes-were-not-hijacked-on-911-we-have-the-evidence-redacted-w.html?e9s=src_v1_ucp